Digital Creator with Dylan Schmidt. We're talking about social media optimization. Is there anything more exciting than social media optimization? I can't tell you how often I'm scrolling through Instagram, particularly Instagram, and I get so many marketing ideas because I I'm scrolling through and I see these people with great intentions and I know how much work it takes to put into growing on Instagram to growing on any platform, but Instagram specifically. How much work they put in, and then I'll go to their profile not because their content intrigued me enough to go to their profile, because I see a big mismatch in what they're talking about and something's off in the marketing. So I'm, like, let me explore more of what I'm seeing here. And then I go to their profile and I'm, like, I need to record a podcast episode on this. This happens once a week and I could finally say this ever comes up in a conversation. I can point you to this episode to be able to say, just listen to this. Just listen to this because there's something missing and I wanna go a little bit deep on it. And I see this time and time again and you feel it. If you are crafting Instagram content specifically to grow your business, you feel that something might be missing because you're not getting as many leads as you want. You're not getting as many people following you. You're not getting as many people DM ing you about what it is that you offer or what it is that you do or asking you for free help. That's the thing I get a lot. These people asking for free help, and then I had to figure out how to just stop so many people asking me for free help because I would shift them to the podcast and be, like, hey. Listen to this episode. That would help you on this. And they're, like, well, I just want to ask you, you know. And I still take that as a cue as I'm doing something right if people are asking me questions in the DMs. I'm doing something right. So I wanna go over 3 areas that will help you optimize your social media. And really, when I'm sharing and recording this content for this episode, I'm thinking primarily Instagram. It works for any social media really, but I'm thinking through the lens of Instagram because I've spent a lot of time on Instagram. And it's where I see most people take extra time in their captions, and most people really put a lot of thought and care into it, and most people struggle with it. So let's go over it. It. The first thing when it comes to optimizing your social media is identifying your target audience. Now, unless you are completely brand new to marketing, which I think very few people who listen to this podcast would be, you're super familiar with your target audience. With that being said, sometimes we have to go back to the fundamentals, and talking about your target audience is do. It's do because there's a fundamental piece to the rest of the marketing. That is gonna not work if you're not taking into account your target audience. Now the cool thing about the whole target audience conversation is that it doesn't need to be some scientific discussion. Right? Like, you don't need to have it all mapped out and create some 47 step ideal client avatar type thing. If you do, great. But I'm not gonna suggest any homework here because I don't know exactly where you're at in that stage. But I will just highlight 3 things that you do need to focus on when it comes to making sure that you're speaking to your target audience so that the rest of what we talk about here is useful for you and actionable, that you can actually use everything else we talk about here. Because if you're not talking to somebody, you're talking to nobody, and so many people gloss over this part of target audience. They're, like, yeah. I'm talking to my target audience. Are you really, though? Are you? Because I see it. I'm challenging you in this episode. And I'm saying that you're not target talking to your target audience because if you were, you wouldn't be in the position that you're in experiencing the things that you're experiencing. So I came into that this episode, f y I, as a challenge to you. I don't think I made that explicit already. But this is this whole episode is like a challenge to you to not do what you've been doing, to get a different result from what you've been doing so that you don't just feel like you're in this crazy feedback loop of, like, doing the same thing over and over and not getting a different result. So target audience comes down to clarity. And when we're clarifying your target audience, it's easiest and easiest is best. Right? Who wants to make something hard? It's easiest to just clarify it to be one person. In this episode, I'm talking to one person. You might not be the person I'm meaning to talk to, and that's fine, And you can still get a ton of value out of this. But I'm talking to really one person here in this episode, for example. And time and time again I see on Instagram. I see these vague things that even though I'm not the target audience clearly for who they're trying to target, I can see how their target audience wouldn't even land on what they're trying to say because they're saying things that are so vague that the outcomes aren't possibly tangible. Like, if you were a business coach, for example, and if you were, like, I'm gonna help you build the business of your dreams. Your target audience person is, like, probably overwhelmed, frustrated. They've heard a million things before. Build the business of your dreams is so vague. It's not clear. Right? And we want clear. We want concise and we want specifically to the target audience. And where I see a lot of this come up is not just in the content. It's in the Instagram captions. It's in the Instagram profile, like the bio. It's not clear. So clarify who your one target audience person is that you want to talk to and talk to them. Don't talk to anybody else. Don't worry about losing anybody else. Just talk to that one person and make it so clear that you are a little afraid. You're a little afraid that you're gonna lose out everybody else. That's how you know you're being clear because you're only talking to that one person, and you couldn't care about anybody else. And that person, when they finally come across that sentence that you wrote that you spent so much time and energy on, they're finally like, woah, I feel like this person's speaking directly to me. It's when you try to talk to 3 people at once, and I'm speaking from firsthand experience, that it lands bland. And bland is in no way moving someone to take action. So clarify that target audience person. Speak directly to them as clearly as you can. Step 2 of this target audience kind of breakdown here is get feedback. You have your person in mind. Get feedback from them on if it's working. Right? You get feedback by if it's working, like, if someone is signing up for your newsletter, and that was the intended goal, and it's from someone that you would say, yes, this is my target audience person right here, then that feedback is, like, yes, they're giving you consent. They're saying, yes, keep keep going. Keep giving me what you're giving me because it's awesome. So that's positive feedback that it's working. And if your target audience is not signing up for the thing, that's also feedback of it's not working. Now they might not have even known this thing exists, so you do have to make sure that the person from your target audience is actually even seeing the thing so you have enough numbers to run the data in the first place rather than assume it's working or not working. Like, you need to know that they saw it and didn't sign up. Not just that, well, you know, a 100 people landed on this. Maybe they saw it, and they didn't sign up. No. You need to know specifically, like, this person saw it and didn't sign up. So there's a couple ways you could, you know, figure this out for yourself. One of the easiest ways is simply by sharing the thing that you made with someone in your target audience and asking them for feedback. Or the, like, pro level to this version is you can get really closer to making this, like, a winning thing is by using your target audience's natural language. So if you were speaking to someone in your target audience and they use you asked them a question and they use, like, a specific word to describe how they're feeling, a problem, a solution, whatever it is, any type of feeling, really, it's probably more accurate to describe. You use those words in your Instagram bio, in your caption, those things like that, because your target audience is using those words, they're naturally gonna see that and go, yeah, I want that. So you can make your job a lot easier if you just simply use their words and you get that through getting feedback, But then you also get the feedback of, like, they actually signed up for it, so it is something they want. So there has to be a match, of course, on the copy in which you're giving them. But the copy's job, really, is to reiterating to them. Hey. Like, this is the the problem you have, and here's how we're gonna solve it using their words. Right? And this is the big thing I see people miss is they're using words like, I'm a business coach, and I'm gonna help you build the business of your dreams. I doubt. I I know, actually, I don't doubt. I know that that business coach, if they were interviewing, they're just like, I want just, I just wanna build the business of my dreams. That's so vague. I've heard someone else describe it too as if you were giving them your target your ideal target audience a cake, and it was on their birthday, and they were blowing a wish. And it was related to the thing that you help people with, what would they wish for? And that word so for example, if your target audience you give them a cake, and and this is the business of your dreams example, you're, like, you give them that, and they're, like, about to blow out the candles and just, like, I wish that I could start making$10,000 a month by next month. So those are the words you would wanna use. Right? Start making $10,000 a month by next month. Now there's some ethical legal things. Right? Obviously, I kind of maybe used an example that has something like red tape around it because you do have to obviously, when it comes to financial gains and things like that, you have to do your due diligence on. You can't promise something. Not, you know so maybe not the best example. But the idea here is you're giving them the thing that they want. And, of course, ethically, again, this is something that you can deliver on. You're not overpromising and underdelivering. You're promising and overdelivering, But the goal here is to use the language for the things they want. Don't build the business of their dreams. Build the business that gives them the money that they're seeking by when they want to seek it. You don't need some crazy formula for that. You can just simply find out by asking them. And then the third thing about the target audience that I want to say here is regular improvements. I see people's copy that hasn't been updated in years, and things change. Like, your audience changes, society changes, trends change. It's just human nature. Right? What worked 3 years ago, there's no guarantee that it would work today, even 3 months ago, some for some industries. And so regularly making improvements not only will make you a better helper for the people that you're trying to reach, it will make everything you do stronger because you're adapting with the trends and the times and things like that. But you're gonna be needing to listen to regular feedback from your audience to make those improvements, and this doesn't need to be, like, a whole long section here. You just need to regularly make improvements. Like, don't rest on your laurels. Don't just think, you know, I did that 3 years ago. I did that 2 years ago. I did that a year ago. Things change. With my company, ContentClips, what worked when I just launched it and what works today is different. AI video editors really didn't exist that I'm aware of, right when we launched content clips. I don't think they were as much of a thing. There are still people editing videos using, like, tools that were kind of close, but then chat g p t comes out. And then all of these video editors pop up, like, Opus AI video, whatever, Opus pro or whatever it's called. There's a bunch of them now where they automatically chop up your videos. Descript has underlord, which is a feature like that. And while those aren't a replacement for content clips, it's something I need to be mindful of and I need to bring up in my conversations with people. And and I just need to be aware of it. So it helps me improve the messaging around content clips and, like, what do people not want? Right? They don't want AI generated videos because they're not that good when it comes to if they're wanting something like content clips. So I need to make sure that I emphasize that they're human made and how much work and and how much fine tuning goes into the clips. Like, we make 60 edits of video. Right? AI, from what I've tracked, makes around, like, 20. So they're vastly superior. They perform better. All these things. I had to make those improvements. If I just did ignored it and act like it didn't exist or was too lazy to update it, well, I'm the one that's losing out because the people that I'm speaking to don't know what they don't know. And what they're telling me is they want high quality content at scale. And if I don't emphasize the high quality part, well, they're just seeing content at scale. You know what I mean? Next, when we're talking about social media optimization, I wanna talk about routines. I was just working out this morning, and it hit me, like, my life is really routine based. Once I figure out what works, I just wanna, like, do it and get incrementally better at the thing that I'm trying to do from podcasting to writing to stretching to nutrition, all of these things. And there's so many parallels between social media content and working out. And the big ones that I really realized here is when I go to the gym, I warm up, I do my lifting, and then I have, like, a cool down. For me, cool down or just, like, lighting exercise, some light stretches. For creating content, it's very similar. I brainstorm. I create, and then I edit in that order. So when it comes to my own routines, like, I have it figured out now when I write my newsletters, which I send out every Tuesday. I write them on Monday, and I know I need time to brainstorm. And then I know I need time to where I just create it. I don't edit it. I've made this mistake too many times. That I have to emphasize now because I've made it I made this mistake so many times. I'll create it. I'm like, oh, I got the idea. I got the idea. And then while I'm writing it, I'll try to figure out the best way to say it. That's not the best way to say it. The best way to say it is just to say it and then clean it up afterwards. You can do that with podcasts too. Right? You could do that with any type of content. Whatever it is that you're trying to create is you figure out what you wanna say. You say it. And then either it's good to go or you need to edit it up and, like, clarify it for your target audience. Right? And the editing part actually and the creating and the brainstorming part, it all goes back to the target audience because you got to know who you're speaking to. Right? And you can kind of see how this builds on itself. But when you start thinking about those routines and and how you're going to do this at scale, you start realizing also, like, what you can't do. For example, if you want to effectively, like, brainstorm and really, like, dive into all of the needs and wants of your target audience, You can't be everywhere. Right? You can't start making YouTube videos, do a podcast, do a newsletter, do LinkedIn outreach, all of these things. It's too much for one person to do. So you have to choose 1, and you have to just tell yourself, I'm gonna get good at saying no, and I'm really gonna just focus on spending the next year or however long getting good at this one thing. And I'll have these shiny objects that come in. Dylan will tell me how awesome TikTok is even though I'm not on TikTok. You know, because I don't know. I think TikTok is pretty awesome. Even if it's gonna get banned, it's been pretty awesome for me and my business. But, you know, there's gonna be shiny objects always coming in. There's gonna be a new platform. There's gonna be a better way you could do your newsletter. There's gonna be all these things. But you can really only have 1 or 2 platforms that you can really go all in on. And going all in on it is how you're gonna get the maximum benefit from these platforms because if you just kind of skedaddle feels like a good time to say skedaddle there. I've seen that. I can tell you. It's not gonna work out. It's not gonna work out how you want it. But if you just focus on becoming an expert at it and be honest with yourself when you're not an expert at it. Because I see too some people were, like, yeah, you know what? I've published a bunch, and it makes me an expert. Like, I think an expert is always beginning and always willing to, like, learn new things again. I don't call myself an expert, but I know people who do call themselves an expert at it. I don't really wanna be an expert. Even though I've been doing certain things for years, I wanna keep getting better. I wanna keep growing. So if you call me an expert, that's cool, but I call myself as just, like, a constant learner. I wanna constantly improve at this thing. I've shared this story, but it's been a while, so I'll share it again. Years ago, I worked at Equinox, which is like a fancy gym. I know they have them in New York and Los Angeles. I worked at this one and Terry Crews, the actor, would come in every day and I was a personal trainer there. And he would come in and he would just, like, lift all this weight and I could hear, like, the funk music playing through his headphones. Just this big dude. Right? Like big in person, big on screen, just a big dude. And at the time, I probably weighed like a £180. I don't know how much Terry Crews weighed. If if I had to guess, like, 260 or something, but, like, muscle. This dude is muscle. And he was dead lifting, like, 4 of me a lot. And I remember, like, one time. I was, like, Terry, if you ever need any pointers and I felt, like, so small compared to him. Right? He's just, like, a big dude. I'm, like, if you ever need any pointers, just let me know, man. I'm always here. Like, as serious as I could be just kind of, like, messing with him and he's, like, Dylan, that's so cool of you to offer. Like, I would love that. If you see anything off, like, please tell me or I'd love any partners. I'm, like, oh, no. He took me seriously, And he did. He took me seriously and he was totally open to learning. I'm like, Terry, I don't know. I've got nothing to offer you because you're clearly way farther along than I am. You're hue you're you could lift 4 of me. You you crush it in the gym. I just I don't know. I was just just joking. It's, like, oh, no, man. I'm always welcome to learn, like, always open to learn. I'm, like, wow. And I just learned something here because here I am joking with the man that is clearly what I perceive him to be as as an expert at something. He's done it for years. He has the physical presence of doing it for you, like, such a expert, a master of his craft, and he's still willing to learn just like a beginner would have, you know, there's plenty of actually beginners who are reluctant to learn from a personal trainer too. So long way of saying, even if you feel, like, stubborn in a way, like, be open to the idea that you can make it better. And, also, it doesn't need to be so hard. I kind of lost track here. Let's just be real. But we're talking about routines, and how do you brainstorm? How do you create? How do you edit? Those are the things you need to be thinking about and how you can improve and doubling down on 1 to 2 platforms. Joe Pulizzi said it best, this was 20, 30 episodes ago now here on this podcast about he's he's run the numbers. If you haven't read Joe Pulizzi's books, he he his most recent one, like, he run a bunch of numbers. He did the data, and creators are too many places, and they're failing because they're in too many places at once. They need to be focused on 1 to 2 platforms. And the more focused you can be, the better results you can get. But I think it goes back to the routines that you have set up for yourself. Because even if you have 1 or 2 platforms, just publishing for the sake of publishing, like, that's either hurting you or helping you. And I wanna make sure it's helping you. So I want you to think about how are you brainstorming? Like, are you brainstorming with your target audience in mind? Are you creating with your target audience in mind? Are you editing with your target audience in mind? Are you doing all 3 of these things that serve your audience best and at your best ability? I know that's a big question to ask, and I absolutely don't have the answer, but I want you to think about it. And then the third thing I'm gonna talk about today is copy. Copy is everywhere. Words are everywhere. They've never been easier to produce these days obviously with using things like Claude, Chat GPT, any of these AI LLMs, large language models. And there's a lot of strength these days in not using these LLMs because they all put out blank copy. Excuse me. They all put out blank copy if you don't edit it with your target audience in mind, which unless you have some super slick setup in chat gbt or claud, which I'll be honest, I see point 1 percent of people, maybe, have. It's gonna get generic output. I see AI experts out there talk about how easy it is to use these AI generators, and their copy sucks. And what they're saying and what promising that AI can do, and then what they're actually doing is not matching up because they're not getting the results. They're still stressed out. They're all they're not consistently putting out content, all of those things, But they're using these tools that they're saying are making their lives easier. Like, there's a misalignment there. Right? It doesn't have to be that hard. Right? It doesn't have to be that hard. And that's because if you know who you're talking to, you don't have to, like, prompt this way into talking about it. Right? It just flows out of you. You can create with more ease. And that copy part goes to just 3 questions you can ask yourself before you're doing any copy. And this is related to social media, because we're talking about content creation, but we're also talking about, like, the captions, the headlines in a video or the if you're doing a text based post, whatever it is, really, the copy is everywhere. Right? Anywhere you're putting text is where you wanna consider this part. Who are you talking to? What are you talking about? And why are you talking about it? Who are you talking to? What are you talking about? And why are you talking about it? If you can answer those three things before you hit publish, not afterwards, don't don't look retroactively be, like, I think I was talking about this because I was trying to know you should know that when you're crafting it. Right? So the headlines on videos, which if you're in the Creator Club, you know, we've talked a bit about not recently, I'd love to talk more about it though, is the headline. Like, you only get 8 words, 8 to 10 words to hook somebody in if if you have a text pop up on a video or if it's, like, right above the video, you know what I mean, where it says, like, how to spot, you know wow. No examples coming to mind. I've literally written, like, 100 or 1000 of these. It's almost like an email subject line. You know what I mean? Like, ways to optimize your social media today. That's a terrible headline, but that's what happens when you put yourself on the spot. So yeah. And I got some sirens back here. Perks of living near a the local police department. Who are you talking to? What are you talking about? And why are you talking about it? The more specific you can make it to your target audience, the more they'll be interested, the more they'll feel connection with you that'll develop the parasocial relationship, which is if you think about whoever it is that you really look up to that creates content consistently, whether that's a YouTuber, whether that's Dylan Schmidt, whoever it is, you've developed a parasocial relationship with them. They didn't use AI to generate that parasocial relationship. There was there's an essence in there that you really liked that made them feel human. That made you feel like you could connect with them. That made you feel like they're a person just like me, and I see part of myself in them. And I think a lot of people who are just using AI stuff for their content output are doing themselves a disservice, because they're so focused on the output that they're not thinking about the input of their target audience and how it's making them feel, the impact it's having on them, you're not gonna get that with AI. Like, it's gonna take you way more time to try and figure out how to do that rather than just say it. Right? If you and I are talking, you don't need to prompt up a conversation. Like, we can just talk. Doesn't need to be weird. You know what I mean? And there'll be a relevance of why we're talking about what we're talking about whenever we talk because you and I are, like, talking about it. Right? So it's not, like, some super evergreen idea where it's, like, so bland. And I'm saying that because, like, when you think about why you're talking about it, the nuance of why you're talking about it It's it's, like, all of these are just nuances. Right? It's not some big oh, this is a huge shift. It's very nuanced. Like, when I'm the whole episode here, when I'm talking about optimizing your social media, it's not, like, this big shift. It's these nuances that you're gonna make that are going to pay over time. It might not increase your followers for a couple months if you start to implement the things I'm talking about in this episode, But you will slowly get the feedback that you can work with and improve, and you know you're on the right track rather than just, like, publishing for the sake of publishing. That's not what we wanna be doing because more publishing, what does that equal? We don't really know. Right? But if you're talking to your target audience, then you'll know you'll be understood. And if if they're gonna work with you or they're gonna listen to your podcast or they're gonna work with you and listen to your podcast, well, then you can know if you're not making sense if none of that happens. Right? But if, if you don't even start there, then where are you gonna end up? I don't know. I don't know. And that's the worst place to end up because you put all this time and effort into something and it's there's no guarantee. There's already not enough guarantee about life. The least we could do is give you a better guarantee that your social media marketing efforts will pay off if you put in the effort. Cool? Sound good? Do you feel challenged? Do you feel inspired? I hope you do. That was the goal here. I tried my best to not make it feel like you're doing anything wrong, that you're already doing a lot of great things and that you just need to make some tweaks. I've never been a huge basketball fan, but I know, like, Kobe Bryant is, like, the guy that everyone seems to, like, talk about how obsessed he was with the game. And I think of it I can only think of it like that. Like, you're already in it. You're already playing the game. You're already obsessed over it. Now, it becomes about making these nuanced tweaks that so many other people would miss. Like, you need to go beyond the general advice. You need to go into, like, the hyper specifics of where you can find that extra 5%, that extra 1%, because those are gonna make the biggest difference than trying to take big swings. You know what I mean? I guess to make it better analogy of something I know more about is baseball and hitting, for example. You'll have a hitter like Justin Turner, who is on the Seattle Mariners now, but he was in the Blue Jays. He's on the Dodgers before that. He was on the Mets before he was on the Dodgers. Wow. I just went through his whole roster or his whole career. But he wasn't, you know, a high pick on the New York Mets. He went and saw a hitting coach and completely changed the way he swings the bat and became an absolute stud, 3rd baseman, one of the most beloved Dodgers in recent memory, and absolutely incredible. And it was just a change to his swing. Right? He didn't change huge positions. He didn't change the right hand to left hand. He didn't change, like, going up and down backwards, like, some weird thing. It was literally just these nuance tweaks that I wouldn't know anything about. Like, if I saw a swing before and after, it's not, like, a big shift. There's just these subtle shifts. I could think of all these baseball players where they make, like, these subtle shifts and it either breaks them or it makes them it either makes them just you know, the hitting coach was, like, you know, I don't know what goes on behind the scenes, but they it didn't work out for them. Or they see the right hitting coach, and it makes them take off. And I think with creating content, we can self correct or we can learn from who we're talking to. And, like, we can get better at it. Right? It's not I don't want you to feel like you other people were born to do it and you weren't, or you can't get any better at it, or you've reached a ceiling. You can get better at it. It takes feedback. It takes work. But don't give up thinking that you've already done everything that there is to do because there's a lot more to do. And it doesn't need to be harder because you've already been doing the hard part. Just keep going.