Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host, Britt Seva and this week we’re going to geek out over the ‘gram a little bit, which is always so fun. Any episode I host where we dive deep into Instagram generally gets my DMs flowing, and we get a lot of questions about them because Instagram is this elusive beast that we’re always just trying to tame. And I wanted this episode to be very timely because you may not have felt it just yet, but in six months, this is going to be the episode you go back to and you’re like, “Wait a second. I feel like Britt talked about this a little while ago.”
So one of the things that I think makes me unique as an educator is instead of being reactive to what’s going on or the changes, I educate myself in a very different way and it allows me to be a few steps ahead. That’s why sometimes you’ll see me talk about something and then a few weeks later, others will talk about something, but I’m kind of on the forefront of what is coming for the future. My track record on this one’s pretty damn good. You can go back and check me on a lot of the predictions that I’ve made.
And right now we are seeing a radical shift in consumer behavior. In our industry, beyond our industry, there is a real shift and change in what today’s buyer wants. Clients are buyers, your buyers. I’m a buyer, like all humans are looking for ’em. You’ve probably felt it. So it’s almost like this very delayed reaction to the pandemic. I know we talked about this a lot on the show. I too look forward to the day where we don’t have to talk about it, but it’s only two years ago. I mean, we’re all still very much in recovery. The economy has not yet recovered from it, so we’re still in it.
So when we look back to earlier 2020, spring of 2020, summer of 2020, we were all just so hungry for normalcy, right? We were like, “Let’s just get back to normal. Let’s just get back to it.” And unfortunately, two years later, that normal is long gone. There was too much downtime. We’re still in the downtime, which means that a 2019 world and early 2020 world, we will never come back. It’s fully impossible. The consumer has changed. Their perspective on what’s important in life has changed. What they want out of their career has changed.
And you’ve probably seen a lot of these pieces happen, right? We talk about the Great Resignation, and the fact that unemployment is so low right now, and inflation is so high, and all these things have happened. People are being asked to come back to work. I know we were always fully operational, my business didn’t really shut down during the pandemic. And I know for you all too, you’re like, “Oh no, I was back to the salon as soon as I could be.”
For our industry, it was a bit different but in the industries where work from home had become so normalized after being not normal, do you know how hard it is for those businesses to get their team members to come back after working at home for two years? Team members are literally like, “No, it’s cool. I’ll just quit.” Like it is impossible. Why? Because people have realized they want something different from life.
You need to embrace that because that is going to change the way you connect with your consumer. That is going to change how you speak to them. That is going to change the education classes you attend, that is literally going to change everything, and you need to understand it.
Today I want to talk about it and the way it relates to Instagram, ‘cause here’s the deal. And this is the part where you’re going to be like, “I don’t know what she’s talking about. This doesn’t make any sense.” Wait for it. I’m going to tell you about it now and in six months, you’re going to be like, “Well, shoot. She was right.”
Instagram is going through a little bit of a softening. It’s not as strong of a platform as it once was. I think for a lot of different reasons. It’s going through a bit of an identity crisis. I think it’s trying really hard to compete with TikTok instead of staying true to who it is, which is so unfortunate because then it’s losing a lot of its brand edge. We’re actually about branding here in this episode and I almost feel like they lost their way in a quest for market domination and it’s super unfortunate.
With that, we are seeing that consumers are shifting their behavior on Instagram. What they want to see on Instagram has radically changed and I’m watching our industry specifically struggle to get out ahead of it. It looks like a dog paddle out there. Like no one’s swimming nice, beautiful strokes to get to the other end of the lap pool. It looks like head barely above the water. You’re treading, like stuff’s happening, but the struggle is real.
You’ve probably seen it too. Have you noticed a decrease in post frequency for a lot of people right now? Stylists, educators, brands, like literally across the board, people are like, “You know what? I’m just going to slow the heck down.” You’ve seen it. You maybe even have experienced it, right?
I want to talk about the five stages of Instagram as they exist today, a few of the things that I see brands and people doing that are completely shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to Instagram, and what it is going to look like to stay relevant on the platform moving forward.
Let’s start with the very first stage of Instagram, which is what I call rookie, and this is where all of us started. For some of you, you’ve never graduated beyond it, and that’s okay. The first step in overcoming any of these Instagram stages is owning them, understanding them, and then choosing to move forward.
You’re in the rookie stage of Instagram if you have no consistent branding, right? You’re just posting photos of your work as you can. When you get a client that’s photo-worthy, you definitely take the picture. Lots of backs of heads, not as many front faces, more back head shots, predominantly photos of hair. Every once in a while, it’s maybe a photo of you or you attempt to take a photo of your salon space. Maybe not even, but it’s predominantly hair, it’s kind of catches catch can. The quality of the photos is just okay. You’re maybe doing a selfie every once in a while and your traction is pretty low. You’re not seeing a huge boom in your following. There’s not a ton of comments. There’s not a ton of likes. Your engagement is probably 1% or so. Meaning if you had 300 followers, you’re getting three to five likes per photo up to 3%, so that goes as high as nine to 15 likes for photos, something like that. That’s pretty indicative of being what I call a rookie.
You’re just trying to figure it out. There’s no shame in your game if you’re a rookie. That is where most people on Instagram are today. They’re just like, “I kind of don’t get it,” so they’re just doing their very best.
Okay. That’s rookie.
Now I will say we as an industry right now are extremely educated, which is great. When I joined the industry in 2008, educating yourself was really hard. My best shot at education was finding a way to get the money to fly to the exchange in New York, put myself up in a hotel, pay for the classes. I couldn’t afford to do it, like I never made it out there, but that was my best shot at it. And our salon brought educators into our salon a couple times a year, which was like bougie. That was not normal. That was a huge part of the reason I chose the salon I did is because they did bring in educators, but I’m learning maybe two times a year. And then the stylists in my salon were great mentors, but they only know what they know. And they’re only learning maybe twice a year.
The trickle of education was quite slow, right, versus now, oh my gosh. I mean, we got YouTube university. Everybody’s an influencer. There’s just a million ways to Sunday to learn right now, so there’s no lack of education.
Because of that, a lot of people have upgraded their Instagram from rookie to what I call the branded stage. So when you’re branded, your work has a very consistent look and style. Like when somebody sees your posts, they’re like, “Oh, obviously that’s Britt’s.” When you start to have a signature look or you could even say a theme—I think theme is kind of a big word, but you could say that—I think it’s easy to understand. You’ve got a vibe going on. Most of your pictures are speaking to your target market.
So you can’t go from rookie to branded until you’ve determined who your target market is and what they want to see. It is a pretty big jump. But once you make that jump from rookie to branded, you start to feel like, “Oh, okay. I think I can do this,” because you start to know what content hits, your feed starts to look more cohesive, you start to see a referral or two from your social media efforts because clients are resonating with what you’re posting. Your formatting is consistent and you’re starting to see much higher engagement.
Now, when we talk about engagements, definitely likes and comments, but also DMs, right? Instagram very openly said earlier this year, early in 2020, DMs are actually one of the things they’re looking at as far as an account’s credibility. So when we shift from rookie to branded, you’ll start to see an uptick in all of those things.
Then the next jump is a pretty hefty one. A lot of people get stuck in branded. Where you really want to get to is to build a following because when you get to build a following, what you unlock is organic likes and follows. You’re not having to work quite so hard to get people interested in your page. You’re starting to build a word-of-mouth reputation. You’re starting to get more referrals really naturally. You deeply understand who you are and what makes you unique. You have a strong sense of what your followers respond well to. So you’ve stopped posting the content that you like, and you’ve really started posting the content that your followers like, which if you’ve not made the shift yet, you’re scratching your head as I say that, because you’re like, “Well, what’s the difference? And how do you know?”
Well, the more you study social media and the more that you understand how it all works, understanding what your clients are responding well to is very easy, super easy. We talk about that a lot in Thriving Stylist Method, is how to understand what content actually plays. You can’t just post content. You can’t just have a color theme and expect for it to hit. That’s not going to work. So once you have gotten into a groove of like, “Okay, this is what my market likes to see, these are the services that I should show, this is what my grid should look like, this is how they want me to show up,” then you start to build that natural, organic following.
This is when local stylists and salons gain a thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand followers, because they’ve understood their market well enough to have earned that, okay?
Followers become clients regularly. This is when a lot of people start to say, “Oh my gosh, it’s firing, like I feel it. My funnel is working.” Those are the things that happen when we’re building a following.
Now this next jump is a real doozy. So we’ve had rookie, branded, building a following, then we have self-confident. This is the one that I think a lot of people feel like they’re in and I can see from the outside that they’re not.
So to get to a place of self-confidence, you’ve nailed your brand message and have a very unique voice. The focus becomes building longevity and maintaining a professional brand. You’re confident in yourself, and what you do and don’t want in your business, and you’re only attracting the right kind of clients because you’re self assured and it shows.
The thing about self confidence, I’m going to go read the first one again and dive deeper. You’ve nailed your brand message and have a unique voice. This is where I think a lot of people get it twisted, and we’re going to talk about some of the faults I see in people showing up on Instagram right now, but a lot of people are still on Instagram playing the better game. So “I see what somebody else is doing. I think I know how to do that better,” and they put like a twist on the look of the feed or on the content or on the technique used to achieve some kind of look on a client or whatever, but more or less, it’s 80% of somebody else’s concept, but you’ve put that 20% twist on it. And you’re like, “I’ve got it.”
No, I mean, you can build a following like that, but that’s not self-confident because you are contingent on seeing what somebody else is doing and playing the better game with what they’re doing versus having your own brand message and unique voice. This is probably the biggest misfire I see in our industry right now.
I want to go to the final stage of Instagram, and then we’re going to talk about the misfires in full, but where I’d like to see everybody listening to this episode get to is self confident. You need don’t need to turn to anybody else to get any ideas. You don’t need to take a twist on somebody else’s look or concept or brand. You’re doing you, and it doesn’t matter when anybody thinks, and it doesn’t matter what the trends are because you are so confidently yourself.
Very few people are here. How come? Because we are so worried we’re going to get it wrong. We are so worried that people are going to judge us negatively. We’re so worried that we’re not going to be able to stay cutting edge, so instead we look to other people to almost affirm for us and like, “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m on the right track. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.” And you’ll see people who are attempting to be self confident, but really stuck in either the branded or the building of following. They’ll be turning a lot to the latest trends, hopping on the latest bandwagon because rather than being confident in their own efforts, they’re just trying to not get hit with the FOMO, right?
I recently did an Instagram live and I was talking about the dangers of going viral on reels. Now I’m certain of the reputation of being the anti-reels lady, but that’s actually not correct. I post some reels on my own account. I’m not anti reels. I think people misunderstand what is happening with reels, like it’s full on artificial inflation. The reason you get a lot of views is not ‘cause people love reels. It’s all fake push. So it’s not that it’s bad. You just have to really understand what’s happening with it. In fact, we have Brock Johnson coming in to teach a class to our Thrivers on reels in May of this year. So it’s not that I’m anti-reels, I just think people need to educate themselves on what reels look like. But what happens is instead of having that self confidence to be like, “Slow down, time out, what is happening here?,” the FOMO kicks in and you’re like, “Oh, this is the new thing. I gotta jump in and do it.”
And I’m watching stylists and salons blow their grids and blow their brand message because the FOMO happened. When you’re actually self confident, you don’t worry about that because you are so strong in your messaging and your structure, it’s all good. Like if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. If you’ve got something working for you, why are you trying to mix it up?
And with Instagram specifically, go back to basics. The fancy stuff is often so unnecessary. It’s like when you make a birthday cake, all you really need is the cake. I mean, at the end of the day, all you really need is the cake, and then if you do a little fruit filling, great. If you do a little basic, like a naked frost where it’s just the top and maybe a little bit in the center, but not the sides, that’s great. That’s a good cake, but I see a lot of people like glitter sprinkles and hand painted and piped roses and all this crazy stuff. And your cake starts to look like a mess and you are going to start scaring people off.
This is the message I want you to understand: Instagram is changing. What today’s consumer wants from it is changing. They don’t want the glitter frosting and the rainbow roses. They want it to be much more simplified when they’re making a purchasing decision. You are making it so fancy and so over complicated. That what’s happening is the analysis paralysis has kicked in.
One of the big challenges we’re seeing in consumer behavior, and I’m going to be talking about this quite a bit at Thrivers Live, is that because there are so many opportunities to buy, to invest, and brands really got their act together over the last two years. Competition is stiffer. It’s become much harder to make a clear cut decision.
So what’s happening is consumers are not making a decision at all. They’re just sitting on it because there’s too much information. There’s too many opportunities. They’re like, “You know what, I’m just going to sit in the back and watch for a while.” Some of you have even done that. Instead of pulling a trigger, you’re going to kick it for a little bit. Your clients and your perspective new clients are doing the same.
Lastly, we have Insta famous. I’m not Insta famous. I don’t think anybody in here needs to get to Insta famous. But I think a lot of people are looking at those who are Insta famous and they’re like, “Perfect. That’s what I’m shooting for.” You have no idea what you’re asking for.
Insta famous people are tricky. So when you’re Insta famous, you have a huge following, right? Hundreds of thousands of followers know you by name. Even stylists in local communities, or salons in local communities, local salon with 25,000 followers would be like Insta famous. You’ve built a real name for yourself and you’re branded in your area. You’re definitely extremely consistent and branded. It’s very easy to create content. And when you get to this place, now is when you can start to create other revenue streams or other areas of opportunity, or think about opening up second locations, ‘cause you got it. You dialed it in, you have that brand name and loyalty. You have earned it, right?
Now while Insta fame is great, it can also be really fleeting. And this is the danger of it is that markets grow hot and cold. Like think about it. Think about some of the educators. If you’ve been in the industry as long as I have, think about some of the educators you admired 10 years ago, seven years ago, five years ago, two years ago. How many of you tuned out some of those people? Ooh, I could see the light bulbs going off for people.
Insta fame is very fleeting and so chasing it is pretty empty, and that’s why when we look at people who are these mega influencers and we’re like, “Ooh, love it. I want to get in with them,” or “I see what they’re doing and I want to copy what they’re doing,” you have no idea what’s up with their brand or their business or how long it’s going to stick around. Or if their efforts are actually producing revenue or if it’s just producing a huge following of people who don’t even want to invest with them, right? You have no idea what’s going on.
That’s the fifth stage. I don’t generally suggest looking at what Insta famous people do and trying to emulate their concepts, but let’s actually dive deeper there and talk about the four things that I see stylists and salon owners doing that is actually hindering their growth. They’ve created these crutches for themselves that they think is going to actually help them to build a stronger brand on social, and it’s just about the worst thing you could do.
So the first is the copycat. So the copycat sees a brand they admire and tries to do what they do in order to get the same result. However, they struggle to feel confident in their content and they lack consistency because instead of having independent ideas or deeply understanding their target market, they’re just seeing what some other person is doing, putting a spin on it, and hoping something great happens. That is exhausting and that’s why there’s that lack of consistency. And there’s that lack of like, “Oh, is this working? Am I doing the right thing?” Because instead of creating a brand that actually makes sense for you or is authentic to you, you’re copying somebody else’s authenticity, which is fully impossible, right?
Then we have the cheater brand. The cheater brand falls in love with a brand and sees a way they could do what that brand does, but different. They take a piece of the concept or style, but twist it to feel like it’s got a new spice or flavor. But the challenge with the cheater brand is they also struggle to come up with unique concepts.
So with a cheater brand, often you see a rise to popularity and a pretty significant fall. It’s not sustainable because, again, it’s that lack of actual understanding of your market or that lack of vision forward that doesn’t allow it to sustain.
I have a lot of salons reach out to me like a couple times a month, not all the time, but a couple times a month, people will hit me up in the DMs and be like, “Oh Britt, I’m so annoyed. I just got all my marketing right, I just got all my promotions right, and now the salon down the street has changed their look, they’ve changed their style. They’ve copied our referral program. What do I do?”
Nothing. That is their prerogative. They have chosen to be the cheater brand or the copycat. And instead of coming up with their own unique concepts, they will always be four steps behind you. That is not only exhausting, it is a recipe for failure. It’s not sustainable, right?
So we don’t worry about the cheater brands. We just don’t want to be one. Instead looking externally to decide what you put on Instagram, you need to understand your market, which we talk about deeply in Thriving Stylist Method, and then we go even deeper in Scaling when we learn to actually build your own methodology, i.e., something nobody else can cheat or steal. When we get into those things, then it becomes really effortless because instead of trying to keep up with someone else, you are only keeping up with yourself. It becomes so much more simple.
Then we have the sell, sell, sell brand. I see a lot of this right now. This is very dangerous. Every post is an offer to buy something. There’s always an angle or an edge with everything, and the goal is to look like a big deal, not to be helpful. And this is because when I talk about Instagram, I’m like you need to be solving your client’s problems. You need to be speaking to their pain points. You need to be showing up with what you offer, but I’m going to guess if you go to my Instagram, it doesn’t look like I’m sell, sell, selling all the time. What I’m trying to do is deeply serve and speak to pain points, definitely. I’m not trying to sell, sell, sell on my Instagram feed. You won’t see it. The goal there is very, very different.
And I think this is where people get really, really mixed up is that the show photos of their work or this is why retail posts almost always flop on Instagram because it doesn’t feel like you’re adding value. Every single Instagram post should add value, but it doesn’t feel like you’re adding. It feels like you’re trying to line your wallet, and so that’s why those things don’t hit.
So the sell, sell, sell brands are going to have a real hard fall over the next six months.
And then the IDGAF brand. You can just go ahead and figure out that acronym yourself. The IDGAF brand is seeing a real tumble right now. So they want to be who they are and share their message with the world, which is great. I’m here for that. They’re very self-confident. So it’s almost always a brand that’s either self-confident or Insta famous. Sometimes it’s a rookie brand, but they don’t cause a whole lot of waves because they’re not there yet. The challenge is that the message has stopped being about the target market client and has unintentionally turned into a personal blog. I see a lot about people shift to the IDGAF and they don’t even realize it, and they become very negative unintentionally and they’re doing it in the name of educating or uplifting, but it comes across very cynical. It doesn’t land well. And I think that it happens very mistakenly because you see something that you feel passionate about, and so you’re like, “I need to share this. I think this is important. This is an alignment with my values.” Or “I want to educate my clients on it,” or whatever. But unfortunately it’s like you’ve missed the mark. Like, oh, is this really what your market comes to you for? Or is this just something that you feel passionate about and you decided like you were in the mood to share?
I think a lot of people, because of the exhaustion from social media, really shifted away from being strategic and they got into the IDGAF mode, and they’re like, I’m just going to speak from my heart. There’s a real difference between authenticity and IDGAF, a real one, and it’s a fine line. It’s super hard not to cross it, but you have to be very careful because when you shift into that zone of cynical or starting to talk about things that don’t relate deeply to your target market client, they still love you, but they’re going to switch focus, like they’re not into it anymore.
Really start to ask yourself, “How am I showing up on social? What does my feed look like? Which of these stages have I fallen into? Have I picked up any bad habits?” And when you’re ready to really own the platform and really make sure that you’re showing up in full and getting the most from the platform as we do step into the season of change, there’s only one way to do it: define your target market, learn what it looks like to speak to them, create your own unique message. Ideally get into Scaling Stylist Method and develop a methodology, but get really clear on what you do different than anybody else. Double down on it. Keep it simple, stupid. You don’t need to have the glitter and the roses and the whole thing. Super simple. Your goal on social is to add value. Show how smart you are in your area of focus, convince people that you are the best possible person to serve them in the specialty that they desire, do not miss the mark on this.
Remember when Instagram is all about, don’t get caught up in the hype, don’t lose sight of the vision on the platform. It can still be amazing for you, but understand it’s changing over the next few months. I’ll be coming in with more information and details about how to keep up with the change, but for now, make sure that your messaging is rock solid.
And as I always like to say so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
