Welcome to 2019 and the very first episode Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris, that’s me, of 2019. I’m so excited, so very excited for this year. There’s so much happening in the next week because of all the things.
We’ve got the new training videos coming to Backstage next week, the price increase happening in Backstage next week. Our event is filing up in New York City. We no longer have the two-pay option. It’s only the single-payment option left, but you can still get seats.
I feel like this is going off the rail early. 2019 is not off to a good start podcast-wise, so let’s collect ourselves. I am, once again, The Stacey Harris, social media strategist and trainer here at The Stacey Harris. I am also the CEO and lead strategist over at Uncommonly More, a digital marketing agency for female leaders ready to make a major impact. I’m going to really need to streamline that, guys. Let’s dig in before I make this worse. I should delete this, but I’m not going because I feel like we should start 2019 with honesty. If you’re still with me, send me a DM on Instagram and tell me that you did manage to keep listening to this. Let’s jump right in. I know it’s the first of the year. I know you’re excited for 2019. I want to keep this super brief because I want you to get to work, quite frankly.
So number one, Instagram rolling out more changes.
Apparently, this has been a thing on Android for a while, but now on iOS, you can long-form record stories, meaning your stories slides are still 15 seconds, but you can record, in theory, 60 or 90 seconds. You can just keep recording them. I’ve not yet found a limit. There might be one though, but I haven’t found it yet. I have tried, so make sure that you are using this for good, though. Remember story is still a mode of short-form media. It is still a medium where brevity is important, so don’t let this turn into a thing where you’re essentially just doing Instagram live, or an IGTV episode into your stories.
It doesn’t serve you, doesn’t serve your audience, so what I like about this though is you can go in and you can actually edit each slide individually so you can go in and add your text or your images or your stickers or whatever you want to add, slide by slide, which is really cool. So check that out. I really like it. We talked about countdown timers and things like that last month, but there’s been a lot of new features that kind of snuck in in the summer, which is really cool. Make sure you are checking them out and looking at where they fit in your strategy as we move into officially now, Q1 of 2019.
The number two thing, I want you to make sure you sit down with your marketing goals.
Often we sit down with our income goals this time of year. We sit down with our follower number goals, but we don’t sit down and look at what all this means. What does our traffic look like? Where do we want our traffic coming from? Do we have any idea where the quality of the traffic that we’re getting? I want you to start making goals around engagement and quality over goals of, “I have a bazillion people that like my post,” which is fine because only nine people follow you. And yes, I have seen those accounts, okay? They’re called purchased likes, and they’re not a good idea, but I want you to be looking at your goals. What are your goals going into this year, and then how are you going to get there? What are the action steps that make those goals happen? If you don’t know those pieces, it’s going to be a long year for you, okay?
Number three. Don’t forget to build your plan, if you haven’t yet.
Check out the 30-day … If you have not yet built your plan, I want you to do two things, three things actually. One, join Backstage, right now. Number two, check out the Build Your 30-day marketing Strategy. That will at least give you a strategy for the next 30 days, and then come join me in New York City because we are going to build you a 90-day strategy in New York. Those are your homework assignments.
Okay, I told you guys. We are keeping this super brief because I want you to go take action on this stuff. I don’t want you to start this year consuming, consuming, consuming, consuming all the things you could do, which is what a ton of your podcasts and your subscription feed are right now. I instead, I want you to get some action steps and go do them.
So if you’re a user of Instagram, if that’s part of your plan, check out those new features. If you don’t yet have your marketing goals established, figure those out. If you don’t yet have your plan to help you reach those marketing goals, see how those things went together? Figure that out. Build it out. Look at the free 30-day training. It’s super easy, and it’s 100% free. You can do that right now.
I will see you next week. Next week we’re going to be talking a lot about what’s changing around here, what’s ahead in 2019 for The Stacey Harris, and of course I will sharing a whole lot more about Uncommonly More, the new digital marketing agency, working with female leaders, ready to make a massive impact. If you have any questions, slide into my DMs on Instagram. It’s the easiest, most fun way to connect with me directly, with no team in the middle, all right? I’ll talk to you very soon. Happy New Year.
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