How To Grow Your NZ Business On Social Media with Josh Ryan

There's an old marketing rule that a person needs to see your brand roughly seven times before they'll buy from you.

But that figure is close to a hundred years old, from the era when newspapers and the odd billboard were basically the only advertising that existed.

Think about how much content the average person now scrolls through in an hour on their phone now.

Instagram alone might show someone somewhere between 100 and 400 pieces of content in that time.

Against that kind of noise, seven touchpoints doesn't cut it anymore. You're realistically looking at needing 15 to 25 touches before you make a dent.

So recently I sat down with Josh Ryan, who runs marketing agency cleverpreneur.com and has been in the content game for over a decade, to pull back the curtain on how we actually think about social media at Next Advisory and give some valuable lessons to NZ business owners on how to use social media to grow their business.

Also worth noting Josh has ran our own social media and Keep The Change podcast & social media channels for the past 2.5 years.

Josh has been doing this since 2014, when he started an Instagram page at just 14 years old, he was posting quotes, cars, houses, travel a 'dream board' style of content which is what was trending on Instagram at that point.

He made his first money through sponsored posts from brands who were paying pages to feature them.

He grew that page for years, eventually built out systems so someone else could run the day-to-day, and sold it a couple of years ago as an actual business with recurring income.

That's the mindset I want business owners to take from this conversation: social media isn't just a place to post updates, it's something you can build deliberately, the same way you'd build any other part of your business.

We got into the weeds on what actually works, and I wanted to pull the five best lessons out into one place, so here we are.

1) Stop chasing views
A lot of people go to social media asking "how do I get as many views as possible" and then try to figure out how to turn that into customers afterwards.

Flip it.

Ask "how do I make impact or get customers" and let views be the secondary metric.

Think about how many clients or customers you currently have, then imagine a piece of content reaching ten times that number.

If you've got 100 clients and a video gets 1,000 views, that's potentially 900 people who now know you exist who didn't before.

Say you post three videos a week across four platforms and every single one flops, getting only 500 views each.

That's still 6,000 views a week, and around 28,000 views a month, from content that "did terrible."

2) Comments are underrated
Commenting on other people's posts, especially within your niche, still works, as long as it's genuine.

It's one of the oldest tricks in the book and it still holds up.

If a post relevant to your industry gets a lot of engagement, or a news article touches on something in your niche, and you leave a comment that adds real context or corrects a common misunderstanding, you can get in front of that creator's whole audience without needing your own reach yet.

People scrolling through content will often go straight to the comments to see what others think, so if you're there with something useful, you get seen.

It also works as a way to position yourself as an authority, someone who clearly knows what they're talking about, even before someone's landed on your own page.

3)  Turn one idea into five pieces of content
You don't need a separate original idea for every platform.

Film yourself doing the actual work, whatever that looks like in your business, and talk through it as you go.

This removes the pressure of "how do I look on camera," because you're focused on the task, not your face.

Post that video.

If it performs well, you've already got proof the idea resonates.

From there, take the audio, get it transcribed, tidy it up into a written post for Instagram or Facebook, pull a still image from the footage to pair with it, and turn the same idea into an email.

One piece of raw content, several formats, without needing five separate ideas.

4. Nail your hook
The first few seconds of a video, or the first line of a post or email subject, decides whether anyone sees the rest of it.

So make sure to not open with "hey guys" or "hey team."

By the time you've said that, you're several seconds in and you've only reminded the viewer they're one of a crowd rather than talking to them directly.

Get straight into the point.

If something's topical, like a new government policy or a news story everyone's already talking about, get your take out while it's still relevant. A week later, people have moved on and nobody cares anymore.

The algorithm rewards timeliness too, topical content tends to get pushed further because people are actively searching for takes on it.

5. Consistency over intensity
Posting three times and deciding social media "doesn't work" isn't a fair test.

If you've got an architecture firm and you post three times, you're not going to get someone walking through the door with a contract. Do it once a week for a year, and you'll open doors you can't currently see.

You also don't need to be excellent on every platform at once.

Pick the one where your audience actually is and where you're most comfortable creating (writing, video, design, whatever suits you), and put your real energy into growing that one.

Still post your content on the others, it costs you next to nothing to copy a caption across, but don't spread your attention so thin that you're not making real progress anywhere.

Now these are only a few of the points we touched on in the podcast, If you want to hear the full conversation including how algorithms decide who sees your content and why we treat likes as one of the least useful metrics, it's up on the Next Advisory YouTube channel and podcast now.

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This article is based on insights from the Next Advisory podcast, where Luke and Phil help New Zealand business owners navigate economic challenges and build better businesses. Visit nextadvisory.nz to find out how we can help you.

Checkout more of our blog content at https://nextadvisory.nz/podcast