Launching a Course with Instagram?! Innovator Interview with Halley Gray

Instagram is a fantastic visual platform, and loads of businesses do great on it — but they are mostly businesses with a visual product.  Think food bloggers, product-based businesses, style and fashion brands, travel brands, and so on.

But can you use Instagram when you have a digital product — when there’s no great way to take pretty flat-lay photos of it?!  (It’s hard to take pretty photos of a digi course or Facebook community…)

My guest on the first episode of my Innovator Interview series is Halley Gray of Evolve & Succeed, and she runs a digital course called Be Booked Out that she recently launched on Instagram.

SAY WHA???

I’ve always thought of Instagram as being one of the more difficult platforms to convert to leads. Because of the way the platform is designed, the only place you can put clickable links is in your bio, and it can be difficult to entice people enough to get them to click on your bio and then click on your link.

But when I saw Halley using Instagram to launch her program — and killing it, as far as I could tell! — I was intrigued.

In this interview, you’re going to hear about Halley’s Instagram launching experience, but also her philosophy when it comes to innovation, and how she looks at experimenting with her content marketing.

As I said to Halley, we’re all grown ups here, but if you have little ears around, you might want headphones for swears. 😉

Some words of wisdom from Halley:

• On branding: “I get to be my creative self online… But zany! Zreative! … It’s basically me on 10 cups of coffee. I’m more caffeine than common sense.”
• “It’s all about evolutionary marketing. Because you’re going to have these new ways to connect with your customer or client that you need to jump on as soon as possible.”
• “The cool thing is, with creative marketing and innovative marketing, the equation is pretty much the same, but how you deliver it, is going to be different based on technology.”

• “I think a lot of the time, people are too cautious when it comes to implementing new ideas or trying things out. I’ve found the fastest growth and success from being to action things quickly…”
• “You have your person, your product, and how you’re going to get them excited about it… How you deliver that is going to change.”
• On Instagram: “I think what we’re underestimating that it allows them to create a relationship with you more, and allows them to trust you more, because it’s a lot harder to sell to them.”
• “It’s always important to keep evolving with the technology that’s available.”
• “You have to evolve your marketing so that people don’t get bored of you, and  you go extinct.”
• On overcoming your fears: “Just fuckin’ do it. There’s no way to know if it will be successful or not until you do it.”

Mic drop.

Be sure and check out Halley at evolveandsucceed.com and watch Braless On Couch on her Facebook page!

And if you want to follow us on Instagram, Halley is @evolvesucceed and I am @lacylu42

But before you go: Stop everything and tell me ONE takeaway you took away from this conversation. Drop it in the comments below.