GTM Sauce

Eunice Lai's personal Instagram

Post calm, sideways talking videos while everyone else posts loud vertical ones

35K views turned into 200-250 new followers

Workedfounder-brandorganic-short-video

What they did

On her personal Instagram, Eunice switched from cinematic vertical Reels to a horizontal, lightly edited ~1.5-minute video of herself talking about her life, with no loud text or rage-bait, but still opening with a hook. Her rule: do the opposite of what's popular in format while keeping proven basics like hooks.

What happened

35K views converted to 200-250 new followers, which she calls a very high rate for Instagram.

In their words

Eunice Lai - This 20yr old girl is a marketing genius…

Play from 15:52
15:39

Hostand I think you sort of like had this cinematic style, but I feel like you're starting to switch up the style a little bit. Do you think horizontal video on like vertical video platforms is actually like the new thing?

15:52

Eunice LaiSo, if you scroll down and click onto, let's say, the one with the camera, this was just like a minute-and-a-half video of me talking. It doesn't have that many likes, it only has 35,000 views, but it actually converted to, I think, between like 200 or 250 followers, which is actually a very high conversion rate for Instagram. I think the reason why this did really well is because it's different, right? Like, everyone is making vertical videos with loud text and these like really rage-baity hooks. So when they finally see a less edited video that's a horizontal format, and it's just, you know, a minute 30 seconds of someone just talking about their lives, the people realize that, "Okay, this is something different, and this might be something that I want to follow along." I guess my strategy for marketing or just producing content is to just try do the opposite of what people are doing right now, but, you know, still maintain some of the methods that are guaranteed to work. I do still have my hooks, but the format of the content itself is the opposite of what's popular right now.

16:55

HostYeah, like, you still have hooks in a lot of these videos, but then the style of the overall video is like calm, but I feel like once people kind of catch on to the calmness, and it's like, "Oh wait, actually, this is like a real human. It's kind of authentic." That's the original retention editing, right? It's just like normal authentic content where they feel like they're connecting with the person. Are there any other styles that you feel like …

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Tags: instagram, horizontal-video, calm-content, contrarian-format, hooks