This is where most videos and posts about getting clients from Instagram stop. Somebody is in your DMs. So what happens next?
In the five-link chain, this is links four and five: getting them off Instagram and onto a call. Usually the person in your DMs asked you for something. The story said reply STORY. The bio said DM me 90DAYS. A Reel said comment GUIDE. Whatever that thing is, that is your lead magnet, and it decides whether the conversation goes anywhere.
Nobody Wants Your Forty-Page Guide
Most people make the lead magnet way too big. Nobody wants your forty-page guide. They will not read it, so it cannot help them, so it cannot make them trust you. Make it solve one problem in about five minutes. A checklist. A template. A three-minute video.
The best one I have seen a coach actually use is the three-minute video with one fix in it. It is the smallest thing that still does the job. They see your face, they hear how you explain things, and they get one thing they can do today. A checklist tells them what you know. A three-minute video shows them what working with you is like, which is what a five-thousand-dollar package is really being bought on.
Mine is on the CreateSocial site. You drop in your website and it gives you three content pieces for your business, a script, a YouTube outline and a LinkedIn post, with no account needed. One problem, solved in a few minutes, and it shows what the product does instead of describing it.
Get the Email While You Are There
While you are sending the freebie, get their email. Here is why. Instagram, and every other platform, has control over how much you can message people and who. A business account can only message someone for 24 hours after their last message to you. After that your automation cannot follow up, and how much you can message people by hand is the platform's call too, not yours. Your email list has no window. It is all yours. If anything ever happens to your account, you can still contact these people and bring in customers from them. You own that audience.
How to ask without it feeling like a form: ask for the email, or send a link to a page that collects it and delivers the freebie. "What is the best email to send it to?" is enough for most people. If they do not answer, do not hold the freebie hostage. Send it in the DMs later anyway. The relationship is worth more than the address, and the person who got something useful from you without being cornered is the one who replies to the next story.
Follow Up Like a Person
Then follow up regularly and actually stay on top of these people. Did the checklist help? What part is giving you trouble? That is the whole message. It is not a pitch, it is a question about the thing you just sent them, and it is the question that gets them to tell you their problem.
Send your booking link after they have told you their problem, not before. That way the call is about their thing, and they already know you get what they are dealing with. "Delegating, I keep redoing my team's work." "That is most of what I work on with new managers. Want to talk it through Thursday, twenty minutes?" Booking link sent. Compare that to a link dropped into the first message, which reads as a sales funnel and gets treated like one.
Meanwhile your emails keep going for the people who did not reply. The shape is: day zero, here is your checklist. Day two, the step most people skip. Day five, want help with yours? Book a call. The days are illustrative. Yours might be three emails over a week or five over two. What matters is that the sequence exists and runs without you, so nobody who raised their hand goes quiet just because you were busy on Tuesday.
Link Five: The Call
And that is link five. A call with someone who told you their problem in your DMs two days ago, who has your freebie, who has seen your face for three minutes and read two emails from you since. That is a very different call from a stranger clicking a booking link off a bio, and it closes differently too.
This is also why the whole chain has to run at once. The freebie only matters if a story asked for it. The story only reaches people who followed you. They only followed you because a Reel got in front of them and the profile made the case. Pull one link out and the call never gets booked.
The Bottom Line
One problem, about five minutes, ideally a three-minute video with one fix in it. Get the email while you are there, because the list is the only audience you own. Follow up with a question, not a pitch, and send the booking link once they have told you what is wrong. Let the emails carry everyone who did not reply.
The three-minute video is a recording, and so is everything upstream of it. If making that content is the part that breaks for you, that is why I built CreateSocial. Ideas from your own expertise, pulled from a knowledge base of your site and your notes, a teleprompter so you are not doing seven takes of a three-minute video, subtitles in eleven styles, captions written for TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook and X, and one recording turned into Reels, carousels and written posts for every platform. There is a free trial. Or book a free fifteen-minute call and I will look at your profile and tell you which link is breaking.