8 Things We Learned at the ManyChat IG Summit 2025

The most quietly radical idea at the most recent ManyChat IG Summit was not a new feature or a growth hack. It was a relocation. The place where a stranger turns into a customer has moved. It used to be the landing page. Now it is the DM.

That single shift ran underneath almost every talk, and for the hospitality, lifestyle and ecommerce brands we work with it changes where the money actually gets made. Here are eight things worth taking home.

1. The best hook lives in your audience's 2am thoughts

Meagan Hall's point on hooks was the sharpest of the day. A good hook is not clever, it is recognised. The trick is to mine raw, unedited audience language, from Reddit threads to call transcripts to your own DMs, and find the emotional barrier sitting under the surface complaint. "I've spent too much money on courses" is the thing people say. "I don't trust myself to choose the right path anymore" is the thing they feel. With seven to twelve touchpoints before someone buys, the hook's job is not to sell. It is to make a person feel seen. Stop writing copy that sounds like your brand. Write copy that sounds like your customer at their most honest.

2. You are writing for a goldfish

Mike Yan opened with the stat nobody wants: the average attention span is now 8.2 seconds, officially shorter than a goldfish. His answer is the 3C system. Content earns the attention, conversation holds it, conversion banks it. Most brands are excellent at the first, skip the second, and then wonder why the third never arrives. A beautiful grid that never opens a conversation is a shop with the lights on and the door locked.

3. Sell the outcome. The service is just the tool

Austin Schneider's line, "systems run the business, people run the systems," was a useful slap. Do not sell the thing you do, sell the result the client wants. His DM-ad funnel for owner-operated hospitality venues was refreshingly concrete: an engagement campaign optimised for message replies, broad targeting, ten to twenty pounds a day, aiming for a cost per lead of seven to twenty-five pounds and a twenty to thirty percent lead-to-booking rate.

4. The DM converts ten times better than the landing page

Natasha Willis put a number on the relocation. Used as a conversion vehicle, the DM outperforms the landing page roughly tenfold. The current sweet spot is a fifty-fifty split of carousels and reels, and a "follow me, then comment" call to action beats "comment" alone, because the reply lands in the primary inbox rather than the dreaded message requests folder. Half of DM traffic comes from posts, forty percent from stories. For a restaurant or a boutique, remember that a booked table or a held item is a conversation, not a checkout.

5. Delegate at 80 percent, or you are just micromanaging

Grace Beverley was the voice of operational reality. "80% perfect in someone else's hands is better than 100% perfect if you did it yourself." If you constantly fix delegated work, you are not delegating, you are micromanaging, and the answer is to re-train, re-brief or replace. Hire to protect your time rather than waiting to feel ready, and use capital to amplify systems that already work, not to go looking for product-market fit. The founder who approves every caption is the bottleneck the brand cannot scale past.

6. Authority is a decade, not a campaign

Jesse Burgess of TOPJAW built ten years of consistent content before mass recognition arrived. The discipline that protects it is striking: they refuse money from restaurants so their recommendations stay trustworthy, earning instead from non-competing brands. The payoff is real, one feature drove 1,500 bookings in two days. Earned trust from a credible voice out-converts paid reach, and trust is the one asset you cannot buy back once you have spent it.

7. Instagram is your storefront, not your scrapbook

Evita Barwise reframed the platform with the numbers. Over two billion monthly users, growing four percent year on year. Ninety percent follow at least one business, eighty-one percent look for products and services, and seventy-two percent buy because of something they saw. If your grid would not function as a shop window, it is quietly underperforming as one.

8. Influencers rent attention. Creators own it

Grace Andrews closed with the cleanest framing of the day. The influencer economy is fading and the creator economy is compounding, and the difference is ownership. Borrowed audiences vanish the moment the budget does. An owned audience is equity that keeps paying out. For lifestyle and entertainment brands especially, the work is to build something people follow for its own sake, not something they tolerate between ads.

The thread running through all of it

Reach was never the goal. Attention is cheap and everywhere now. The brands that win are the ones that turn it into a conversation, the conversation into a booking, and the booking into a relationship worth keeping. The grid gets you noticed. The inbox is where the brand actually gets built.

Our notes and takeaways from the ManyChat IG Summit, with thanks to the speakers.