Let's talk about leveraging Instagram to grow your business.
I am not going to talk about getting more likes and followers,
They do matter for some, but for me, they don’t.
We will be talking about the bigger picture of Instagram, about what our true focus should be on, what’s going to make the biggest difference in both our day to day and long term efforts.
Remember Instagram should be used as a marketing tool, not a standalone method for building your business. Your marketing funnel may include a YouTube channel, an email list and Website is important too.
My method for using Instagram as a marketing tool that can generate hundreds of potential customers every single month.
The First step is to have a plan.
A plan is going to guide all of your efforts and make the outcome much more fruitful.
So the first thing I want you to do is to ask yourself: what is your primary goal with Instagram?
Let me give you a hint, it shouldn't be to grow your following,
I want you to think bigger than that, It could be to get traffic to your website build up your email list make a sale of your products or services decide what is important for you and write it down.
This will be your new motivation when it comes to Instagram every piece of content you create and every caption you write will have this overarching goal in mind.
The second step is to identify your market.
If you have not yet identified your target market well you have got work to do.
Knowing who your target market, is without a doubt the most important element of any business.
Without this information, all the time you spend on creating content, writing captions, choosing hashtags and dishing out likes and comments will all be wasted.
Instagram could be a very time-consuming platform so we want to make sure that everything we do has a purpose.
so, what exactly is the target market?
It is the person you believe is going to benefit from your content and what you are offering.
This will be different for everyone depending on what your business brand way presents, but is super important that you flush it out before you say that yours is a 35-year-old woman and head off to the next step.
I want you to stop and take way deeper approach than that.
You should identify as much information about this person as possible including their age, gender, marital status, annual income, education level, hobbies and even personality traits.
Knowing if your target market shops like warner or like verses Gucci can make a big difference in the vibe of your content the tone of your caption and the way your price your products, which brings us to the next step.
The Third step is to Create strategic Content.
Creating strategic Content by deeply understanding who are target market is making content becomes so much easier which photo you take and the caption you write should speak directly to that person.
It should provide value and offer a solution to that particular person's problem, the idea here is if we create content for specific demographics we are going to naturally attract that person to our feed.
Once they are at our feed, we are going to value them with our content because it sounds like it was made just for them and easily convert them into real paying customers.
if we create random content with no real direction we are going to attract a mix of people that don’t end up taking any action.
We want to make sure we are consistently getting the right people to our feed we need to make the most results from our next step.
The fourth step is to Locate and Engage with Your Target market
Locate and engage with your target audience Regularly, this is something that should be done daily and it doesn’t have to be hard since you know who your target market is finding them on Instagram will be a breeze.
One easy way is to think about the Instagram accounts that your target market is already following go to those accounts click on one of the recent posts than hit the liked by button this will open up the list of engaged users who are following to your target market from there you can easily leave few likes and comments on as many accounts as you have time for.
What this is going to do is send those people a notification and encourage them to come over to your feed.
When someone likes or comments on your content where instantly interact by who they are right? And remember we create content specifically for them so once they are there they are going to be pleasantly surprised and prepared to take the next step in our funnel which brings us to the last step of my method.
Step Five is to Encourage Meaningful Activity
Encouraging Meaningful Activity is far more important than likes and followers.
So, instead of posting a picture and hoping that you get more likes than last time, What you want to be doing is encourage audience to be using call to action and ask your audience to do something that is going to help your primary goal and send your audience to the next step of your funnel, for instance encouraging them to click the link in bio to check out your website, new blog related offering or asking them to send a DM or email, so you can chat with them one on one.
These actions are so much more powerful than a like or follow; and you build a better like, know and trust factor.
If you haven’t heard this before, it is what makes people buy from you when someone is continually exposed to your content has spoken to you one on one and has received some sought of value for you they begin to trust you and a long term connection can be built.
Every action they take on your account, the connection and support and trust they have for you grows.
This makes them much more likely to invest in you than anyone else on Instagram, so by having a plan understanding your target market is creating content specifically for them and encouraging them to take action that matters.
You are going to utilize Instagram in a significantly better business building way than ever before and trust me just because you are focusing on website clicks doesn’t mean your followers and engagement will not go up, it will simply act as a cherry on top of all of your efforts.
So now that you know my framework for using Instagram as a real marketing tool we need to know how good this method is working out for you.
Previously you may have measured your success by how many likes or comments you got, but I want you to forget about that, instead, I want you to keep track of two main things,
Audience Insights
Activity Interactions
The First thing is Audience Insights, to check these
Navigate to your profile.
Hit the hamburger icon in the top right, and
Select insights, from these toggle over to the audience tab.
This is where we can tell if you are actually attracting target marketing to your feed, go back to all the details you rolled down about your target market and cross-reference them where are they coming from the right country are they the right age and gender if so awesome you can’t really ask much more than that.
If they aren’t quite right then it means one of two things
1. The content you’re creating isn’t actually speaking to a different demographic and you might want to consider your making them your target market instead
or
2. You are missing the mark on your engagement efforts and you need to switch up the accounts your using to locate your target market.
Keep tweaking your engagement, content strategy and content creation until you see your audience on track.
The second metric we will be using to measure our success is Activity interactions, as I mentioned this earlier the thing like website clicks post-shave, post shares, swipe ups DMS and click on your email, text, or direction button.
Remember these are more important, because when you are using Instagram for marketing.
This is the starting point of your marketing funnel.
Once our target market lands on our feed the next step we want them to take is moving over to our website getting on your email and eventually buying your offering.
So to keep track of your activity interactions head back into your insights and toggle onto your activity tab from here you can see how many website clicks, emails and calls you got in the last seven days, you also want to navigate to each post and click the view insights button to see how many shares, saves and website clicks were generated.
I strongly recommend you to maintain track of these in an excel spreadsheet so you can monitor your growth and also the performance of the different posts.
This data will help you on your Instagram strategies even more and drastically increase its ability to funnel potential customers straight to you, so remember having a ton of follower is not a goal here getting the right people to your feed and taking meaningful action is.
Instead of stressing over how many likes your posts are getting divert your energy to finding and engaging with your target market these actions will make a significantly larger impact.
This will set yourself up for future success, If you are not sure with the next step of your funnel should be, think about Instagram as where you introduce yourself to someone new, your website should be where you show them your expertise potentially with your blog post or free downloads and your email should be where you offer the solution to their problem or your paid offering.
So to quickly recap my five-step method to using Instagram as a marketing tool
Have a plan,
Identify and understand your target market
Create strategic content
Engage with your target market regularly
Encourage meaningful activity
If you follow this simple framework I promise you not only will feel better about your time spent on Instagram you will actually begin to see a positive return on your time invested in-app
So that’s it, I hope you learned something new I hope you are starting to think Instagram differently and are leaning away from the importance of likes and moving towards the importance of interaction using Instagram like a true marketing tool.