With the rise of social media in the last decade, all businesses — from eCommerce to traditional ones — have started to rely heavily on online platforms for their sales. So, they have to boost their presence on social media if they wish to succeed.
Instagram is a popular social media outlet that you, as a business owner, can choose to elevate your brand image and sales. To fulfill this goal, it is necessary to learn Instagram marketing tips and guidelines on lead management.
What are the Benefits of Marketing Your Business on Instagram?
We recently polled 35 marketers to find out if Instagram is an effective platform for B2B marketing. When we asked if it’s possible for B2B brands to succeed on Instagram, 100% said yes.
Additionally, nearly 20% of our respondents say Instagram is responsible for as much as 50% of their site traffic each month.
No doubt, Instagram offers an array of benefits with its amazing features. Here are 7 reasons why Instagram is worth the investment.
Huge number of active users: Instagram is a powerful platform for businesses, with nearly 500 million daily active users of which 71% of the billion monthly active users are under the age of 35. This powerhouse provides you with an avenue to promote your brand and attract more customers.
Spy on your competitors with ease: Track your competitors both at home and abroad. Find out what kind of content they’re posting, how they interact with their audience, the kind of sales offers they have, and so on. Use this information to improve your Instagram B2B strategy.
Increases brand visibility and engagement: By making use of Instagram stories, leveraging branded hashtags, posting during the time followers are most likely to interact with your content by liking, commenting, or sharing you’ll be able to increase engagement and brand visibility on Instagram.
Furthermore, as a business, great strategies like giveaways, using influencers, or affiliates have proven over the years to be effective in generating more followers and visits to your profile and overtime increasing your revenue.
Makes your brand relatable: Humanizing your brand can go a long way in building trust and loyalty. In fact, 33% of American consumers say trusting a brand is key particularly during times when they are struggling financially and cannot afford to waste any money on a bad purchase.
Purchasing power: More than ⅓ of Instagram users have used the app to purchase a product online. What this tells you is that most of its users already have the buyer’s mindset and will hop on to buy a product if they like it which makes it a great platform for any business. After all, the core goal of any business is to increase revenue and profitability.
Powerful features: Business profiles on Instagram have an array of extra features that personal profiles don’t have. Such as the ability to promote your posts, include a call-to-action button, and gain access to your business account’s insights.
Building a community: Instagram allows you to easily connect and interact with your customers. As such, people are more likely to purchase from you more than once, especially when they keep seeing your posts and new offers.
How to Attract Leads for Your Business on Instagram?
Attracting leads on Instagram requires a comprehensive yet detailed knowledge of Instagram marketing. Knowing that there are billions of monthly active users on the platform, selling on Instagram is very tempting.
Instagram is a social media platform that has a wide group of users from a wide age range. Its easy-to-use mechanism and simple functions have made it popular even among people over 50. As it is a photo-based type of media, it has strong visual impressions on its users.
All these features are what has made business owners think of Instagram as an opportunity to attract leads. The first step is to increase the engagement of the business account on Instagram.
Keep on reading the tips to turn your followers into customers and use Instagram to attract leads.
1. Set Up an Instagram Business Account
The first thing you have to do is to switch your account from personal to business. Just go to the Setting section and click on “Switch to Business Profile.” But why should you do that?
THE BENEFITS OF HAVING AN INSTAGRAM BUSINESS ACCOUNT
- The first thing a business account shows is that you have joined the platform for some professional reason.
- A business account allows you to add your contact information such as phone, email address, address, etc. This is beneficial since it encourages and facilitates contact between your followers and you.
- Perhaps the most important advantage is that you can access Instagram analytics. A careful analysis of Instagram analytics helps you plan based on your followers’ preferences which can help you grow your engagement significantly.
- Finally, you will get the opportunity to run ads on Instagram. You also can run ads on Facebook if you also have a Facebook page l.
- Another good thing about Instagram ads is that you can determine your desired budget and how much you are going to spend.
2. Optimize Your Profile
A business profile needs a proper username, profile picture, and bio. Username should either be the name of your brand or contain the key phrases of your niche. For instance, if you have an account related to travel, you could incorporate the word ‘travel’ or ‘tour’ in your username. Why? Because it makes your account appear in the search results when people search for those keywords.
In addition, the use of a logo can make your account look highly professional. However, if you do not have a logo and you have no plans to design one, try to choose a picture that illustrates your niche. For instance, choose a picture that shows a dish of green vegetables if the activities of your account revolve around clean and healthy recipes.
Finally, another feature of a professional business profile is a to-the-point bio. Briefly explain your business using relevant words and descriptions. Do not forget to add your social media link to your Instagram bio. Links are the gateway used to bring in leads you have attracted to your website or elsewhere. As you may not have links in your posts and stories, keep in mind to refer your followers to this link in the captions or stories.
3. Be Consistent in Posting
To be present in the feed of your followers, you need to post on a regular basis. Think about creative ideas for your content.
You can also research what your competitors have done and try to outdo them. Also, find inspiration in the content that is relevant to what you do. The result would be a bunch of high-quality and rich content that you post on a daily basis.
To plan the best time to post, check for the time that your followers are online from your analytics section. If posting at a specific time during the day is not always convenient for you, you can use marketing tools that have a scheduling feature.
4. Use Communicative Posts
On the way to look for ideas to post constantly, you can also think of posts that are communicative. In other words, asking a question in the caption or using a poll sticker in a story can be a good content marketing strategy. The dialogue can bring in considerable engagement and attract leads to your business.
5. Tell Your Story
The friendly tone is a necessity on Instagram. Keep the tone light and share your own stories about your company, team members, history, behind-the-scenes videos, etc. It strengthens your relationship with your followers because you involve them in your in-business matters. They see your efforts and they will understand that you are doing your best to provide high-quality products and efficient services.
6. Let Your Followers Find Inspiration
Do not just post pictures or videos of your products or services. Think of adding value for your followers, teach them a practical skill, a life-related lesson, a practical experience, or inspire them with the wisdom of successful figures, etc. Show them that your only goal is not to sell your products or services and that you care about the social and mental health of your followers.
7. Be Authentic
There is a brain and a heart behind every post that you post on your feed or as a story, right? So, do not act like a robot. Express yourself in your content in a quiet friendly tone. Talk about the origins of a product, the idea, and history behind it, etc. Being authentic means that you should make your followers feel that there is a human with a voice behind your posts.
8. Think Creatively
Creativity is a necessary requirement for being a content creator. Posting a bulk of pointless posts not only does not attract more leads for your business but also may discourage people from following you. Do not forget to measure the ROI of your content marketing to check if your plans are working.
Moreover, you can always look at the content marketing strategies of your competitors and see how they are operating to attract leads. This does not mean that you should imitate them, but it may give you new ideas.
9. Use Hashtags
Features like hashtags can attract leads and increase your Instagram engagement accordingly. It does this by showing your post to a wider group of audience. The process starts when a user searches for a particular hashtag and your story appears in their search result.
Instagram allows for 30 hashtags per post and 10 hashtags per story which means you should brainstorm smart subjects to add as potential hashtags.
Choose your hashtags wisely though. Think of the keywords of the subject you are posting about and choose the hashtags that are neither overused nor underused.
Using extremely popular hashtags and unpopular hashtags can severely affect your efforts. You risk your posts or stories being buried by an overload of content with the same hashtag or it being put somewhere where no one looks at it. Therefore, it is better if you choose hashtags that are in the middle of the two poles.
10. Organize Contests Giveaways
People in general like competitions so you organize contests or giveaways. Contests on Instagram are highly popular especially if the prize is something that makes it worthwhile. Organize contests that are easy to take part in, relevant to your brand, and inspiring. Follow closely how the competitors are doing and check their feedback.
Creative suggestions for organizing a contest can be to ask your followers to take part in your contest by sharing a photo a pet, skincare product, a particular author’s book, a dish they have cooked using your recipe, etc.
11. Generate User-Generated Content (UGC)
One way of receiving User-Generated Content (UGC) is through such contests as we have just mentioned. High engagement will come as a result that generates leads to your account. Another way is to run a creative and exciting challenge using your products or services and encouraging your followers to post content and tag you.
12. Use Your Ecommerce Limited Offer to Add Urgency
Discounts are always favourable to everyone. Share some limited offers or promotional codes to encourage your followers to buy a product. This way, you both increase the engagement of your Instagram account and the traffic to your website. Moreover, you can increase sales which is the final goal.
13. Make It Easy to Buy From You
Instagram is a user-friendly app. It has attracted different age groups due to its simplicity. So, Instagram users are used to easy processes and they do not like complications. When leading these users to your website, you should know that if there is a complicated procedure for them to follow, they will simply leave.
So, in order to keep them there and achieve your goals, you should make the shopping process as easy as possible if you have an eCommerce business.
14. Collaborate with Influencers
Collaborations and partnerships are quite common on Instagram. As it is really important to grow your target audience so that they get to know about your products or services, you may consider a collaboration with an influencer.
Depending on your budget, you can think of collaborating with micro-influencers or the ones with a higher number of Instagram followers. To choose the influencer, you can search through the platforms that suggest Instagram influencers related to your business. Just present yourself and the product or the service that you want to promote to the influencer and then leave them free to promote you to their followers. Remember that you may not dictate anything to them.
15. Sell Through Your Posts
Regardless of the kind of business you own, you can always count on Instagram to sell your products. If you do not own an eCommerce store and therefore have no websites to link to, it is still possible to sell through your posts. If you have a real shop out there, you can add its location in the location section of your posts or simply write your address in the caption of your posts.
If you own an eCommerce business and have a website, you can use Instagram Shoppable Posts. It enables you to create a tappable post that showcases your products with their prices. When your followers tap on the picture, they can see the price tags and if they tap on the price tag, they will be directed to a shopping page on Instagram. Accordingly, they can buy your products right from the Instagram app. This function is available only if you have more than 10k followers.
The feature also allows you to add a link to your website in your stories as a See More button to lead your story viewers to your shopping page.
16. Make Use of Instagram Ads
Instagram ads contain story ads using a Swipe Up button, photo ads, video ads, carousel ads, collection ads, and ads in Explore. You can choose your budget, the age of the audience of your ad, their gender, language, and demographics. Then, you can schedule your ad for a time to start from then on. The number of days that Instagram shows your ad to your audience depends on the budget you choose.
17. Use Facebook Partner Integration
In 2012, Facebook bought Instagram and this gave users of both platforms the opportunity to connect their accounts to each other and benefit from the new features. Right now, for eCommerce businesses, there is a way to make use of Facebook partner integration. As Facebook has collaborated with many organizations as a partner, it is now possible and easy to use Facebook Business Tools. Such integrations enable you to set up website pixel and conversions API, app events, offline conversions API. You do not need to change any codes on your website to use Facebook partner integration.
18. Provide Support for Your Customers
Selling a product or service is not the last step. Your final goal should be to keep your customers satisfied even after selling your products or services to them. You are responsible for their overall satisfaction.
Talk about the services in your captions or stories. Let your followers know that you are still there even after their purchase. Let them know if you provide warranties, free exchange, cashback, or a 24/7 online help support centre, etc.
In addition, you can carry on having a personalized approach to the way you sell your products or services. You can do this through DMs on Instagram or via emails. Ensure that you are always there to listen and support them.
Conclusion
Following the tips that have been mentioned in this article, you can not only attract leads to your business through Instagram but build a strong relationship with your clients-to-be. Depending on how you adopt these strategies, it should not take long to improve engagement.
