Deepa Mistry, Digital Strategist at Sookio, writes:
Over 120 million Instagrammers took some form of action after seeing an Instagram ad in March 2017. Whether by visiting a website, calling, emailing or direct messaging the company behind the ad, that's around a third of users positively responding to advertising on the platform.
Along with this, 60% of Instagram users say they learn about products and services through the network, organically and via ads, with 75% saying they visited a site or referred a friend after seeing an Instagram post.
This is promising news for brands looking to reach customers on the network and make more sales. People are happy to engage with branded content, so what can you do to take advantage of this?
Do the groundwork
If you’d like to grow your business using Instagram, then you should optimise your account first. Why not review your Instagram profile, here’s your to do list:
- Revisit the basics – rewrite your bio and update your profile image.
- Set up analytics – if you’ve not already, switch to a Business Account on Instagram which will allow you to access basic stats for your account.
- Evaluate your photos – Are your photos good enough? Accounts which gather followers and loyal fans invest in quality photographs that reflect their brand.
- Schedule or plan your content – Plan the photos you’ll post and their accompanying hashtags and captions on a regular basis – that could be monthly and weekly. This approach means you can evenly spread your messaging and plan around campaigns, trends and new products.
To learn more about sprucing up your Instagram account, read our post on refreshing your Instagram strategy.
Use analytics
Instagram analytics, available to business accounts, are basic but provide an excellent way of knowing what your customers want. The data it provides helps you to refine what you post and post more of what people have responded to in the past.
You can use analytics to track:
- Follower growth and behaviour
- Impressions, reach, profile views, website clicks, email clicks
- Follower demographics (gender, age, location)
- Post-performance
- Stories performance.
The demographics data will help you understand who your followers are. Are these your typical customers, or has the data surprised you? Are you posting the right content that appeals to these people? You can also see when people are active on Instagram, and schedule your posts around those days and times.
Post-performance allows you to see which posts performed the best using a variety of metrics – impression, reach, engagement, likes, comments and saves. Whilst you won’t be able to see any conversion data here you should pick which metric is the most important to you, and judge your post performance on that.
Also, don’t forget to use Google Analytics alongside Instagram. Create goals that track how many conversions you receive from Instagram visitors, and measure these on an ongoing basis. You should also compare these with other social networks so you can decide which networks are the best for your business.
Create giveaways and contests
A healthy following of relevant people (not bots!) is important if you want to start making sales on Instagram. Simply, more people are likely to see your content. Giveaways are a fantastic way to scale your Instagram account with relatively little expenditure, opening it up to new potential customers and encouraging your loyal fans to spread the word.
The best mechanism for running a giveaway on Instagram is to encourage people to tag a friend (or two, or three) in the comments to enter the competition. At the end of the giveaway you pick a winner and the prize goes to them. By using the tagging method new people will find your account, enter the competition and most likely follow you too.
Your customers are choosing who they think would be your best customer, from their own Instagram friends. You’re getting them to do the legwork and research for you!
Read the rest of this post on the Sookio blog.
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