Instagram has over 1 billion monthly active users who post 1,000 photos per second. Such high traffic makes the social network an excellent platform for promoting goods and services. Today the application is used by more than 25 million companies. A minimum of 200 million users visits at least one business profile every day.
What should be done before launch?
Before starting a promotion on Instagram, you need to answer a few questions for yourself:
- Who are the clients?
- How do they use the social network?
- How and why to keep in touch with them on Instagram?
- What is the expected result?
Each subsequent action should be based on the answers to these questions.
Instagram promotion strategy
The promotion algorithm in this application consists of 7 steps. Each of them is worth studying separately.
Target audience analysis
It is necessary to evaluate the following:
- age and gender of users;
- geolocation;
- how many followers use smartphones, tablets, and how many of them utilize stationary PCs;
- marital status;
- area of interest;
- occupation.
You can conduct such monitoring based on information from your account and competitors.
The next nuance is objections. These are common obstacles that prevent people from making a purchase. General objections include the high cost of goods or services and distrust. There may be individual interference – the client believes that in reality, the product will look worse than in the photograph.
Next, you should develop a user behavior scheme – a scenario for buying a product or service. For example, a decision when buying clothes can be made like this:
- a person sees targeted ads;
- a potential customer studies the review on Instagram;
- a person comes to the store to try things on;
- a person purchases clothes
In other cases, at the 3rd stage, there may be a hyperlink to go to the online store.
Setting promotion goals
An application can be used to solve many business problems. The choice is influenced by global goals, terms of work, and the expected result. Several goals can be achieved.
How and how much the sales will increase depends on the timeframe, user behavior, and investment in the advertising campaign. If the decision-making path is short, then even the simplest sales funnel will bring results.
Warming up makes the customer's “journey” to purchase longer. At the same time, it contributes to the implementation of the maximum number of sales with a reduced cost per lead.
Another important task is to increase LTV. An in-app business account allows the subscriber to constantly interact with the brand or artist. In order for the client to follow the publications, you should use engaging posts, and selling posts to stimulate interest in a product or service.
Various activities increase engagement. Most customers like to participate in giveaways.
An Instagram account can be used not only for sales but also for improving your reputation. In this case, the content of the post makes the user want to become the owner of the product. Trade is carried out through points of sale, retail chains.
The best way to increase your sales is to expand your customer base.
Analysis of competitors
At this stage, you first need to find out with whom you will have to fight for the consumer, and then get to know the following:
- what content and how often competitors publish;
- what "chips" they attract customers with;
- what are their trade offers;
- where the traffic is leading.
As a rule, 5-10 strongest competitors are selected. The conclusion should be drawn in the form of a table of their strengths and weaknesses.
It is important to understand what kind of emphasis is placed in posts: on high-demand goods or on marginal ones. Considering the ad format, you should pay attention to the following nuances:
- Does your ad use a single image or gallery?
- Images or videos?
- What exactly is in the frame?
- If there are people in the frame, who are they, what is their age, what kind of clothes are they wearing, their emotional message are they conveying?
- Is there any text with selling information in the picture? If so, what is this information?
Having found "traps" for the buyer, you can either use similar ones or highlight the shortcomings and come up with something more interesting.
Traffic can lead to both the landing page and direct.
It is important to collect statistics on competitors: the reach and engagement of users, how often posts are posted, how many followers are there, etc.
It's worth exploring ways to communicate:
- if there any thanks for the good comments;
- how they react to negativity;
- how to give answers to questions.
Effective methods should be immediately adopted.
Building a sales funnel
The sales funnel is the customer's journey from the first encounter with the product to its purchase. It's better to start by defining traffic:
- cold – attraction and involvement;
- warm – warming up;
- hot – sale.
And now let's talk about everything in order.
The cold list includes users who know nothing about the brand and are not ready to buy. It is advisable to immediately involve such people in contests, sweepstakes, and offer a subscription.
Warm traffic is users who have just learned about the brand and are interested. When working with such an audience, you should heed objections, motivate them to buy.
Hot traffic is active users. They are kept by means of special conditions of purchase, shares.
Choosing a content strategy
To engage the user, you need to motivate a person to like, subscribe or leave a comment.
Warming up content should answer questions, improve brand reputation, and eliminate objections.
Selling posts should become a kind of call to buy something or place an order.
Content creation
Promotional images of products, unusual photo sessions, screenshots, live photos, memes – these are photo content.
Many people shoot and immediately edit short videos using their smartphones. For long videos, it's important to use the IGTV format.
Collaborating with bloggers is a great opportunity to attract the attention of their subscribers. You need to choose blogs with similar topics to achieve better results.
Engaging events, whether online or offline, can help you attract new followers and increase sales. Rebuses and puzzles designed for a mass audience work great too.
Another mechanism that works is situational marketing. Newsfeeds can be scheduled or spontaneous. The first option includes posts dedicated to important thematic events and holidays. Spontaneous posts are an instant response to HYIP events. Such content often goes viral.
Sales funnel efficiency analysis and correction
So that all efforts are not in vain, it is important to constantly monitor the effectiveness of the promotion. The indicators should be monitored every day. The strategy is adjusted if necessary.
Let's summarize
Instagram promotion starts with analyzing the target audience. This will allow you to understand whether this application is suitable for solving the tasks at hand. If the choice is made in favor of Instagram, you need to determine more specific promotion goals and plan a budget. The next step is to analyze the work of competitors. When all the necessary information has been collected, you can start actions. First, you should develop a sales funnel, then a content strategy. It is important to devote time to analytics in order to regularly track the effectiveness of promoting a business account. Another important nuance of working on the Instagram social network is the efficiency and quality in processing requests from users.
