How to use Instagram to generate new clients for your Business? At Performance Snatch, we believe that it is important to have a strong Organic Basis before to launch ads. “Strong” does not necessarily mean big in numbers of followers. It means having a clear storyline, chart graphic, message, and few key followers.
What platform comes first in your mind when you think about lead generation? Instagram? Not sure.. but it definitely needs to be considered, here is why!
A simple reason why you should include Instagram in your strategy is the lead qualification process. A user first starts to see the content then reads the description and finally clicks on the link in the bio (If you didn’t forget to put this link), to finally arrive on your website.
You have to offer value to your audience and propose to offer even more value for free. Some simple examples are to get people to sign up for webinars or registrations to a weekly newsletter, download an EBook, get on your email list for special sales, and others.
Spoiler Alert: Swipe Up feature on Stories. A simple tip here – Do not abuse it! Make it relevant and it will drive constant traffic on your landing page.
1. Time to optimize your Instagram profile
An Instagram Profile should be short and concise. People looking at their Instagram feed daily want and need to act quickly, help them to do so.
Do you even realize which images you are putting a heart on? For the ones you do, do you know why? What is catching your attention? You are eventually stopping on some of them and reading the caption. Does this caption awake your curiosity? Now you are on the page.
Let’s dive into what you can do right now to increase traffic and engagement on your Instagram Page!
a. Name and Username
The name and the username are the only searchable parameters on Instagram. Let’s assume you are selling cars, and you have “Best automotive Expert in Alaska” in your bio. People won’t find you for this if any of those words are used in your name or username.
b. Instagram Bio
The bio is your branding! Your personality, your ton of voice, your style on Instagram. In 150 characters people will either like you or they won’t
Consider the “…more.” breaking line to put above what matters the most to describe you or your activity.
The bullet points are the most efficient way to communicate a clear and direct message. Using bullets or emojis and always starting with a first point which clearly describes what you do is the best way to put yourself out there.
c. Link in Bio
Link in Bio is the one and only URL that you can insert in your profile. Choose it wisely to make each click count!
There are different strategies depending on your business needs. If you offer a service or a product, only one click could be powerful enough to bring you clients! Be sure to work on your landing page and make it highly converting!
In case you are offering different services or offers, the use of a service link such as Linktr.ee can definitely be appropriate. It allows you to create a landing page to list multiple links. The visitor can simply choose what is most relevant to him/her and convert. Consider that also adds one step on the acquisition journey which has its pros and cons.
d. Instagram Action Buttons
For business or creator account, you have an action button feature! An action button will be best suited for a straightforward call to action such as “buy now”, “shop now”, etc.
Overall, it is not efficient for brand awareness, traffic, or lead generation.
2. Instagram Content That Converts
Do People Look First at the Picture or the Caption?
It could be a surprise to you, but people look at both! REALLY?! Of course, it is always better to have an amazing picture and a thoughtful caption, but it is not always easy to do so and especially it is very time consuming. You need efficiency! Surprisingly people get used to patterns pretty quickly, which means that following a news page they will automatically tend to read the caption even with a less eye-catchy picture. Following a photograph, you are surely interested in what he/she has to show.
The truly interesting point here is that you can educate your audience the way you want. If you started an account without call-to-action and no interesting caption and you want to change that, start by writing a few words captions under each post and then make it a bit longer, to step by step guide the user to read them. Give your audience and yourself one to two months to get used to a new routine.
a. Instagram Captions and Call-to-action
Now that you have reviewed your profile, time to focus on the content that will grow your audience and generate sales!
A good caption is essential. It has to mean something to your audience, to make them curious and thirsty for more. It has to be a good title, a question, an impossible statement. So far there is no option for a preview, so just make every word count.
Once they clicked to see “more”, the call-to-action they see has to be their Excalibur! The “what they were looking for”, without really looking for it. It could be a “click on the link in the bio”. Visitors will directly understand what to do seeing this message. Do not hesitate to surround it with emojis, or make it stand out in your own personal way.
A very simple trick is to list your username again. It becomes more clickable, rather than having to scroll all the way back up in the caption to go back, it’s basically tagging yourself.
So there is no accessible analytics data regarding the number of people looking at your entire caption, but we do know that it is recognized as a positive action which has for results to help for ranking better from the Instagram algorithm.
b. Give your content a personality
Why would people follow your page? What would make your post more engaging than the posts from one of your competitor’s pages? A post of Nicki Minaj wearing your product? Ye, it will definitely help, but do not all have Nicki Minaj phone number, How do we get their attention? That’s the hardest part. People are scrolling through a busy Instagram feed and it’s constantly moving. You need your content to stop their scroll.
When it comes to content, we just want to get people’s attention. Maybe that means bold colors, maybe it’s minimalist design. If you have a really busy photo with a lot of colors and distractions, it’s easier to scroll past that. If you have a very muted, white and gray background with a beautiful pop of yellow color, it’s going to stand out on the feed and visually capture attention.
In a general way, we do not recommend to use text on images, if you see it relevant in some punctual moment, just do it! Such as “Sales -50%”, always keep it short and rare! Exception for quotes pictures.
C. Frequency of Instagram Lead Gen Posts
You would like all your post to bring you clients? Yes, we know, but it is not possible. Instagram is a social platform firstly! People surf there to laugh, chill, procrastinate, learn, be surprised, get inspiration, etc.. You can’t only tell them to buy your products, you have to provide much more value than that in order to sell.
Our personal data shows that Lead gen posts work out the best when there is an average of 75% posts dedicated to pure content meaning audience engagement and 25% posts with a call-to-action. Try this out and let us know!
d. Instagram Video and stories
We advise to not focus on Videos and Stories at the beginning of your Instagram Strategy, there is a lot to do with the content and many possibilities as well. While a video once in a while can be very interesting in terms of engagement, stories can be let to influencers who will promote your product! Of course, on a later stage, if you see it relevant for your business to share stories on a daily basis, just roll-on!
Consider IGTV videos that are getting a 1-minute preview in the feed. The format is very attractive and gets a high engagement rate, but once the viewer goes on IGTV, you can lose him easily among a flow of videos each more attractive than the previous one. It is a great tool for brand awareness, but definitely not to use for lead generation.
3. Instagram Insights
Insights feature is available for business and creator profiles.
Identify patterns— We look at our metrics on a week time frame, a month, a three-months and 6 months period. It will give you a good overview of your page and see what is working and what is not. These posts with cats got a ton of engagement! Fine, so definitely to use them time to time, but don’t overdo it, I mean, do not lose the focus, we are selling Mugs here! Once in a while, check on a yearly basis, to see the evolution of your page and if the content changes were successful or not.
Differentiate properly what is bringing you engagement and what is bringing you sales. You have to understand each of them and make sure that they always work well simultaneously. Both are necessary for your page to grow in visibility and bring you more clients.
Want to talk with your Instagram marketing specialist and grow your business? Click here.
