Feel the Love on Instagram

Use these 3 steps to woo and keep followers, boosting your invention’s returns

Many influencers in a variety of niches are willing to talk about your company and invention to their Instagram followers.

BY ELIZABETH BREEDLOVE

February is the month of love, but is your Instagram account an exception? If you haven’t been feeling the love on Instagram lately, this article is for you.

Those struggling to attract a quality Instagram audience should consider revamping your strategy a bit starting this month so you can grow your account—and ultimately, your business—using this three-step process.

1. Attract them.

Before you can begin to nurture new Instagram followers and convert them into customers, you must first attract them to your account where they can learn more about your business and product. There are quite a few strategies for this.

Perhaps the simplest tactic is strategic hashtag use. Consider your brand’s niche or industry and which search terms a user would employ to find a company like yours.

If you’ve invented a tech product, you could use hashtags such as #tech, #technology, or #techy. If you’ve invented a product for parents of babies or young children, you can use a hashtag such as #parenthood or #parentinghacks. If you’ve created a new clothing brand, you could use hashtags such as #clothing or #fashion.

Take time to think about and research valuable hashtags, then start adding them to relevant posts whenever you post on Instagram.

Another simple tactic is to promote your Instagram account using your other marketing channels—such as email marketing, your website and other social media channels.

Look for opportunities to drive traffic to your Instagram profile. Keep in mind that the audience you’ll be reaching with this method is already generally aware of your brand; these people won’t be completely new followers. However, this is still valuable. Having an audience on multiple platforms provides more opportunities to nurture your followers and turn them into customers.

If you’re looking to spend some of your marketing dollars on attracting new followers, you can utilize several different paid opportunities that include influencer marketing or paid advertising.

Influencer marketing has grown into a massive industry. Many influencers in a variety of niches are willing to talk about your company and invention to their Instagram followers.

To begin working with influencers, think about what sort of following your ideal influencer would have. More isn’t always better; influencers with millions of followers are much more expensive and may have lower engagement rates.

Regardless, this is when you’ll need to consider your budget. Then, think about what sort of niche where your ideal influencer fits. What do they post about? How does their audience respond? Do they get a lot of engagement? Do they interact with their followers often?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you should have a good idea of what type of influencers will be a good fit for your brand. At this point, you can start to identify specific influencers with which to connect. You can use Instagram to search for these influencers, or you can use a third-party tool to find them.

Once you identify them, you’ll want to start working out a compensation deal. These deals vary widely. Consider factors such as whether you’d like to compensate them with product or cash, how often you’d like them to post about your company or product, and any other details about what the collaboration will look like.

If more traditional paid advertising sounds interesting to you, Instagram offers multiple advertising options. Remember, the platform is owned by Facebook, so you’ll use Facebook’s Ads Manager to set up and manage your ads.

2. Interact with them.

Now that you’ve grown your following, you need to interact with them and nurture them into customers. If you’re already following Instagram marketing best practices, this shouldn’t be too difficult. As a refresher, some things to make sure you’re doing:

• Post to Instagram regularly, at least a few times a week. Create a schedule if it will help you stick to it!
• Post stories regularly as well. Remember, these can be a bit more informal than your normal feed posts. Don’t feel pressured to make these posts perfect. Casual, behind-the-scenes looks at your company are great!
• Use calls to action in your posts and your stories. Invite your followers to leave comments, like your posts, tag people in your posts, share your posts with someone, visit your website, purchase your product or something else entirely.
• Above all, stay true to your brand. Keeping things consistent and on-brand will help users quickly identify your posts as being by you, which is important when users are quickly scrolling through the platform.

3. Convert them.

Now that you have a loyal audience who loves your brand, you can focus on converting them to customers.

What takes someone from Instagram follower to customer? The simplest answer is an attractive offer. Whether you’re offering a free download in hopes of continuing to nurture your followers or you’re offering a special discount code in hopes of convincing followers to purchase your product, it’s important that what you offer is unique and valuable.

Consider creating an Instagram-specific landing page (or more than one!) that you send all traffic to from Instagram. This enables you to provide a unique offer specifically to your Instagram followers, and it will also help you track traffic to the page so you can measure how well your Instagram offers are converting and adjust accordingly.

After following these three steps, you should be well on your way to having more Instagram followers and more customers. Here’s hoping this is the beginning of explosive growth for you on social media in 2020.