Why You Should Add Instagram to Your Social Media Campaign

Instagram has over 800 million users, who spend upwards of 24 minutes a day using the platform.

So if you’re not currently targeting Instagram in your social media campaign, let me ask you one thing — how many of those 800 million people are in your target market?

Unless you sell orange robes to hermit monks, you can be sure the answer to that is “Lots and lots!”

The chance to reach millions of potential customers should be enough reason to get your business on Instagram. But if that’s not convincing enough, read on for 6 more key reasons you should be using the platform.

1) Get Targeted Traffic from Your Social Media Campaign

Raw traffic to your website doesn’t mean much if it’s not targeted. If you sell lipstick and you get thousands of referrals from a men’s website, your conversion rate will not be great.

With Instagram, you build a base of targeted followers. You do this by posting content that appeals to your target demographic, by building relationships with influencers in your niche, and through the use of relevant hashtags.

Once you’ve built a following, you can start profusely linking to your website, blog posts, and sales pages. You can run promotions specifically for your Instagram followers to reward them for following you, which can boost engagement further.

Best of all, you know that the traffic you refer from Instagram is targeted. They are people interested in your product, who are ready to buy.

2) Set Up Sales Funnels

A sales funnel represents the path people take from not knowing about you to buying from you. Usually, it’s described in phases — awareness, interest, decision, and action.

Instagram is a key part of any social media campaign because you can set up custom sales funnels, targeted to different buying personas of those who use your product.

For example, if you’re a gym, you’ll have some customers who want to look good, some who want better fitness for sports, some who want to be stronger, some who want to be healthy… and so on.

Each one of these groups is a different buying persona. For each one, you can create a different sales funnel.

So imagine you’re targeting the fitness persona. You can run fitness contests, encourage people to share their personal bests, and share relevant motivational and informational content. (awareness, and interest)

When you link back to your site from these Instagram posts, you point to specific sales pages aimed at this persona — may be promoting gym memberships, personal trainer sessions, or nutrition products. (decision)

At the end of each pitch, you have the “Buy Now” button to close the sale. (action)

When that campaign is complete, you set one up for another persona.

3) Instagram is Perfect for Analytics Integration

If you track your Instagram traffic, you can see how they use your site and run experiments to optimize your conversions.

Once you have your sales funnels set up, you’ll be able to see where your process is working and where it is failing.

For example:

• If you aren’t getting many followers, you need to work on increasing your reach (awareness).
• If you have a lot of followers but they are not going to your site, you need better Instagram content and campaigns. (interest)
• If your followers are checking out your site but not buying, you need to improve your pitch pages, offer better deals, or write better calls-to-action (decision, action).

Data is crucial to a successful social media campaign. When you have it, you can experiment — try out new pitches, new content, and new campaigns, and see what works.

4) Take Advantage of Visual Content Marketing

Your website and blog are your key outlets for written content. They help you run purposeful marketing campaigns, optimized for important keywords to pull in targeted traffic.

But Instagram is the place for visual content marketing.

In many ways, Instagram is what people always wanted from Facebook — a place to connect with people and share photos. And they love to do just that.

If you can get unique, interesting, funny, or otherwise engaging visual content out on Instagram, you’ll get more people checking you out. Your followers are literally doing your marketing for you.

Need some visual content ideas for your social media campaign? Here are a few to get started:

• Data is your friend. Create a visual representation of a statistic that matters to your target audience.
• Pictures with quotes of people your target audience admires
• Infographics
• Memes related to your field
• Video content

5) Humanize Your Brand

People are increasingly looking for a relationship with the brands they buy from. They want to know who you are and what you’re about. The faceless corporate image doesn’t cut it anymore.

A good social media campaign isn’t just about referrals and conversions. It’s also about developing your brand awareness.

Instagram gives you a great way to humanize your brand, and change you from any old business into something your potential customers can relate to.

You can do this by showing photos of your staff members and having them answer a few fun questions, showing what your offices look like, or, if you have staff on the road, have them take photos from wherever they are.

Instagram is also a great way to document your brand’s story. One of the reasons Apple is so relatable is its whole “two guys in a garage” roots. That’s humanizing a brand!

Do you have any photos of your early days, that would humanize your business? Share them!

6) Build Social Proof

One of the hardest parts of a social media campaign is establishing yourself as a trusted authority in your niche. Word-of-mouth marketing does this work for you.

If someone tells you about a great plumber they used, you do not even look at the plumber’s marketing materials before you call them. Why? Because you trust your friend.

Instagram is a platform through which you can engineer word-of-mouth marketing.

One way to do this is to take testimonials from satisfied customers and ask the customer to send an original photo for you to post on your account, along with their testimonials.

You can also run competitions and offer rewards to people who share your content — “tag to win” campaigns are an awesome way to encourage sharing.

Next Steps

Do you need any help finding customers on Instagram, or with any other aspect of your online marketing campaign?

We can help!

Get in touch today, and one of our gorillas will get back to you within one business day. Let’s talk about how you can boost your sales!