Luckily, Instagram understood how powerful its reach was and how important its platform was for converting visitors and/or followers into sales opportunities. That's why in recent years, its updates to business profiles have focused on making interaction results more measurable, providing more detailed statistics, and making the content that companies publish more monetizable. Instagram Shopping is an example of how this social network wants companies to use its platform to boost their online purchases.
In this sense, Instagram is an excellent tool for brands that want to carry out inbound marketing strategies . Here are some key tips for using Instagram at each stage of inbound marketing and making the most of its potential:
Attract visitors and followers
Hashtags
Hashtags are labels that allow us to classify our content in a particular trend or theme. When we use hashtags in our posts, we are incorporating our content into a search system (within the same platform) that users use to find profiles and/or content that connect with their interests.
While these tags are present on many social networks, Instagram in particular lets you follow hashtags in the same way you can follow profiles. In this sense, they are powerful tools to attract visitors and/or followers to your content who are looking for options in the market to learn about.
To successfully accomplish this challenge, it's recommended that you create a list of hashtags in the same way you create your keywords : with your target audience in mind. Think about both fixed tags and tags that can vary depending on the content, i.e. hashtags that are popular with your target audience and others that are closely related to both the image being tagged and the general theme of your brand. It's recommended to use fewer than six hashtags per post to avoid overwhelming the text or overusing them.
Valuable content
To convert those people who visit our profile into followers, we must give them reasons to stay. Inbound marketing largely encourages the promotion of valuable content over any sales content. The good news is that people who use Instagram are more accustomed to seeing some posts such as product and service catalogues, so both strategies can coexist. However, that does not limit us from offering useful and interesting content for those communities that want to educate themselves quickly and interactively through social networks .
In this way, attracting new followers, as happens with blogs, will depend a lot on the quality of the content we offer, which in this case, has a greater visual weight. The format also plays an important role, especially if Instagram also allows us to share videos and images in the same post. Therefore, it is advisable to align the work of the community manager with that of the graphic designer and, in turn, with that of the content strategist.
If you post an attractive image or video with clear, easy-to-read text, you are likely to receive several likes and positive comments from people who are enjoying both formats.
Convert them into leads
Link in bio
Instagram has the peculiarity that its links are not enabled in posts or comments. This means that if we place the link to our website in one of our posts, people will not be able to click on it, since it would be displayed as just another text.
Instagram allows you to place a single link in your bio, and in that case, it's recommended that you tell users to click on it. That space can be perfectly used to redirect that group of people to obtain a content offer or to complete a purchase. Use this traffic to create a database of leads and potential buyers.
Links in stories
Another space that Instagram gives us to place our links is Instagram stories . Although to have this option available, our account must have at least 10,000 followers, it is also an excellent way to convert our followers into sales opportunities.
One advantage that Instagram Stories gives us is that we can make our content more attractive, dynamic and interactive. That is, quickly capture a person's attention, providing them with information capsules of interest and then, in the last story, place the link to access the landing page so that person can obtain more information, make an online purchase or share their data.
Closing sales
Private messages
There will be people who, in order to demonstrate their interest in purchasing, will go poland number for whatsapp directly to Instagram's private messaging to ask about prices, payment methods and availability of products and/or services. In this sense, in addition to emails, Instagram is also an excellent tool within the closing stage of the inbound marketing methodology to serve consumers in a personalized way.
Through direct messages, you can share images and links that can connect the consumer to conversion pages. You can even share previous posts on your profile with people to recycle that content.
Delight and satisfy
Competitions
Among the strategies to reward and boost the loyalty of our followers, contests on Instagram have undoubtedly been a trend in recent years. While they are mechanisms to attract more audiences and create alliances with other accounts, they work perfectly to give your community of followers some of your products in order to reward their constant attention and delight them.
These contests are usually done by placing a post where the prize is displayed and the contest rules in the description. There is a classic contest dynamic where in order for people to participate they must use a hashtag that the brand designates, mention 2 or 3 friends and make a comment about why that person wants to win. This is just one example of a contest since there are multiple ways to create them. From this, companies make use of pages that randomly select accounts to randomly choose the winner or winners of the contest.