Instagram for Small Businesses (Part 1)
A complete guide to using Instagram to find customers and increase sales.
Instagram can be used as a customer acquisition tool, leading to increased sales and revenue for your business. It can be used to help generate both product sales and business leads.
Marketing industry insiders often claim that Instagram is best used as a ‘visual storytelling platform’ — a way for businesses to interact and strengthen relationships with their current customer base. While this is important (particularly once your company reaches a certain size), it shouldn’t be the primary purpose of your Instagram use. Large corporates have the necessary resources to foster online communities around their products, however many small businesses are (and should be) more concerned with finding new customers and increasing their bottom-line.
In this multi-part blog post, I’m going to show you the most effective ways to use Instagram to build a large targeted audience, with the goal of finding new customers and increasing sales.
Instagram is an efficient and low-cost marketing tool that should form part of any comprehensive marketing strategy. Nothing in this guide is ground breaking — please treat it as collection of ideas and lessons that I have learnt over the past few years. I decided to create the guide as I wasn’t able to find a good summary elsewhere. If you find this information useful, please let me know — I’d be happy to expand certain sections and make the guide more comprehensive if there is interest. Feel free to contribute ideas / knowledge.
To illustrate each step of the process, I will use the example of Rugged Material (@ruggedmaterial on Instagram) — a backpack and travel goods manufacturer based in Southern Utah, USA. They are a small business that makes high quality products that they guarantee for life. I have no financial interest in this company — I simply own one of their bags and think they make excellent products. Rugged Material have given consent to be featured in this article.
Setting up your account
I’ll try to keep this section brief and only highlight a few important points.
1. Complete ‘bio’ section correctly
The bio is the only place on Instagram that you can put a clickable link. Therefore it is extremely important that you include a link to your website here. If you don’t have a website — include the relevant information that is necessary for a potential customer to contact you (i.e., email address or phone number). Keep your bio concise, but ensure that it includes sufficient information about your business.
I would suggest that @RuggedMaterial let potential customers know in their bio that they ship worldwide, and use their brand logo (or a scene that showcases their products) as their profile pic.
2. Connect your Facebook account
Instagram allows you to follow all of your Facebook friends / email contacts in a single click. This is a great shortcut to allow you to batch follow a large group of relevant people when you first set up your account.
3. Analytics
I have assumed for this section that you are all using Google Analytics to measure and analyse your website traffic. If you are not — you should. If you do use google analytics you may be aware that Instagram traffic does not show up in referrals in Analytics — instead it shows up as direct traffic (there is a very good explanation of why this is the case here). Not being able to directly measure traffic leads to confusion around the effectiveness of Instagram in driving traffic… and sales.
There are a number of solutions, however I am yet to find a method that adequately solves the problem. Methods I have come across include combining UTM links with bit.ly, creating company-specific vanity URLs, combining 301 page redirects with UTM links, creating Instagram specific landing pages, providing Instagram specific discount codes, segmenting direct traffic by mobile / tablet only and even adding “/?” after the URL to analyse unique page views. If anyone is interested — I can expand this section and go into each option in detail (and please — if you have found a better solution, let me know!)
In Part 2 we will start to delve into the good stuff: How to Cultivate a Following.
Elevator Instagram Marketing
