These days a lot of marketers are asking themselves how to get more followers on Instagram, but I’ve been asking myself, “how can I use Instagram to impact the bottom line?”
The more targeted followers you have, the greater your chance for generating new sales from Instagram; However, you don’t always need a large Instagram community to drive big bottom line results.
Today let’s chat about two methods that allow marketers to make a big impact using Instagram even if you don’t have millions of followers.
Promote a Helpful Blog Post via Retargeting Ads
Instagram is a great place to generate targeted traffic to your blog. You probably already knew that though. What you might not know is that there are THREE different ways to get consumers from Instagram to your blog.
The first two are pretty straight forward. First you can simply create a post and publish it to your Instagram profile. That’s free to do and many of your followers will see it. The second option is to turn your post into an ad. By boosting your post with ad money you can show the post to people who may be interested that aren’t already following your account.
Instagram ads are created using the same platform as Facebook ads and have all of the same targeting options enabled. This means you can target by age, gender, location, interests and more.
In addition to showing your blog post promotion to the people who follow you and to people who fit your target profile you can reach people a third way: using Instagram retargeting!
Retargeting allows you to show a low cost ad to someone who has recently visited your site. They can provide a reminder to people who haven’t converted to come back and complete a purchase/fill out a web form, but they can also be used to promote blog posts to people regardless of whether they converted already or not.
If you’re not familiar with how to setup a retargeting ad it’s really simple. You basically just need to install a pixel on your site and then choose Website Visitors as your audience when setting up ther ads. You can find step-by-step instructions on Social Media Examiner.
Using retargeting to drive highly qualified traffic to your blog can help your bottom line in a variety of ways.
A great blog post can convince a lead to convert into a customer. It can provide a non-threatening environment for putting additional sales opportunities in front of your existing customers, and of course it can help you build brand loyalty and affinity which increases the longevity of your customer lifecycle!
Offer a Free Trial to A Custom Audience of Your Existing Leads
Another great way to drive bottom line results with Instagram is by offering a free trial of your product or service via an Instagram ad to potential buyers.
You can, of course, run these Instagram ads towards shoppers based on their demographics and interests. However, you can also show a special offer just to people who have already been in touch with you in some way. This way you don’t have to worry about introducing yourself in the ad, you can get right into your promotional offer.
Perhaps you’ve collected email addresses on your website from people who: indicated they want more product information, signed up for your newsletter, downloaded a piece of content or entered a contest.
You could take this list of email addresses, remove all current customer email addresses from the list, and then upload what remains of the list to Instagram’s ad platform as a Custom Audience.
Instagram will then match up these email addresses with Instagram user profiles. Once the matching process is completely (this can take a couple of hours depending on how big your list is), you are then able to create an ad campaign that specifically targets Instagram users with the email addresses you provided whether they are following you or not.
This type of ad campaign can be highly effective because you’re gently nudging someone who has already expressed interest in your company! Additionally because you are uploading your own list of contacts instead of asking Instagram to find consumers for you, your cost-per-click (CPC) is likely to be much lower than regular ad campaigns. That’s a win-win in my book!
Just a side note that since you have already had some form of contact with these consumers and they didn’t purchase (because you scrubbed existing customers from the list), you should consider a strong incentive to move people to checkout. A free trial, free shipping or promotional discounts make a lot of sense here.
The reason why it’s so important to remove existing customers from this list before you upload it to the Instagram ad platform is that you don’t want current customers to see promotional offers they may not have taken advantage of. Someone who paid full price but then sees an offer for a percentage off may feel badly about their purchase and that’s something you want to avoid.
If you’re not sure how to create a Custom Audience, check out this step-by-step guide.
Getting Started:
Now that you’re armed with tried-and-true methods for using Instagram to generate better bottom line results it’s time to get started!
If you have any questions, leave me a comment below and I will try my best to respond!
By the way, if you loved these actionable tips and you want even more ideas for growing your Instagram account check out this free guide on How to Get Your First 10,000 Instagram Followers!