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Instagram Marketing
Instagram Marketing
Username
Username or handle is one of the most important factors to have a successful
Instagram page because username will effect on SEO (search engine optimization)
and people can find you post through your username in Google, that’s why it is
important to select a username that is connected to your topic and goal.
Because there are tons of users active on Instagram, selecting a suitable username
became a tough task. If for example you want to create a page for yourself and
your name is John Smith, and you want to select johnsmith as username, it is more
likely not available and you have to use different elements and different ways to
select your username.
You can use some of the tips written below to find the best username for your
page.
use “.” or “_”. ex: john.smith or john_smith
use initials. ex: JLO or JKRowling
use your niche. ex: john.designer
use your website domain. ex: johnsmith.com
use country or location. ex: nike.uk or nike.us
The best way to check the availability of your username is Instagram itself. Go to
your page and select edit. Change the username and if it is not available, Instagram
will give you error to change your username again.
One important tip you should remember is that your username must be as simple
as possible. If people look at your username for 3-5sec and can’t read it, you are
doing it the wrong way. As an example of a bad username is Jim Parsons page. I
am one of his great fans but sadly every time I am looking for his page I can’t find it
because I don’t remember what did he wrote as his username, which is
“therealjimparsons”. Because there is no space in his username it is very hard to
read and remember it.
Name
Selecting a name is much simpler and easier than selecting a username, there is no
limit and you choose what ever you like. Some people select their profession or
niche, some select their name or brand name. You are also able to use capital letter
in your name. As an example in my page, my username is “pouya_eti” and my name
is “Pouya Eti”.
Name doesn’t have any effect on SEO and it is just visible in your page. If you
request Instagram to give you approved page mark, it will appear next to your
name.
Profile Image
Profile image must be simple and easily understandable for people. If your page is
person focused you can upload an image of your portrait close to your face, and if
your page is company focused I strongly suggest to select brand logo or and icon
familiar to people.
You can take a look at some of the successful pages on Instagram listed below
and how they selected their profile image.
Person focused:
Garyvee
TheRock
Oprah
JLO
Elon Musk
Company focused:
Nike
McDonalds
Udemy
Mercedes Benz
Tesla
Biography
Biography is what people will see under your image and name, you have the ability
to write text and use emoji. Same as other places in Instagram links doesn’t work in
this area. The most important tip which you should consider here is to use the bio
to sell your Instagram account not your products (means use it to convince people
to follow you not redirect them to other sites), not at least you get to a huge
amount of followers.
Write one or two lines and speak about the rewards of following your profile. Write
one or two lines and explain what is your page about, what people will see or find
out in your profile. The about section and reward can be the same. You can write
one to two lines which represent both purposes.
The final part is to use CTA (call to action) such as, join our newsletter, buy my
product, watch the final episode of, follow me and so on. The CTA part is a bit tricky
because half of it is inside bio and the other half is a link you can add in your profile
edit section. You should use a CTA that doesn’t seem to heavy and big for
customers, so they know the value you are giving them through CTA is much more
than what you want from them.
Below you can see several good examples of bio from marketing perspective.
2. know your Followers
Before doing anything as Instagram marketing you mast know who your target is,
what they like, what they want, where they are and so on. To solve this problem you
must prepare a buyer persona.
Buyer Persona
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on
market research and real data about your existing customers. When creating
your buyer persona(s), consider including customer demographics, behavior
patterns, motivations, and goals. The more detailed you are, the better.
Buyer personas provide tremendous structure and insight for your
company. A detailed buyer persona will help you determine where to focus your
time, guide product development, and allow for alignment across the organization.
As a result, you will be able to attract the most valuable visitors, leads, and
customers to your business.
Example:
Name: Jerry
Age: 27
Location: USA
Goal: Launch and grow his business with online marketing.
What is his/her problem? He doesn’t know where to start, afraid of failure.
He is looking for practical step by step proven way.
Places he/she can look for a solution: Google, YouTube, Udemy, …
Now try to write your own buyer persona, think about your followers and how they
might be. As much as you go into details, your marketing will be more successful.
Bonus:
If you know about the 4 type of business energy which are practical, action, social
and emotional, find that out about your followers too. It is important to know what
is the lead energy in them. For example if it is practical, your posts must be mostly
facts, numbers, charts and so on, or if they are emotional you should focus on the
design more.
3. Content Quality
I can say for sure that the most important factor to attract people and make them
your follower is your content quality. For some people their profession is to create
high quality images or videos like photographers or video editors, but for most of
the people it is very challenging to create high quality content. Even if you know
how to use some design softwares like photoshop yet you may not be able to
create professional content from design perspective.
During this section we are going to learn several tools which help you to create and
design your content in a professional way. Also I will give you some amazing tips
that will increase your content quality.
Tools that we are going to learn are:
Canva
Unsplash
Photoshop
Dredown
Camtasia
Repost
Canva
Canva is is good platform for people who don’t know how to use designing
softwares. There are tons of ready templates that you can use and edit it inside the
site or application. They have many different categories and simply you can select
the category you want, then search for the design you like the most, and finally edit
and download it. As I mentioned above you can access it through desktop or your
smart phone, and in this case because we are focusing on Instagram here, using
their mobile application is much more comfortable.
Unsplash
Unsplash is an amazing platform for anyone who is looking for very high quality
pictures for free!, yeah that’s right for free. You can simply go to their website and
search for the topic you want, select your image, download it, use it via Photoshop,
Canva or any other software you like. Not only the images on Unsplash are free but
also their quality is amazing and it will bring your Instagram post quality to a whole
new level.
Photoshop
To be able to use Photoshop to create high quality posts for your Instagram page
you must have some basic knowledge about Photoshop an it’s tools. During this
lecture I’m going to show you how you can create a theme for your profile, how you
can use high quality images for your posts and so on.
Dredown
Dredown is a great site which let you to download images and videos from almost
any platform out there. There are other services but the thing that I like about
Dredown is that it gives you the ability to use it on many different platforms. With
using it you can increase the amount of good posts for your page by downloading it
from other pages or even other platform.
The way it works is very simple. If you see an image or a photo on Instagram simply
click on the three dots beside the post and it will let you to copy the post URL. Then
paste the post link in Dredown and it will download it for you. You can edit the post
with other softwares, improve it and upload it on your page.
Also there are some other applications for smart phones which let you do the same
on phone, but I prefer desktop because then you will have the ability to edit the post
and make it better, specially for videos.
Camtasia Studio
Camtasia is a fantastic software for video editing specially for people who are not
very technical with softwares. It is very easy to use and you can learn the whole
software and how to work with it in less than an hour. The importance of Camtasia
for Instagram post is that you can easily add elements to your video, change the
size, cut and edit it. With Camtasia you can prepare a good video content for your
Instagram profile.
Also Camtasia has the ability to record the screen, your camera and your voice all
at the same time, so you can also use it for teaching or explaining things to your
followers.
Repost
Repost is a very useful application for smart phone. You can use it when you see a
great post on Instagram and you want to share it with your own followers. You copy
the post link and just open the Repost application. It will paste the post
automatically and from there you can easily share it with your followers.
The good thing about repost is that in Instagram marketing giving credit to other
pages is a good thing and this way their page username will be written at a corner
of the image you share.
4. Instagram Marketing Strategies
During this section we are going to focus on different strategies to bring your page
to people’s attention and make them follow you. Some of these strategies has a
certain time to use on your page depending on the number of followers you have.
we will go deep into each of these strategies in their own lecture.
Lectures in this section are:
Hashtag strategy
Followers attention
Give credit
Shoutout
Competitions
We are going to talk about each of these topic in an order according to the number
of followers, meaning if you just opened your Instagram page, you can start with
the first strategy and go on.
Hashtag
What is a hashtag?
A hashtag (#) is a type of metadata tag used on social networks, allowing users to
apply dynamic, user-generated tagging that makes it possible for others to easily
find messages with a specific theme or content. This means that if you upload an
image and under it write #holiday , people who search for post with holiday hash
tag will see your post, and maybe like/comment/follow your page.
to start a new page on Instagram with no followers, hashtags are the main strategy
that help you improve your page. Also if you like when you start a new page you can
ask the people around you like your friends, family, relatives and so on. It is always
a good start to invite people who know you personally, they will be patient and very
supportive which will end up encouraging you to go forward.
But not everyone like to invite their friends and in that case you have to go for the
first strategy which is using hashtags. You can always use hashtags but for
beginning, at least for the first couple of thousands of followers it is important to
you use it with maximum strength. The limit of using hashtags under any post
is 30, but there is a trick which let you use 60 hashtags under a single post and this
will double your traffic for the beginning. I will tell you about it at the end of this
lecture.
Now I want to introduce two useful tool about hashtags which let you to select the
best hashtags for your posts.
Followers attention
The next method of instagram marketing is to grab your potential follower’s
attention. In this method you can create more loyal followers for your page
because of the interaction that exist between you and people.
Before we have talked about finding where your potential customers hang out, and
make a list of pages that they follow. Now is the time we use that list. You should
go to those pages and take a look at their recent posts (during the last 3-4 hours)
and see who have liked those post. The people who liked those posts are your
potential followers because they are interested in the same thing that you are
providing.
click on each and check if they have the potential to follow you when you grab their
attention.
Important!
Do not do this very fast and quickly, if someone come online and see you liked 4 of
their post in less than a minute with 2 comment, they will know that you are just
marketing and you are not looking for interaction. Then they won’t believe what you
do and you basically waste your time and energy. Give it time, pay attention and the
result will be loyal followers.
Give Credit
The next marketing strategy you can use to increase your followers is to give credit
to other people. For example let’s say I want to post a quote from Will Smith. I will
post my image and tag him both in caption and on the post. This way my post will
be visible in his page to, and some of his followers that may check his tagged
section will see my post. If the quality of my content is good they will become my
followers. In Marketing we call it influence from mere association bias.
Also you may see a post from someone popular and you want to share it. Use the
repost application so his account name be visible on the post too. This way you
can give credit to the real owner of the post and increase the chance of their
followers, following you.
Shoutout
An easy method of these marketing strategies which mostly cost you several
messages. Find pages who are in the same topic as you and also have the same
amount of engagement. Send them a message and ask them if they like a
shoutout. A shoutout is when 2 pages ask their followers to follow the other page.
For example you can share a post from the other page and in caption write “please
follow this page + a reason”.
Shoutouts are very common and bring a lot of value, it’s free and all you need is to
try to contact other pages.
Competition
From all of these marketing strategies, I recommend to use this method while you
have at least 2k-3k followers, otherwise you won’t receive any result. The way it
works is to select a reward (it can be anything, but must be valuable for your
followers) and tell your followers that I am giving away an IPhone (or cash, or free
coupon of a course, …).
How you can get in to the competition? Just follow me and tag 5 of your friends. I
pick a winner by Friday.
The higher value of your reward, the more followers you will receive. Also you can
do something smart here. You can release the result of the competition in your
other social media like twitter. You can say ” I will announce the winner at Friday in
my twitter”. This is a cross social media marketing, to bring your followers from a
social media to an other.
5. Posting Time
One of the most common questions that everyone has about Instagram marketing
is “When is the best time to post?” or “How often I have to post?”. These are all
questions which we will find the answers during this section. I want to make the
answer as clear as possible, that’s why I am going to test different posting time to
show you exactly which one is the best.
Even though I already know the answer, but I think you will make a better decision
when you see the result for yourself. So the test is going to be like this that I will
post with different time lines and different number of posts and we will see the
result.
Once/day
During this experiment we are going to see the result of one post per day. The other
important question here is that:
when is the best time?
The answer can vary according to
How you built your page
Who is your target
Where are they located
…
The general best time to post is usually at these three hours during the day:
8am
5pm
10pm
Otherwise there will be other element that influence this time line. If your target
followers are living all around the world, then the timing above won’t matter and
you have to consider other marketing strategies.
4 times a day
During this experiment we are going to see the result of posting every 6 hours
which will be 4 times per day. This strategy works for international targets. If your
followers are from many different locations, this method of posting time will work
amazing for you (It will also work for single location profiles).
Every 2 hour
Doing this method of posting is pretty much difficult to keep the post’s quality at a
high level of standards but if you can, the result is going to surprise you. But you
have to remember not to sacrifice quality for time.
Story basic
So what is story?
Story is an image or video that will only last 24 hours and it appears in a different
section from normal posts. Usually the main concept of story is to show what is
happening to you during a day and the most important thing you have to consider is
entertainment. If you can entertain people with your stories, they will watch it no
matter how many they are, but if the content quality drops, you will lose your
followers.
Let’s look at some of the basics on Instagram.
Story Marketing
Most people use stories just for fun, but there are a lot that you can do with stories
in Instagram marketing. There are some important elements that you must use in
at least 90% of your stories and those are:
Hashtags
Location
Tagging profiles
Links
Hashtags
Same as a normal post you can use hashtags here too but the difference is that
you have to write your hashtag on your image or video, meaning you have to take
care of the quality of what you are posting. Also use the Stickers section at the top
to create a hashtag ( you can also write your hashtag as a text, but using sticker
will give an style to your hashtag). Same as a normal hashtag, people can find your
story through the hashtag, but your story must be attracting to bring them into your
page an convince them to follow you.
location
Another great feature for stories that help to market your story is location tag or
sticker. You can create a location tag from the stickers section, and people who are
looking for that location can see your story and maybe become your follower and
later customer, but you must consider to use a relevant location not just any
location you think it fits.
Tagging profiles
Same as tagging a profile in normal posts, here you can do the same for stories
and give credit to people, ask other pages to shout out your profile or other
marketing strategies that you can apply by tagging people. Tagging a profile is very
simple and all you have to do is to write a text and use “@” + “profile user name” to
tag a page.
Links
This feature is only available for business profiles, other wise you can not add links
to your stories. you can use this feature for many different goals, maybe to invite
people to see your new video on Youtube or maybe ask them to buy a new product
you released. It’s up to you to direct your followers to where ever you want them to
go, but remember not to ask them to take a big step, always go small and little by
little bring people to the point you want.
How to add links?
If you notice while you are uploading a story, at the top you can see a link sign
(chain), click on it and then you can insert your link, then if anyone swipe up your
story they will go to your link.
CTA
While you are creating your content to try to design an arrow sign at the bottom of
the story. Many people use links in their stories but they forget to ask their views to
swipe up, and it has a huge effect if you just ask people to swipe up. So by adding
an attractive arrow at the bottom + a call to action text, you can increase the
conversion rate.
Highlight
An other amazing feature of Instagram stories is that you can highlight some of
your stories, bring them all in one folder, under one title and show them in your
profile. You can act innovative here and create several interactive images and
videos that explain an story to people and finally at the last one or two
images/videos force them to make an action, join your subscription list, buy your
product and so on.
Most people use these features for fun and have no idea how effective they can be
in marketing. With a little hard work and innovation you can create amazing
highlights in your profile and increase the amount of your followers or customers
more and more.
7. Instagram Live
What is Instagram live?
You can use Instagram to share live feed to all your followers, increase the
interaction and loyalty in your followers which have a very positive effect on your
profile and make more active.
You can share a live video to connect with your followers in real time. Once a live
video has ended, it’s no longer visible in the app, unless you share a replay of it to
your story.
To start a live video:
Swipe left in home page (go to the same place you want to upload a story)
At the bottom you can see a list of different type of stories, the first one is
“LIVE”
select it and start your live stream
To make this a bit more clear we are going to try a test live streaming on
Instagram.
8. Followers to Customers
One of the main purposes of Instagram marketing is to increase the followers, then
convert those followers to customers. It’s not an easy job but if you have a
business and think to use Instagram to market your product you must follow the
instructions in this section.
Unbounce
Unbounce is a great and powerful platform to create a landing page but if you are
new to creating landing pages I suggest not to use Unbounce. The main reason is
that Unbounce charge a lot comparing to the other platforms even though it has 30
day trail version after selecting a paid plan. The main problem is that until you start
to get good at this it may take some time and you have to spend more and more
money.
But if you already are familiar with landing pages, how to create them and so on, I
strongly suggest to use Unbounce.
Click here to see pricing plans.
Squarespace
Squarespace is very much the same as Unbounce but more focused on designing
great pages. Also it easily jump into free trail without any credit card. So if your
target customers are people who are emotional and care about design, this is a
great platform to start building your landing page.
Also comparing to Unbounce the membership price is way cheaper, and if you are
new to this topic, this is one of the platforms you can use.
Click here to see the pricing.
Instapage
Instapage is another popular platform for creating a landing page. It has 14 days
trail version and the pricing is similar to Unbounce but a bit cheaper and yet I
suggest if you are new to this, do not use instapage.
Click here to see the pricing.
Webflow
Webflow is also great if you are just starting to create a landing page. I can say
Webflow and Squarespace are the cheapest platform to create a landing page. The
good thing about all of them is that you can easily learn them by tutorials which the
site itself provide. Webflow and Squarespace are a bit harder to use comparing to
Unbounce.
It also include 14 day free trail without taking any credit card. Click here to see the
pricing.
Also several days ago I prepared a landing page for our product which is an online
service using Webflow. We are going to see the example and I will show you
around, give you some tips about it so you get familiar with the environment.
The connector
After you prepare your landing page, you have your 2 platform completely ready,
just remain the last piece of the puzzle, “The connector”. Now what you need to do
is to bring your followers from your instgram to visit your landing page and as we
talked about it before you can use a link in your profile setting or in stories and
highlights.
The big problem is that people just don’t come into your landing page by
themselves and you need to provoke them. The main 2 technique that you can use
is reward and curiosity. If you can show them that if they come to your landing
page and do what you want them to do they will receive an amazing reward, they
start to click on it more and more. some people give their product free to small
number of people, some have other giveaways.
To be able to do this part in the most successful way, you have to know
the marketing cognitive biases.
9. Instagram Tips
The last step of having a successful Instagram profile is to always remember
several fundamental tips about it. The most important one is:
Quality
Never ever under no circumstances decrease your content quality. If you feel tired,
stop working on it, rest and the come back. If you don’t have time, work on it when
you have time but DO NOT DECREASE THE QUALITY. The moment your followers
feel you are just posting without quality, they will stop responding and you will lose
followers.
Consistency
If you try to work on Instagram marketing today and after several day stop it and
then come back again, it’s not gonna work. Some people are deactive for a week
then they come online and upload 6 posts in 30 min. Make an schedule if you are
busy or some problem happen in your business and stick to that schedule. I see
this happen a lot in different profiles. The admin comes and just upload 10 image
and leave for a month.
If you have a goal about instagram marketing, you must do it constantly, otherwise
don’t have expectations.
10. Automation
Managing your Instagram account can be a bit time taking mostly. This is why we
are going to take a look at 2 powerful automation tool which make some of the
work easier and faster for us.
Everliker
Everliker is a chrome extension which will use your Instagram account to like posts
on a specific hashtag or place or users. You just select what type of post you want
it to like and it will do the job for you.
On free version it will like 700 posts per day but you can increase this number if you
change your plan.
Also don't be concern about the safety of your account because this tool will like
post a way that Instagram won't suspect. For example it will like 10 post and the 5
min sleep. Today I used this tool to like more than half a million posts, and I had no
problem with safety of my accounts.
My Business Automation
Another great tool for Instagram automation which will help you a lot in many
different tasks. You can use this tool to schedule your posts with multiple accounts
at the same time, you can do some marketing strategies like auto like, auto follow,
auto repost ... .
This tool is paid but you have 1 week free trail access to the software.
Click here to get access to this tool.