The inbound marketing methodology consists of 4 stages: attract, convert, close and delight. Social networks and especially Instagram, although they play a high role in the attraction stage, can also help us guide our visitors from the beginning to the end of the funnel.
Luckily, Instagram understood how powerful their reach was and how important their platform was in converting visitors and/or followers into leads. That is why in recent years, its updates to company profiles have focused on making interaction results more measurable, providing more detailed statistics, and making the content published by companies 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 to use Instagram in each of the stages of inbound and make the most of its potential:
Attract visitors and followers
Hashtags
Hashtags are labels that allow us to classify our content into a particular trend or topic. When we use hashtags in our publications, we are incorporating our content into a search system (within the same platform) that users use to find profiles and/or content that connects with their interests.
Although 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 achieve this challenge, it is recommended that you create a list of hashtags in the same way you create your keywords: thinking about your target audience. Think about fixed tags and tags that can vary depending on the content, that is, hashtags that are popular among your target audience and others that are closely related to both the image that is being tagged and the general theme of your brand. It is recommended to use less than six hashtags per post so as not to clutter the text or make excessive use of them.
valuable content
To convert those people who visit our profile into followers, we must give them reasons to stay. Inbound marketing greatly encourages the promotion of valuable content above any sales content. The good news is that people who use Instagram are more accustomed to seeing some publications as catalogs of products and services, so both strategies can coexist. However, that does not limit us to 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 greater visual weight. The format also plays an important role, especially if Instagram also allows us to share videos and images in the same publication. 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 an attractive image or video is published with precise and easy-to-read text, we have a high probability of receiving 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 publications, people will not be able to click on it, since it would be displayed as just another text.
Instagram allows us to place a single link in the biography and in that case, it is advisable to tell users that they should click on it. That space can be perfectly used to redirect that group of people to obtain a content offer or make 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 are 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.
An advantage that Instagram Stories gives us is that there we can make our content more attractive, dynamic and interactive. That is, quickly capture a person’s attention, providing them with informative capsules of interest and then in the last story, place the access link to the landing page so that person can obtain more information, make an online purchase or share their information. data.
Close sales
Private messages
There will be people who, to demonstrate their purchasing interest, will go 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, images and links can be shared that can connect the consumer to conversion pages. You can even share previous posts found in our profile with people to recycle that content.
Delight and satisfy
Competitions
Among the strategies to reward and enhance the loyalty of our followers, Instagram contests have undoubtedly been a trend in recent years. Although they are mechanisms to attract a larger audience 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 publication where the prize is displayed and the bases of the contest are described 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 an example of a contest since there are multiple ways to prepare them. Based on this, companies use pages that randomly select accounts to randomly choose the winner or winners of the contest.
In short, Instagram is a platform allied to our inbound marketing strategy, since it can play a complementary role in each of the stages of this methodology.
