Instagram, one of the most famous social media platforms based mainly on visuals, is currently used by more than one billion users and the number is only growing. That, needless to say, represents a great opportunity to reach the audience you haven't reached yet. One of your marketing goals might be to generate quality leads and Instagram may be the channel you want to use. Now the key question is how to effectively leverage this platform so that you generate valuable leads at a reasonable cost. There are ways.
First of all, you need to consider if Instagram is a channel for you and your type of business. If you can't think of a way to showcase your products or services, show your personal story or share something from “behind the scenes” in a VISUAL way, Instagram may not be a good fit for you. Similarly, if your audience is not present on Instagram, consider other channels for your communication mix. Try to look deeper into LinkedIn or Facebook which represent opportunities to generate leads too.
On the other hand, if you figure out a way to leverage its visual style, Instagram is a great fit for connecting your potential customers with your brand. 62% of people say they have become more interested in a brand or product after seeing it in Stories. That's just one placement. If you effectively leverage all of what Instagram offers, people will love you (and your brand).
Let's finally jump straight into ways to effectively generate more quality leads through Instagram!
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1. Run Lead Generation Campaign
Yes, there is a campaign tailored exactly to your needs – get more leads. I did not plan to rhyme, but there we go. If your goal is to get high-value leads, you can set up a campaign that aims to bring you exactly that. The premise is that you have a nice looking Instagram profile, already have some posts and Stories published and respond quickly to the comments and messages. Your profile needs to be very well prepared before you decide to jump into the campaign activities. Another premise is that you are willing to invest something into your lead generation activities.
All set up? Great, let's move on.
Log into your Facebook Business Manager account and go to Ads Manager. What would you do in Facebook interface you may ask? Instagram is owned by Facebook and offers you great advertising features in their central interface – Facebook Business Manager. In other words, you can run campaigns for both Facebook and Instagram from one place.
Are you in the Ads Manager? Cool. Now when you run a new campaign, take a look at what shows up:
“What's your marketing objective?” Facebook asks. This way, Facebook makes sure to optimize your campaign. If you want to know more about how Facebook optimisation works, check out our beginner's guide to Facebook advertising.
Next, in the “Placement” section, choose “Edit placements” and pick only Instagram:
This way you make sure your campaign will only run on Instagram. You can even dig deeper and choose specific placements like Stories or Feed in the bottom section.
Finally, and most importantly, you set your ad. This is something people will interact with, so make sure you arrange that as best you can. Making your ad is engaging is a crucial part of every campaign. Instagram is, as already stated, based on visuals. If you are wondering how to engage your audience on Instagram, check out this article.
The great thing about lead generation ads is that once the user clicks on your ad, she is redirected to a native form that collects any information you desire – be it first name, email, phone number or anything else. The user does this, of course, based on her consent and in exchange for some value that you offer. Without motivating the user to complete the form, your lead generation ad won't work. You need to find a reason or value for which users will be willing to give their information and will be happy to continue communicating with you.
Once the user fills out the form, you can find leads in your Facebook Business Page (Publishing tools, Forms Library) where you can download them and make sure your sales process begins.
If you feel like running ads in the Facebook Business Manager is too complex, try out our tool that simplifies this process so that even non-marketers can run their campaigns effectively.
To make this whole machinery run, you need to know a bit about how Facebook Business Manager works and where you can create your lead generation forms. But as soon as you learn that, the campaign creation takes literally minutes to complete. Just don't forget, whether or not you put energy into the ad will hugely determine the success or failure of your campaign.
2. Connect with your followers
We've introduced a really sophisticated way to generate leads on Instagram – through Facebook Business Manager or tools like groost. But the fact is, that you can collect the low hanging fruit too! Connect with your followers (or followers of your competitors). For example, you could have a nice chat with them, get to know more about their needs and offer a solution (if it fits). This way you can directly generate demand for your product or service, get people to call or demo, offer educational content or sell conference tickets – all depending on your business and its goals. Instagram offers an interface for messages which you probably know – take advantage of that! Get in touch with those who already know your brand or may be interested in getting to know it! It really can be that straightforward…
For this to work, you may want to have a nice looking (and converting) landing page in place and tools for webinars or apps like Calendly or e-books that you provide in exchange for users' information. These are all pieces of content that will help you while communicating with your potential customers. Instagram, then, will help you connect with users and redirect them to your content that eventually converts them into leads.
You can even automate this process to be more efficient. Use tools like Later to schedule your Instagram posts or Socialdroid to increase your follower base.
To sum it up, to get the most out of Instagram, you need to have engaging content to share, spend time building your audience, dig into tools like Facebook Business Manager or groost and stay responsive to comments and messages users will send you. This way, you can effectively leverage this visual based platform for all your lead generation activities!
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7 Key Instagram Stats & Demographics
There are more than 7 billion people on earth. And 1 billion of those people are on Instagram. That means every 7th person uses this visual-based social media network. Launched in 2010, and eventually bought in 2012 by Facebook (with more than 30 million users back then), Instagram offers a huge opportunity to connect with your current and potential customers, as well as, your followers and fans. The growth has been tremendous, which makes Instagram one of the most well-known and most widely-used social media platforms of all.
You already know that you can leverage any platform if you have a clear understanding of the audience you can reach there – and whether or not it aligns with your target audience… To find this out, let's jump into the key stats about Instagram and its users!
How to Publish Articles (Natively) on LinkedIn Like Pro
If you're wondering where you can get your articles published, so that it reaches a broader audience, we have great news for you: LinkedIn allows you to create and publish articles natively on their platform. Not only can you leverage the wide user base that LinkedIn has, but you can also use their analytics to see how your posts perform.
Like Facebook did with Instant articles, LinkedIn has switched from being a solely networking-based platform, focused on professionals, to a content-based platform that allows its user to educate themselves while spending time on their platform. That's also what both LinkedIn and Facebook (amongst other platforms) desire – to keep you, me and other users on their platform for as long as they can.
Does this feature represent the potential for you to share your knowledge among other people? You bet it does - if “done well”. Let's jump right into how you can publish articles natively on LinkedIn like a pro.
To get started, click the “Write an article” button. Can’t find it? It's right there, have a look:
Isn't this one of the features that has been in front of your eyes the whole time, but remained undiscovered?
Once you hit the button, magic happens. You are redirected to an interface where you can create your native LinkedIn article. Having said that, you can now configure the content: add a headline, background image, write the article, add engaging or educating infographics or other visuals and finally, publish!
We won't leave you without any tips and tricks to get started (just keep reading), but we recommend you play around with this feature to get a better idea of what all you can do.
How to Target People According to Their Interests
Have you ever wondered about how it is possible that you actually like the products you see in your feed? That is because of the targeting. You should always know who you are talking to. Who is your buyer persona? If you know it, you can tell Facebook what your potential customers look like and Facebook will target them.
Facebook allows you to target custom audiences, lookalike audiences and saved audiences. The saved audiences are our topic in this article. Those are the audiences that you can define by choosing people’s interests or location, demographics, used devices, income level, etc. You can create Saved Audiences both in the campaign setup phase or in the Audience Manager. To narrow or broaden your audience, you can combine those as much as you like!
Regarding demographics-based targeting, you’ll get plenty of topics to refine your audience based on many options. The basic 3 are: Age, Gender and Language. That’s easy.
Location targeting allows you to pick the whole country, a city, or a specific radius around a pin you drop on the map. Imagine you are a realtor and you have a perfect house to sell in California! As an example, you can target people currently traveling or planning their next trip right there… To read more about the location targeting, read this article.
What is interesting here is the interest-based targeting! Interests are one of the best (and easiest) targeting options. They allow you to target people interested in a specific subject related to your product. Does it sound like a good option to target people interested in your competitors or the market segment you are in? To target people based on interests, you can either browse the menu with hundreds of interests or simply type some of them in and see what Facebook can suggest and offer you.
Everytime you edit your audience, you can check your potential reach and estimated daily results based on your campaign objective.
How does Facebook know? The interests are based on its users’ likes, apps they use, Pages they’ve followed, and more. Adding more than one interest will target people with at least one of them so you’ll broaden your reach.
Behaviour-based targeting allows you to target Facebook users by their purchase history, events they were interested in, personal anniversaries, etc. This data is gathered by Facebook analyzing many factors and also using external data sets.
You can include or exclude people based on another kind of information or connections e.g. ads they click, pages they engage with, the mobile device they use or the speed of their network connection. Interesting, huh? You can read more in Facebook article about best practices for detailed targeting.
Pretty much everything is summed up in the picture above. To save your time, save your audiences, so you can always use them again, copy them to make small changes and have a brand new one.
To read more about this topic, you can download our e-book below!
How much does Facebook advertising cost?
Well, that’s a tricky question – there are so many variables at play. Depending on your situation, the cost of your Facebook ads could be as much as $10 per click, or as little as 40 cents.
The most important factor is efficiency and performance. Your ads might be super cheap, but if they do not bring any results, it's a waste of money. Define the purpose (the goal) of the ad and what is your cost limit to label the ad as efficient. Many businesses measure success by the number of sold products, leads generated, or potential customers engaged.
There is no rule or benchmark for this, each business is different with different needs and circumstances. Someone might be satisfied with a new lead for $45 and another might not go over $10. One person might consider a $3 cost per click as successful and another would not want to pay more than $2. Calculate the revenue you can get from the lead and think about how much you want to spend per action, this way you can always check whether your ads perform well or not.
Before you spend a lot of money, try to set up your daily budget for $5 a day. (We will talk about how to set your budget later). Monitor your results. If the ad performance meets your ideas and you have money to raise the daily budget, do it. And do it again, if the ad is bringing you results.
Remember: If your ad is comical, visually appealing, engaging, or all of these combined, people will like, comment or share it more often than they would with some boring copy with a blurry image. If you really want the most from your paid ads, they have to be great to make the people share them and so the ads will be also spread organically. Deciding how much to spend is a good place to start, but always make sure each dollar goes as far as it possibly can. The key is the visual, the text, as well as targeting. Regarding your content creation, read my article about buyer personas, because you should tailor-make it for your ideal customers and you can also find more helpful info in this article about tools for creating visual content.
So, how can you get an idea of how much Facebook advertising costs before diving in?
10 Best Marketing Tools for Small Businesses
There are over 7,000 marketing tools you can use today. And I'm going to name them all. No, just kidding, Scott Brinker already did. Actually, he updates the database every single year, so I don't have to. ;)
- If you have a lot of time on your hands and want to spend it browsing a list of tools, here is an Excel sheet
- If you want to print it as a poster for your bedroom wall, click here
- If you are a marketing expert, I would appreciate your feedback down there, in the infamous comments section.
If you are new to marketing and want to learn about the 10 most useful tools for small businesses, keep reading!
How to Build Your Personal Brand
We’re all used to connecting the term ‘brand' with relationships to companies and products. However, that’s not what we’re going to talk about right now. A personal brand is kind of like a stamp that defines your persona and how people see it. In the past, personal branding used to be only about business cards, logos and websites. Today, it’s much more diverse. (Although websites are still useful for anyone building their brand and if you'd like to know more, you can read about this topic here.) Anyone who has access to the internet and social media can showcase themselves as an expert, build an audience, and attract clients that might be interested in their business. It’s a connection between how you see yourself, how you communicate with others and how they see you. Now, where do you start and how do you build a brand for yourself?
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