How to leverage attention on Instagram
Written by Lilly Steel, Managing Director
So you’ve put the hours in, you’ve posted the content, and you’ve built yourself a neat little audience on Instagram. Now you’re wondering how you can leverage your few thousand followers to land more sales, generate new leads, or whatever it is that your company desires as a result of social media marketing.
Every company with a healthy online audience has been there before. Getting the vanity metrics up is one thing, but taking advantage of your social media numbers can be tricky – and even futile with the wrong approach! In this blog post, we’ll outline five easy ways you can leverage attention on your company’s Instagram account to achieve your marketing goals.
Story Link Stickers
In October last year, Instagram made story link stickers available to all users of the platform – which is fantastic for us marketers! Now you can place a sticker link to any website on your story and drive your story viewers to your site or landing page.
You should always hook the viewer with vivid visual content, provide something entertaining, informative or urgent upfront, and then a short reason for them to hit the link sticker or to swipe up. Playing around with story post formats will help you nail down what makes viewers click your link, so you can maximise your traffic.
Imagine you’re a SaaS company and you want people to sign up to use your software. You could make a story post showing a video of someone benefiting from your platform, with a caption telling viewers that free trials are now available and they should hit the link to take advantage now!
Events & Competitions
Whether it’s a new product launch, a giveaway or an audience competition, holding unique events on your Instagram profile can keep your audience active and drive engagement. If you have a decent engagement rate and a healthy following, just 2 or 3 main feed posts announcing your event or competition are likely to attract enough attention – but to really push results, share content to your story and get on camera to make announcements!
Imagine you’re trying to promote tickets to an in-person event, like a conference, or a theatre show. You could make an early announcement with posts showing sneak peeks of the event lineup, behind the scenes, or what attendees can expect on the day – and then encourage users to hit the link in your bio to join a waiting list or sign up for a limited time.
Live Streams
Hosting a live stream is one of the most powerful ways to build engagement and credibility on Instagram, as well as converting some of your followers to potential customers or leads. Live videos are personal, long form and realistic, which gives your audience a feeling of authenticity that many branded accounts on Instagram lack. You can also use live videos to demonstrate how your product works, talk about company news, provide industry information, or just have a fun chat with some future customers/clients!
Link in bio!
On Instagram, your bio link may be genuinely the most useful tool for yielding actual marketing results – web traffic, leads, etc. Having a big audience is one thing, but getting them to click through to your site and take action is another thing. We recommend that at least one in three of your main feed posts should be focused on getting users through to your bio link – and it doesn’t hurt to include a little extra line at the bottom of all your post captions encouraging viewers to click through!
There’s no limit to how often you can change or update the link in your Instagram bio, so feel free to modify it so it links to your latest blog post, new landing page, or product announcement. Just make sure it’s obvious what the user is clicking through to.
Value Content
Our previous tips have been ways to directly leverage your instagram audience to drive results. This one is more about improving the quality of your audience and increasing the chance that your followers turn into customers or leads.
Providing value content, eg. info posts, is a brilliant way to gain instant credibility with your followers, win more engagement, and possibly drive people to your bio link and DMs. There’s a common phrase in marketing which is “content is key”, and on Instagram that really is true. Creators and brands who post genuinely entertaining or helpful content are more likely to attract attention and rise up through the algorithm. Sure, you may be posting helpful content already, but have you tried a carousel post that goes in-depth into some of your target demographic’s pain points? Have you posted a multi-slide infographic showing how your product or solution improves your customer’s life or work?
Exploring new options for value content never hurts – and always improves your reputation and connection with your audience.
