Instagram Content Strategy : Tips to Engagement and Lead Generation

Instagram content strategy become more entrusting by the passage of time after understanding the role of Instagram in social media marketing. At first, I was completely unaware of how to market a business over the social media channel. Instagram is a mobile app which helps users, communities and business to interact on the go.

The sole purpose of the Instagram app is to share, like and comment on the posts you like according to your interest. Once I created an account on Instagram I got to know that Instagram is suitable for the business to market the masses in your community or around the globe. The marketing on Instagram is a bit tricky, but ultimately give a huge opportunity for business to learn the ways to generate leads using Instagram as well. After learning the bits and bytes of the ways on how to drive leads to your business, the Instagram content strategy is the most important thing to market like the pro. We shall move on in two parts.

Part 1: Instagram Content Strategy for engagement

Traditional advertising is less effective these days even 70% mobile users disliked it. But the rise of Instagram users totalling over 800 million, 200 million from July to September 2017, making the social media channel most effective for businesses. According to Social Media Today, referrals from Instagram “spend the longest time on e-commerce sites with an average duration of 192 seconds, which is almost double Facebook and triple Pinterest.”

Create a contest

A contest is always attractive due to a free giveaway and ours were more attractive as we also included a giveaway for the runners-up, too.

I was doing social media marketing for a brand who sell fashion accessories. The prime task of the social media marketing was to increase the user engagement. We requested the brand that we need few items which brand agreed. Then we created a contest in which we asked few questions from the Instagram audience. The policy of participating the contest was to share and tag 3 friends whom you consider to be the best users of the product. The participants can add the entries more than once to increase the chance of being the winner. The winner and runners-up will be selected by the count of shares and number of friends tagged.

Then we boost the post with the image of the giveaway. The results were unexpected as we got about 200 new likes to our business page, about 1000 entries in the contest and about 3000 people tagged. Let’s plan to give it a shot.

Leverage user-generated content

Let your users part of your brand. It is only possible if you appreciate them for their participation. This will make your brand to let your users own it. But how you can do it?

The process is very simple. Ask your users to share some content like their pictures during or after using your product or service by adding how do they feel about the product or service.

If you are a beauty product manufacturer or reseller, you can share the benefits of your products through influencers and then ask them to share their experience in words. Yes, you can ask them to use a specific hashtag. Now what? The image shared by the user will be reached to the friends and their friends with the hashtag. And ultimately it will give a great engagement to your product or service.

Share the application of your product

There are many segments which remain untouched taking a product like yours. It was a big challenge to find out the right ways to engage the audience on social media channels especially Instagram for a company which were selling solutions and services in the healthcare sector. We were found ourselves blank to proceed.

Then in the brainstorming session, we decided to share the application of the product and service the company is sharing. Believe it or not, we found hundreds of content ideas to design our content strategy. For the purpose, we also included third-party solutions as the part of integrated solutions with the services and solutions our client were selling.

Other than the customers, the company got great appreciation even on the openness in content strategy and got many mentions in the media and seminars.

Tell a story taking your product around user experience

Further to the application of the product, we then come up with the idea to share the user experience of the solutions and services of that healthcare company. It was really a WOW in the industry as it has never happened before. Doing so we won a great user engagement from the future customers of the services and solutions of the healthcare company.

We created small videos to let people see the user experience with the naked eye.

Part 2: Instagram Content Strategy for lead generation

We need to grab the users who want to visit your website to get the further information about the product/services or solution of your company. This should be considered as the second part of the Instagram content strategy for lead generation. For the purpose, you need to make few tweaks to capture the email address of the leads for future communications. Also, you need to be smart enough to try to close the lead as sales. Yes, this is most tricky part of the Instagram content strategy for lead generation.

Update your profile bio

As there is no place on Instagram from where you can drive your audience to your landing page except for profile bio. Use the option of URL in profile bio to drive referral to the landing page.

To intimate the intention, you should leave some message in the post which you are using to communicate your message in all the above type of Instagram Content.

The URL should be in tiny form as long URL will not be displayed properly. Once you are done with all the two steps mentioned above you can move to the next step and that is your landing page on your website.

Instagram-specific landing page

There will be many landing pages on your website but you should design and develop a specific landing page to meet the needs of your Instagram users. Yes, you know better what offers you have promoted in your Instagram content that you published in your marketing campaign. Brainstorm to find out what should be the next giveaway at the time when the lead is landed on your landing page.

Most likely you are going to give some statistics or some free worksheet to your users to help them solve their next problems. This will be good to go element and will be highly appreciated by the Instagram users.

Email list database and its future use

While your users landed on the Instagram specific landing page you would have captured the email address of that user. This is internet money, save it on some proper database. Today, there are many software which provides you free software to manage some thousands of emails for future email marketing. You can use them or otherwise create one which you can manage in-house.

The future use of these emails should be to communicate with your Instagram users to offer them more useful material which can help them make their decision to buy your product.

Instagram is really a smart social media application which can help you increase social engagement for your business if you have applied the Instagram content strategy for lead generation properly and like the pro. How have you been designing Instagram content strategy for lead generation? Please share your experience to let us include the points in our future posts.