Instagram has a considerable eCommerce potential, with more than 25 million brand accounts on the platform. But more important is that 80% of all Instagrammers follow at least one brand or business page. Thus, if you’re running a small business, Instagram is not the place you should ignore.
However, growing a business page on Instagram is now a real challenge, because the platform is getting stricter and stricter in terms of content and promotion. Automation restrictions, offensive captions analysis, and forcing people to use paid ads are some to name. It’s not surprising that business owners constantly face challenges and believe it’s impossible to get sales from Instagram. But this is not at all true.
In this article, you’ll unlock vital steps to promote your startup on Instagram and find out challenges you may face when growing your business.
1. Define your Instagram target audience
The number of Instagram monthly active users is 2 billion, so there is a target audience. It doesn’t matter if you’re a clothing store owner or a plumber searching for clients on social media. All you need is to know and find your audience on Instagram. You can surely do so manually, but this is more convenient with special tools like Combin Growth.
To demonstrate our thoughts clearly, let us consider this tip on the example of a lash extensions beauty studio in London. This is a B2C business whose target audience is enormous. So, how would you discover its potential customers?
To streamline this process, you can use Combin Growth, a tool for target audience search, engagement, and analysis. Once you open the tool, visualise your typical customers and search for them within the app. Combin Growth allows you to find your audience by searching with hashtags, location, and even filtering out the results by gender and language. Thus, we’ll find posts from relevant people. We can later interact with them — like, comment, or follow.
Keeping in mind our hypothetical studio based in London, we can use these parameters: location — London, gender — female, and language — English.
Here are the results of our search.
Once you find the relevant people, you can start interacting by liking, following, or commenting on their posts within the app and draw their attention.
To do so, press the required button and select a handful of users. The app will start the task automatically.
The program automatically hides irrelevant users — Instagram pages of other businesses or celebrities that are unlikely to interact with your account. If this filter doesn’t match your goals, you can always turn it off manually.
Another way to discover your target audience is to find the audience of your competitors. In Combin Growth, you can find the competitors’ audiences by their followers, followings, commenters, or likers.
A small hint: when performing this search, you should choose commenters and likers, since they are the most active and engaged audience. But to do so, you need to know the Instagram username of your competitor.
If you don’t know any competitors in your niche, we’ll discuss how to find them in the next point.
But first, let us find an audience of a well-known competitor. To find their current or potential customers, type the name of the competitor or a link to their specific post and choose likers. Here are the results.
Now you can follow them on Instagram, like, or comment right within the app.
2. Discover your competitors
If you don’t know any of your rivals on Instagram, you can easily find them in Combin Growth.
To do so, you need to add relevant hashtags to our first-ever search. Let’s see how it works. First, set all the relevant parameters. In our case, they are location — London, one hashtag #lashartist (you can use several if you like), language — English, and gender — female.
This is one of the results we found.
To find out more about this competitor, you can tap on the last nine posts in her account, check the bio, or press on the link directing to her Instagram page.
Another actionable way to find your competitors is to search by a keyword in the bio. Just type a relevant keyphrase and start searching. Considering our example, let’s type “lash technician London”.
Here’s what we found.
When you’ve found relevant competitors, you can thoroughly explore their pages on Instagram and track their marketing strategies.
3. Decide what to post on Instagram
When you start your Instagram page, you need to think in advance about what you will publish. Obviously, as an entrepreneur, you manage Instagram to sell your products, but here’s what you should remember. Your Instagram page should consist of various content, not just posts with your products and captions telling people how great they are.
Give people something valuable and engaging. Think about what attracts you in brands’ accounts — visual aesthetics, witty captions, videos, insightful posts, or funny stories? Test everything to find out what works best for your audience.
Instagram is a visual social network, so the quality of images is a must. Even if you focus a lot on captions, try to pick a relevant, unique image of high quality.
For instance, luxury jewellery brand Cartier is a perfect example of visual aesthetics that makes people press the Follow button. The grid looks consistent and beautiful, even though 99% of their posts aim to sell. And they combine every type of content offered by Instagram — shopping posts, videos, gifs, standard photos, and stories.
Another example of a well-thought-out consistent page is an Instagram of Rachel Goodman, an intuitive eating dietitian. She sells her services through value — not on an outstanding visual concept.
Every post of hers is full of insightful advice on how to eat healthily and control eating behaviour. When people see that she shares such value for free, they wonder what useful tips her paid services will offer.
The examples above are two opposite approaches. If you’re new to Instagram and don’t know yet what resonates with your audience, try different approaches and monitor followers’ reactions.
The secrets are various and engaging content, proper timing, and consistency. Your content should be always fresh and new so that your audience will not get bored. Instagram is full of different businesses, so if you want to attract followers on your page, be creative. At the same time, your grid and the post timing should be consistent.
Small hint: use Instagram Alt Text function. With this feature, you can add alternative text to your post along with the caption. The goal is to include relevant keywords that reflect your image or video. You can find the Alt Text function in Advanced Settings while publishing your post.
This feature works as an SEO tool and aids in increasing your reach and profile visits.
4. Find relevant Instagram influencers
The importance of Instagram influencers is hard to ignore. Many brands use bloggers as the only way of promotion. The trick is to find those who will help, not harm your brand. To find yours, you can search by hashtags or location in Combin Growth. But this time, set the required followers count.
You’ve probably heard about nano, micro, and macro-influencers. In a nutshell, the difference between them is their followers count. With influencers, the quality over quantity rule is crucial.
When looking for an influencer, pay attention to the quality of their audience, if the audience is relevant to your business, and if it’s engaged. If the majority of a blogger’s followers are bots or private accounts that never comment or like, this influencer is not your best option.
5. Analyse your actions
Marketing doesn’t work without analytics. To earn but not waste your money on Instagram and influencers, you need to constantly track your progress and understand how your account performs. You can find some of the vital metrics in Instagram, like the best time to post, reach, impressions, profile visits, and website clicks. You can also discover information about your audiences like gender, age, and locations. Based on this data, you can tailor your audience manually.
For instance, if your target audience is women from London and your current followers are men from India, you can manually remove these faux followers that kill your account engagement. To do so, open the Followers tab and press the Remove button.
If you need more advanced analytics of your account performance, you can track it in Combin Growth.
Combin Growth analytics focuses on your total engagement during a selected window of time. Engagement is one of the crucial metrics that shows your account is interesting to people and generally works well.
The upper tab shows changes in engagement in your Instagram account and the lower displays your activity within Combin Growth, not Instagram. Thus, you can track which actions (likes, comments, or follows) work well for you and which don’t.
Final thoughts
Startup Instagram promotion is a large topic that is impossible to cover in one article. We tried to point out the most significant steps that every entrepreneur should take before starting on Instagram page management.
Don’t include Instagram in your social media marketing strategy only because other businesses do so. First, analyse the avenues and possible obstacles, think through the content and audience, and then move forward. Instagram growth is not the easiest option to grow your business, but it has a large potential. So, if you’ve decided to conquer Instagram with your startup, Combin Growth is on your side to assist.
