Instagram is a great free platform for running small businesses. It provides a lot of handy tools to help increase sales and user engagement with your brand. However, at the initial stage, it is difficult to navigate and understand what needs to be done first. Therefore, in this article, you will find useful tips, adhering to which you can achieve excellent results in a promotion.
To fully promote on Instagram, you need to know the best site to buy Instagram followers and create a business account. It allows you to view profile statistics, show active contacts – phone number and address, and launch advertising campaigns directly from your profile.
START A SOCIAL MEDIA PROMOTION
Hoping for word of mouth is pointless – you need to add paid promotion. The most popular and effective methods on Instagram are targeted advertising and advertising from bloggers.
Focus on bloggers with a small audience – it will come out cheaper and more effective since micro-influencers better retain the audience’s attention and have more loyal subscribers. Also, keep in mind that one touch is not enough – try to enter into long-term cooperation, make a blogger the ambassador of your brand – then you will get the maximum effect from advertising.
Targeted advertising is also effective, but for those who do want to understand this tool and are willing to constantly test creatives/audiences and track the results.
Before starting your campaign, answer a few questions:
- What is your target audience?
The more accurately you determine what your target audience is and what style of communication they prefer, the more successful your interaction will be. Without this knowledge, you won’t be able to create a working content plan for social media.
Find out a typical client’s age, location, and style of communication. Create a value proposition – understanding what customer problem your product or service solves.
- What does the company need to get from SMM?
List the most important conversions for your company. For example sales, registrations, newsletter subscriptions, phone numbers left. Record the desired results in numbers right away so that after the campaign starts, you can compare the actual results with the ideal ones.
- How to measure the results?
Counting likes and audience growth is an important part of SMM, but not the most crucial one. Google Analytics or Amplitude you can track sales through social networks, registrations, newsletter subscriptions.
MAKE A CONTENT PLAN
When you have decided who your target audience is and found it on the social network, try to draw up a content plan. Ask these questions before you start doing it:
What value will the content bring to the reader? The three main values that a user who scrolls through the feed is looking for are entertainment, new knowledge, or inspiration.
Who will interact with the content on each social network?
What do competitors post on their social networks? How are your content strategies similar and different?
Who will be in charge of the content production? If you have a startup or a small business, most likely everyone will write, because there is no point in hiring an SMM or content manager.
Posts are more noticeable if they are accompanied by pictures and videos. So decide if the designer will do it as a team, or if you should invest in buying pictures from an external illustrator.
MEASURE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA PERFORMANCE
Likes, reposts, clicks, and audience growth are good metrics for measuring performance, but more importantly, conversions.
What can be a conversion:
- purchase;
- registration on the website;
- subscription to the newsletter;
- the number of pages viewed on the site;
- time spent on pages.
Short conversion, or last click conversion. A user visits the site through the advertising channel, performs the targeted action – for example, makes a purchase, registers on the site – and leaves. Only one ad channel is involved in a short conversion. Most often, these are contextual advertising and SEO optimization.
Long or associated conversion. The user goes to the site several times through different channels, and only then performs the targeted action. Several advertising channels are involved in a long conversion, for example, a search engine and social networks.
TRACK SOCIAL MEDIA SALES
There are a couple of ways to do it:
Promo codes. Write down separate promotional codes for each social network and campaign. Track the frequency with which each code is mentioned.
Questionnaires or direct questions. As a rule, it is not difficult for clients to tell how they learned about the company. Ask them directly or offer a short questionnaire.
Google Analytics and other Internet analytics systems. A lot of official documentation and guides have been written for this system on setting up and all features. You can set goals for the site: views, time on pages, purchases, registrations, etc. The system measures all marketing channels: blog, newsletter, banner ads, social media. If you collect all the channels in one place, it is easier to track the effectiveness of each.
TIPS FOR RELIABLE ANALYTICS
- Remember that traffic analytics (Google Analytics reports and ad cabinets) is sometimes wrong and shows different numbers. Look at the data in several sources at once and decide for yourself which of the options you like best – there will always be discrepancies, and you can only put up with this.
- Add UTM tags for each social media sharing button. If your posts from a website or blog are published on social networks, do not let this traffic disappear from the reports. Take the time to write down the labels.
- Hang UTM tags on all links in social networks and pack them with a shortener. The counter inside the shortener will count the transition, and the UTM tag will prevent traffic from leaking from the report. Also, shortened links look much neater than long links with labels outward.
CONCLUSION
In order to survive on social networks, you will have to publish quality content and invest in advertising every day.
Before you start working with SMM, decide why the company needs it and clearly set goals and objectives – preferably in numbers.
When drawing up a content plan, keep in mind the peculiarities of content consumption and the formation of a feed in each social network.
Counting likes and audience growth is an important, but not the main part of HMM. Remember that it is much more important to count conversions.
The return on investment in SMM should not be negative. But if you have just started and it turns out zero or a small minus – it’s ok.
