How to use Instagram Throughout The Marketing Funnel

It is surprising that a considerable percentage of marketers still do not use Instagram in spite of its being one of the most important social networks and gaining a special place in the marketing world due to its popularity around the globe.

Instagram and its visual content are getting more and more users each year; the number of its users increased from 30 million in 2012 when Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger sold it as a small startup to Facebook to more than 1 billion users in 2018 and is still increasing.

Reviewing Instagram statistics persuade any marketer to consider using this powerful social network. For example, the platform is the most preferred social network for teens in the United States and 60% of users discover products on Instagram. These stats prove why it is important to use Instagram as a marketer either as person who manages a company’s business page or promoting your own personal brand.

But Why Instagram is a powerful marketing platform? As Seth Godin once said, “Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell”.

Brands, now, have recognized the importance of storytelling and successful ones assigned a special place for it! It is why Instagram is gaining a special place in marketing policies of businesses. Through Instagram, you not only can promote your brand, you can directly engage with your followers and get useful feedback.

How to use Instagram in your marketing funnel?

Instagram is one of the most important tools in your marketing strategy. Getting advantage of your Instagram page in your marketing funnel, you can comprehend the journey of potential customers from early stages of awareness and discovering your brand to becoming your customers. And yes, Instagram is a good tool to convert thousands of people into your customer.

The core idea behind a marketing funnel, as you may know, is that the number of leads would decrease through different stages of your marketing journey. So you need to find the best ways to guide them through this marketing funnel to turn as much lead as possible to loyal customers.

Depending on your business and policy, you can define different marketing funnels with different stages. However a common funnel consists of three stages, each having some other subcategories as well, from lead generation stage including awareness to lead nurture including stages like interest and decision and final stage of conversion including commitment and sale(if sale is your final desired action).

However, the concept of marketing, traditionally depicted in a form of a funnel, has changed over time with the bottom of the funnel expanding in an extra stage of retaining the customers. So, though the number of leads turning to the customers may be few, turning them to repeat customers became an important stage in a marketing funnel.

As a good marketer, you need to define different strategies for each stage to retain as many lead as possible. There are plenty of tools which can help you in each step to get the most out of your marketing efforts and turn Instagram users into your potential costumers. Here we would introduce some of the best tools you can use through your Instagram marketing funnel. Continue reading to see our suggestions for the best tools to use in each phase of your marketing funnel in Instagram.

Awareness: how to go viral on Instagram?

To become visible to more Instagram users, or what is called awareness in a marketing funnel, you need to have high quality contents as well as great connections. One of the first steps and quite obvious to all people who have used Instagram before, is producing great content. High quality content is the first step in getting your desired audience familiar with your business and it will differentiate your brand from others active in your niche. Being a visual media, Instagram engage your audience even more with your content.

Besides Instagram’s own editing tools like its photo filters, there are many powerful tools you can use to share high quality images and videos with your audience, some of which free to use.

Applications like Canva and Photo Editor Pro to edit your pictures and also InShot or Quik for videos are easy to use and help you produce great photos and videos for your Instagram page.

Though we have put it in the first stage, content is important throughout all the stage of your marketing funnel. Try to keep it always the best. Besides raising awareness, your content would help a lot in making your audience interested in your content, encouraging them to buy and converting them to your loyal costumer.

Producing the best content, you need to find the right audience. A task which is not so easy on Instagram with lots of active brands and businesses. You should devote enough time to find your audience, especially the first 10k followers. Instagram hashtags is a good way to make you posts visible to your right audience. RiteTag is a good tool to find most appropriate hashtags for your brand.

Instagram’s own tools like Sponsored Posts and GeoTags can help also to make your posts appear on Instagram’s users feed or explore page who are not following you. Though you should pay for the first one, use the second one as much as possible especially if your audiences are located in a certain place.

There are other ways like influencer marketing which can help you to gain a lot of followers in a short period of time, however it is costly compared. Take advantage of this way if your marketing budget lets you and don’t decide just based on the number of their followers. SocialBlade is a great tool to view their analytics and decide which influencer to choose.

Interest: how to engage your followers with your brand?

Finding the right kind of audience, you need to engage with them to keep them interested into your business and hence enter the next stage in your Instagram marketing funnel.
Here you need to share contents which make them interested in your business. For example you can show the process of producing a popular product via your Instagram Story. People would like to know how their favorite products are being made.

Besides continuing to produce high quality pictures and videos, writing motivational Instagram captions is a powerful tool as well. There are tools for every part of your caption, from its hashtags to its texts. Instant Caption, a helpful Instagram app, let you to write the best captions for your posts.

Don’t miss Instagram stories which even is outpacing its rival, WeChat. The number of Instagram active users sharing Instagram story reached 400 million in July 2018, a number which was just 250 million users in July 2017. StoryArt is our suggestion to make your stories even more interesting.

To get enough attention and make your posts appear on your followers’ feed, you need to post when your followers are active and also be consistent in posting your content, your followers need to feel your active presence. Tools offering scheduling services would help you to posts on certain times when your followers are active on Instagram even if you are not online yourself. Buffer is one of the best post scheduling tools.

Here also comes what we call Instagram automation services. These services are time saving and to the point. They will help you to find the right kind of audiences with minimum waste of time and also money.

They will help you to find the right kind of audiences with minimum waste of time and also money. In the stage called awareness stage, automation tools like Instamber bot make Instagram users aware of your business and products, providing services like following other users or sending them direct massages on a single purpose, encouraging them to visit your profile and follow your page if they find it interesting.

But in this stage, automation tools let you to engage with your followers: like their posts, comment on them, manage your own comments to respond the most important ones. Now social media is not just about presence, it is also about engaging and caring. When your followers feel they are important to you, they will get more engaged with your brand. A study on IconSquare shows for example that commenting on other users’ posts would increase the possibility of being followed by them by 4 times.

Conversion: how to change your followers into customers?

In decision making stage you can use different approaches like using paid partnership in which influencers’ comments on your product lead to your followers taking action. You can also motivate users with discounts or run different campaigns.

Later is another tool you can use in this phase, one of its functions is to act as a listening tool. Its service to manage comments let you to be on time in answering your followers’ questions specially question regarding your product and their price which lead to sale.

Instgram Shoppable Posts, one of the latest Instagram updates make it easy for your followers to buy your services and products. Also use Bio Link as well as story links to make your followers take action (a great CTA in the caption would work also).

Contacting your followers through direct message is a useful way too. As you may know, direct marketing is one of the ways which increases the customer conversion rate rapidly. Use Instagram direct message to interact with your followers and answer their questions. Send them messages which encourage them to act, some examples are:

• sending a brief instruction about the function of your new products
• encouraging them to use your services and products by sending the latest discounts
• sending them your contact info so they can find you easily when needed.

To save your time, use Instamber Instagram auto direct message which helps you to classify your audiences and send each of them the proper message automatically.

Retaining: turn your customers into loyal ones?

Getting to the sale stage, your marketing efforts will be useless if you do not have a good strategy to retain your current customers, a less costly marketing stage but at the same time a very effective one. Loyalty programs are powerful tools for example to keep your current customers satisfied. you need to define advocacy actions like Instagram interaction (like, comment, tag and so on) and pay them back by proper rewards, not just to thank your loyal customers but also to increase your ROI.

Instagram’s statistics, provided for business pages, give useful information about your audience to decide on the content you should produce and the actions you need to take to keep your customers satisfied. Don’t forget to use other third party tools like SproutSocial which show the demographic as well as other stats of your page to decide about tools and contents to be used in your future posts. Tracking your steps through these tools is a great aid in assessing your performance and improving them if needed.

You have invested a lot for your marketing strategy up to this stage so do not forget to continue sharing high quality contents and engage with your customers.

As you may have noticed, many of these tools can be used in every stages of your Instagram marketing funnel. Be creative in using them and get the most out of your marketing strategy.