Instagram has become one of our favorite social media platforms over the years. With new features added frequently, and the user base of the platform, it is hard to ignore its impact. With over 800 million monthly users on Instagram, it is as good a platform as any if you’re targeting a media-centered user base.

Instagram is the fastest growing social media platform. Businesses, photographers, artists, celebrities are all having their online presence noted on Instagram.

Staying ignorant of all the facts and figures and not managing this platform for your online presence is living in ignorance. This doesn’t serve well to a business in today’s age where social media presence is more essential than any other forms of marketing.

Instagram is also like Facebook, LinkedIn and other platforms a great place for lead generation. Let’s have a look at the ways you can achieve this:

Best Ways to Generate Leads from Instagram

1.  Targeting:

First and foremost, it is important to define the lead numbers and kind of leads you want. This is a crucial step in the process of any lead generation cycle, as it defines the output and process of the remaining processes. Here are a few questions to ask yourself before setting out to generate leads:

• How do they spend their free time?
• What goals and values do they have?
• What kind of media interests do they have?
• Where do they prefer to go on a holiday?

Such character defining questions help you define the image of the kind of leads you can target on Instagram. This targeting and defining process outlines the rest of your lead generation process on Instagram and other social platforms too. Having a clear target about what to achieve makes it easier to complete these goals rather than having no clue about it.

2. Optimization:

What next? After you have your ideal lead type clear with you start setting up your Instagram profile accordingly. But, your leads must be able to tell a couple things on visiting the profile:

• That it is your authentic profile
• What they will be getting by visiting your profile.

The Instagram profile should be first of all be consistent with the profile photo and handle, I.e., same as other social media profiles. Your leads aren’t going to be visiting your social media profiles for your goodwill or personal information. People visit company profiles on social media to know more about offers, information, products and the latest updates.

Instead of the bookish description about your portfolio or company as: We are A and do so and so. Instead, use the description space to make a mark about the company. Place a CTA and a description to drive more benefits rather than description.

To solve the problem of putting a suitable description with the aim of attracting more leads in mind, think about what your visitors will want from the page. Since the first thing a profile visitor will see is the description, design it a certain way.

It should ideally clearly describe what the visitor will get after clicking on the CTA you include below it. The CTA should take them to a landing page to deliver as described in exchange of email addresses or information.

3. Promotion:

Now that you have your kind of leads defined and your profile ready and optimized, the next step is to bring in traffic.

Content:

Based on your niche of product or services, make sure there is at least one post uploaded every day on the Instagram. This is essential as the audience likes consistency and wants regular updates on Instagram when they follow anyone.

There are so many apps in the form of image editors, video editors, third party special camera apps to help one generate different kinds of engaging content. Since Instagram is all about the media, the creative one takes away the prize. Be as creative as possible here and be sure to include hashtags using apps for best used hashtags.

This is to bring out your posts to the people searching for them much like a search engine.

Additionally, every post should have some kind of call to action or an action to bring in more leads directly or indirectly. Engagement options like: ‘double tap to agree’, ‘tag friends who want to see this’ and so on.

Engagement options:

Community engagement is really important for your page on Instagram. Many people user a share for share strategy in which they take turns to re-post others’ posts to their users for better outreach. Find influencers in your niche who may be interested to do this or in some way help you reach out to a large follower base. You can also consider ethical ways to grow your follower count, such as organic content creation and engagement.

The best and traditional way to grow Instagram traffic is to comment, follow, like other posts and profiles. Find out such options by either following similar hashtags that your ideal leads are following or directly engaging with them for maximum output.

Contests:

Use contests to giveaway prizes to establish a chain of people following your account for a chance to win. This is more effective today as a lot of accounts end up getting a large number of leads using this technique. Understand what your idea definition of leads might want to win and giveaway such prizes to get large number of people to sign up.

Now you’re getting engagement, profile visits, and even getting people on to your landing page through the CTA in your bio on your profile, your profile on Instagram is nearly set up to attract as many leads as possible. But there is always a chance for improvement. And to improve, you need to analyze.

Integrate Instagram With Your Website

If you’re an E-Commerce business then another way of generating engagement and potential leads is by embedding Shoppable Instagram Posts on your website. This not only helps you to bring in potential traffic but also generates revenue for your E-Commerce business.

TaggShop is a visual commerce platform, that helps you to turn your social into sales by converting your embedded Instagram posts on your business website into Shoppable Posts. This brings the point of sale closer to the point of inspiration, thereby avoiding any chances of confusion and abandonment of the shopping journey thereby enhancing your overall conversion and sales.

4. Tracking

Tracking is a very important step, you can either look at your insights directly from the Instagram app, or you can use an analytics tool like Socialinsider. If you’re unable to track and analyze your results and the effort and investment that went into it, it is pretty careless. This way you might end up investing more than you give away. Calculate your ROI based on certain factors:

• Landing page click rate
• Landing page conversion rate
• Lifetime customer value
• Customer acquisition cost

Use these factors to carefully analyze and improve your efforts. Are your efforts paying off, in the long run, using Instagram as the lead generation source? These factors and numbers should help you figure it out.

Instagram is getting new features as fast as they come into the market. While these techniques are great to attract leads to your profile and landing page, there can be new techniques coming up fast.

Be on the lookout for other users and company profiles and the techniques they use. Organically growing Instagram follower base using such techniques can be a bit time-consuming. But in the end, it will be worth it.