Instagram is one of the top four social networks worldwide. That means that it’s an excellent place to sell things directly or increase brand awareness. Everyone trying to expand their business should use Instagram.
But how can you get the best out of Instagram? Use a sales funnel.
An Instagram sales funnel is designed to pique your existing followers’ interest, attract new ones, and convert them into clients and purchases.
In this article, we’ll discuss why you should use an Instagram sales funnel and how to set it up. So let’s get started.
Why Should You Choose Instagram?
Did you know Instagram is a popular social networking platform with over 1 billion active users? That was shortly after announcing it had reached the 800-million user mark. A nearly 30% increase in a short period says more about the platform’s appeal and future potential than anything else.
You need to understand that your returns are not all in numbers. Instagram has a higher interaction rate than any other social media network, especially when making purchases.
What’s more? You can easily track sales and leads with Instagram. It has all of the same tracking features as Facebook.
If you’re blown away by the fantastic benefits the Instagram platform draws to a sales funnel, then it’s time to get cracking. Let’s see how you can create a successful Instagram funnel in just seven steps.
How Can You Create a Successful Instagram Sales Funnel?
Instagram is now among the fastest-growing social media sites, and it’s proving to be a terrific method to kickstart a new sales funnel. Here’s how you can create a successful Instagram sales funnel.
Complement this with a good email marketing strategy–create good email content, track email opens so you can further tailor your content to recipients, and send emails regularly so you can stay top of mind with customers–and you’ll see good results.
1. Create Buyer Personas and Use Relevant Ads
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional portrayal of the marketing audience you want to target. It assists you in focusing on the target market for your products or services.
You may then develop organic posts and ads that speak to the target customers you’ve chosen once you’ve defined your buyer personas.
Here’s how to create a fictional consumer who fits your real-world business perfectly.
1. In-depth Research on Your Audience
Here’s where you’ll go to find out everything you need to know about your current consumer base. Age, purchasing habits, income, language, life stage, and interests are crucial data variables.
Who are your current clients? What is the demographic of your social media audience? Whom do your rivals want to target?
2. Identify Pain Points
You need to be concerned about the customer’s problem at this stage. What drives their behavior? What is their ultimate goal? What challenges or annoyances are you hoping to alleviate for your potential customers? You can get this information from your customer-facing employees. You can also get the information from your customers. Just send them a survey, for example, and give them an incentive for them to answer it.
3. How Can You Solve the Problem?
It’s time to consider how you can provide solutions to your customer’s pain points. That entails looking beyond the characteristics and determining the underlying value of your product or service.
Consider your audience’s primary purchasing barriers and where they are in the purchasing process. Then figure out how you help.
4. Create Buyer Persona
You can now collate your information and seek common traits in your data. These traits will be the foundation for your consumer personas.
This buyer persona concept from Survey Monkey brings a fictional data analyst to life. We hear about her schooling and where she lives, as well as her preferences and passions.
What would your marketing approach or product offers be like if this were your business’s typical client?
A well-defined buyer persona aids in the framing of every ad you post out there. It allows you to condense your target demographic into data points that you can quickly enter into your promotion.
That helps you target customers you can push down your Instagram sales funnel.
2. Reach Out to Relevant Influencers
You can use influencer followings to spread the word about your business or items. It won’t feel like an advertisement because their followers trust their voice. It’ll come across as a recommendation.
Desi Perkins, for instance, is an excellent example of a powerful influencer. She has 3.6 million Instagram followers, with one of her sponsored posts garnering over 72,000 likes in July 2017.
There are strategies to reach out to influencers. Here are five approaches to strike up a conversation with an influencer you want to collaborate with:
- You can ask to interview the influencer
- Offer a favor rather than asking for one.
- Make a unique pitch
- Ask for advice on industry-specific issues
- Use the influencer’s name in your content
However, you must stay cautious. Just because an influencer has a large following doesn’t necessarily indicate they’ll be a good fit for your brand. The tools listed below might help you locate top influencers in your niche:
Traackr
Traackr is one of the best tools for creating and tracking an efficient influencer marketing campaign. Traackr was created to assist marketers in managing their influencer connections, but it also includes some features that allow you to track the success of your campaigns.
Onalytica
Onalytica is a contact management software for influencers that helps you locate, contact, and track them. It provides a significant quantity of data to assist you in tracking and measuring your efforts.
Pick the tool that works best for you and meets your business needs.
3. Add Your Product Links to Your Instagram Stories
The simplest way to generate traffic to external content and items on Instagram is to use story link stickers. To add a link sticker to a story, follow these steps:
- Click the + sign in the Instagram app.
- Pick a Story instead of a Post, Reel, or Live.
- Use all of the beautiful content you have at your disposal to craft your story.
- In the top section, tap the sticker symbol.
Then follow these steps:
- Fill in the URL
- Fill in the text section with a call to action, e.g., Tap to read
- Use the sticker to decorate your Story
- To resize it, pinch it
- Toggle through the available color schemes by tapping blue, black, white, beige, etc.
5. Finally, post it to your Story, and you’re finished!
Although Instagram Stories only last 24 hours, including a link in your story can help you increase sales, promote organic engagement, and make it easier for your followers to find the material you want to share.
4. Add a CTA Button in Your Bio
A call to action (CTA) is also a lead generation technique. It’s a digital way of requesting a sale at the end of your pitch. It’s crucial because if you don’t ask, you won’t receive.
That is a terrific approach to get clients to follow you on Instagram and buy from you. Here’s how to add a converting CTA to your bio.
- Go to your Instagram profile.
- Select Edit Profile
- Choose business information
- Contact options from the drop-down menu
- Add an action button by tapping the plus sign (+)
- Choose the action button you’d want to include in your company’s profile
- Press the Submit button.
You can also insert CTAs directly in your bio just like TopShop did below:
Topshop added the CTA “Click to shop” and a link to their website.
People don’t have to go straight to your product page when clicking on your CTA. You can use it for advertising anything, from software to a new blog post.
Use a premium tool like Link In Profile to publish multiple links from your bio. With this application, a single Instagram link leads to many other connections.
5. Tap Into User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) is employed at various phases of the buyer’s journey to influence engagement and enhance conversions. It also boosts the integrity of your brand.
With consumers viewing user-generated content as 2.4 times more authentic than material developed by brands, now is the moment to engage in a customer-centric approach.
UGC is available in various forms and formats, making it easy to find the appropriate fit for your company. They include images, videos, testimonials, product reviews, and more.
We’ve explained what UGC is, but how do you use it on Instagram? You essentially create a shared hashtag that encourages customers to share images of your products as a quick and easy way to do this.
Here’s an example from LuluLemon.
To broaden the brand’s Instagram exposure, they urged fans and loyalists to post images of themselves wearing LuluLemon clothing with the hashtag #thesweatlife.
You can also pose a question or even fund a competition, such as a photography competition.
6. Turn Your Personal Account into a Business Account
You’ll need an Instagram business profile to grow your Instagram following and use the network effectively. That’s because a business profile has attributes that boost a brand’s usability.
Let’s walk you through the steps so you can start enjoying these fantastic benefits.
To begin, head to your profile and then tap the hamburger menu in the app’s top right corner. To get started, go to Settings and then Account.
You’ll see a blue call-to-action at the bottom of the page to switch to a professional account while you’re in the account settings. Just like this:
Instagram has launched an Instagram creator account, a new form of business account.
You’ll need to create an Instagram creator account if you want to work with brands as an influencer. If not, you’ll need to set up an Instagram business account, especially if you plan to work with influencers.
If you’re planning to create or move to a business profile, the next step is to link your Facebook Page. To complete this step, you must have admin rights to your company’s Facebook page.
Your company profile is ready to go once you specify which Facebook page you want to integrate.
You only need to pick a category for the manner of creator you are if you’re converting to a creator account.
7. Sell Directly From Your Instagram Business Account
You don’t want to spend money on ads to market your Instagram sales funnel, whether you’re selling things or services. There are three basic ways to sell on Instagram:
Shoppable Posts
The shopping-bag icon in the corner of a post distinguishes Instagram Shoppable Posts. Because they show as part of a prospective customer’s average Instagram experience, they are incredibly effective.
You may tag products and services in your Instagram stories or photographs and link them straight to your catalog using Instagram’s built-in ecommerce capability. Here’s an example.
When constructing an Instagram post, you can upload up to five products per image or up to 20 for multi-image posts.
Simply tap on the items in the shot to identify them with items from your catalog. You can also promote products on Instagram stories, but each Story can only have one product.
Sell Through Comments
Share your product photographs with “Comment to Buy” guidelines in the caption to advertise through comments. For instance, for a clothes product, you might add “Comment SOLD [plus your size] to buy.”
Here’s an example:
Then, to organize delivery and payment, you’ll have to follow up on each remark with a DM. You can even automate the process with third-party apps like Soldsie or Comment Sold.
On Instagram, many startups choose to go right to the DMs. For artists that create one-of-a-kind items or a limited quantity of a product, selling through DMs is a convenient approach.
Although comments and direct messages involve more work than Instagram Shoppable Posts, this manual technique is a fantastic place to start for new businesses without a website or a structured product catalog.
In Closing
Creating an Instagram marketing funnel will undoubtedly benefit your brand. It’s one of the most effective methods for locating new consumers, engaging with them, and making connections that lead to sales.
You learned how to create an Instagram sales funnel from this post. Create buyer personas, add product links to your Instagram Stories, add a CTA button, leverage user-generated content, and turn your account into a business account. Finally, sell directly from your Instagram business account.
Follow these tips to design an effective Instagram sales funnel. However, don’t settle with that once you’re done. Remember that regularly measuring and adjusting your sales funnel marketing approach is also key to successful Instagram sales.
