Your social media profiles are among your most important marketing channels. Social media doesn’t just enable you to promote your business to a large audience, it also enables you to interact directly with your user base. If you want to create a reliable stream of visitors from your Instagram profile to your website, here’s what you need to do.
Add a Link to Your Website in Your Bio
Some people would like you to believe that effective social media marketing is a dark art that only a chosen few really understand. While there are definitely more nuances to social media marketing than a lot of people realise, you can also go a long way on the back of the simplest of techniques. Among the simplest, yet most effective of all the marketing techniques available to you on Instagram, is including a link to your website in your bio.
Instagram allows users to include a single clickable link in their profile bio. This is a golden opportunity to promote a link, but with only one available, you want to make it count. You can add a link to your profile by navigating to your profile settings and then adding the relevant URL to the ‘Website’ field.
Clearly, the most obvious choice here is to post a link to your website. This isn’t necessarily a bad idea and is probably the most sensible option in most cases. However, there are also some other options that you might want to consider that can provide a similar boost to your website traffic. For example, if you are currently running a time-limited promotion on your website, then you can use your profile as another means of advertising it to the wider public.
Another option for your bio link is to use the tool have2have.it. With this tool, you can use your bio link to direct users towards a page that displays products or content that you offer in an Instagram feed-style format. The New York Times, for example, has featured a Have2Have.it link in their bio for some time now. Clicking the link takes you to a page where you are presented with a series of images relating to the top stories of the day. Clicking these images takes you to the relevant story.
By using data analytics and data about your website, you can gain vital insights into the kind of content you produce that resonates the most with your audience. Once you understand what types of content you produce are the most popular, you can then begin to focus your output on those and maximise your ROI. Build your content strategy around your most successful endeavours.
Combine Your Images with a Call to Action
If you want your Instagram images to serve as effective conversion tools, bringing new visitors to your website and turning as many of them into paying customers as possible, adding a call to action, and your website URL to your most popular photos can lead to a significant traffic boost.
A call to action can be anything from asking your audience to visit your website to enter a competition, or even buying a particular product. Whatever it is that you want your audience to do, including a call of action directing them to do it will lead to greater uptake. There’s a reason that every YouTuber ends every video with, “like and subscribe” – if you tell people to do these things, then they will often do them.
Include a URL in All Videos
According to most research, videos are the most effective medium to use for marketing on Instagram. In fact, they can be up to three times as effective as an image post is at generating inbound links. The extra time and money required to create a video is well worth it when you consider the potential benefits that it might bring to your website. Even a relatively short narrative could make a significant difference to your business’s fortunes.
Many businesses have found innovative ways of using their Instagram feeds to promote their work in unusual and attention-catching ways. In some cases, businesses and websites are outputting video files that resemble professional TV commercials.
An easy way of enhancing the impact of these videos that you publish to Instagram is to include the URL of your website as a text overlay. If your URL is relatively short and sweet, you might even consider saying it out loud in the video in the form of a voiceover.
Advertise on Instagram
Social media marketing is vital for any business operating today. As marketing platforms, social media services are able to offer a number of advantages that can’t be replicated anywhere else. For one thing, social media platforms enable businesses and websites to target very specific demographics with their marketing. Even the most niche of businesses can benefit from advertising on Instagram.
A growing number of consumers are searching social media for purchasing advice before they look on the usual search engines. For example, someone who is about to launch their own business and needs to identify a suitable utility supplier may well look to social media to find recommendations before they look online. If you are a website that provides these kinds of price comparisons, you want to be just as visible on social media as on SERPs.
Instagram has opened up its API considerably in recent years. If you have a price comparison business that enables users to compare the prices of business electricity, gas and other utilities, then you can take advantage of the Instagram API to ensure that your ads are being targeted at the right demographics, such as those who are considering launching their own businesses.
With a solid marketing strategy, you will be able to make back whatever you invest in your Instagram marketing many times over.
Identify the Right Influencers for Your Niche
Influencers are one of the most important aspects of social media marketing; they are a big part of the reason that brands are so eager to leverage the power of social media marketing. If you can get the right influencers talking about your business and products, it can completely transform your fortunes virtually overnight.
However, you shouldn’t be aiming to work with just any old influencer. Reaching out to an influencer and establishing a relationship with them will require an investment of time. This investment isn’t worth it unless you are sure that the effort is going to pay off. In order to really reap the benefits of working with an Instagram influencer, you need to first identify which influencers command the most influence in your niche.
All About Automation
If your marketing budget is limited, you can still use Instagram as an effective marketing tool – you just need to be smart about how you go about it. Using automation tools to manage your Instagram account will enable you to develop a consistent schedule for uploading new content and automatically liking and sharing content that will draw attention to your profile.
For example, liking and engaging with the right hashtags will help you to get noticed by the people that you need to appeal to the most. Liking content that is associated with hashtags that are popular amongst your target audience will help to increase the visibility of your profile and can end with users associating your business with trending hashtags. This is a very effective way of pulling customers into your marketing stream.
One of the most powerful things you can do with automation is to establish an automatic posting schedule. Scheduling your content to automatically be posted and tagged won’t just save you time and make your life easier, it will enable you to prepare all your content properly beforehand and will enable your audience to easily find any new content you upload.
In order to get the most out of your Instagram automation software, you need to know what the optimal posting time is for your content. The best approach for identifying your optimal time is simply to spread out the time that you upload your content and measure the results. Look for the times of day that lead to the most engagement from users to maximise the impact of your uploads and your scheduling.
There are numerous different automation tools for you to choose from, depending on the kind of content that you produce and the audience you are trying to attract. For driving users to your website, Jarvee is a popular automation tool that includes all the basic functions you would expect – the ability to post at certain times, automatically like content and follow users etc. – along with some much more advanced features that we haven’t seen deployed in other automation tools.
However, Jarvee is just one of the many options out there. Check out what’s available before you commit to a single tool.
Social media marketing is perhaps the most important marketing medium for businesses and websites today. If you use your Instagram account the right way, you can dramatically increase the flow of traffic to your website while also raising awareness about your business and brand in general.