By Instagram has approximately 700 million active users out of one billion in total who have diverse interests ranging from beauty and fashion to accounting and cars. It’s practically a ‘sure bet’ that you’ll discover your target audience on this social media, no matter what your brand represents. The only problem is that there’s no obvious way to attract traffic back to your website once your brand page is set up.
Understanding the value of your Instagram sales funnel is critical for growing visitors and sales. It’s possible that it’s even more crucial than the always-elusive algorithm. Instagram sales funnel is a path you have to take to start earning money through this social network.
It All Started With Instagram Shopping
Many Instagram users, mostly in the big markets such as the United States, were previously introduced to a tool called Instagram Shopping. It allows brands to tag products with a product name and price in their Instagram photos. When an Instagram user taps on an image and then clicks on the product name, they are directed to a product description page, from which they can choose to visit the brand’s website.
For years, many brands have been waiting for Instagram to do something similar. However, in order to take advantage of this function, your business must have both a Facebook Page and a Facebook Shop Section set up. Don’t worry if your firm doesn’t currently have access to Instagram Shopping or if you don’t have a Facebook Shop Section set up; you can still use your Instagram sales funnel to boost sales.
The steps you’ll need to grasp the Instagram sales funnel and gauge your potential success are outlined in the following text. Are you unfamiliar with the term “sales funnel”? That’s just a fancy way of describing how a company guides its prospects through the various stages of the buying process. Everything will make clear as we progress through this article, so let’s get started.
Preparing the ‘Terrain’ Before Entering the Sales Funnel
First of all, you need to create quality content and provide value in order for your profile to attract attention. Don’t bombard your followers with annoying content from the very beginning, i.e. don’t just post pictures of your products and services. Try to make a specific story out of your profile. Find interesting content that may be related to your product or service.
If your product fits with an interior or decorative design, take advantage of it and shoot quality photos that will have a visual story. Show all the places in which your product fits and what value it can provide. Create interesting visuals, find or make fun videos yourself that may be related to your product or service. It’s recommended that you use a strategy that includes that you post promo content of your product or service every 5 to 8 posts.
Step 1: How to Get Attention Without Investing in Advertising?
The first step of the Instagram sales funnel is to attract visitors to view your profile. You can do that with notifications, hashtags, sharing your post on other social networks… If you want to spend as little money as possible, you’ll do it best by being active on Instagram every day, meaning you’ll comment on posts, like, participate in a story poll, send a DM to your target audience, use the hashtags they follow in posts, etc.
For instance, find the 3 most beautiful photos on the profile of a potential follower, like them, and leave a comment on the one you like the most. In order not to waste time, you can do all this, e.g. while riding the bus on the way to work and back, while waiting in line at the bank, post office, supermarket, etc. If you are impatient (because this is a marathon and not a sprint), then you can add Instagram ads to all this and pay for advertising.
Step 2: Keep Quality Content Always Ready
The second step is the quality content we mentioned in the introduction. When a person sees your picture and name in the notification after a few likes and comments and decides to visit your profile, you must have content ready to keep them there.
Maybe that person will just reciprocate the like or comment and won’t follow you, but don’t worry – you’re not at a loss. You have remained in the subconscious of that person to whom your product or service has remained somewhere in their memory, and you, in turn, have received interaction on your posts.
Step 3: Commit to Everyone Equally and Gain Confidence in the Responses
The third step is closely related to the second and refers to the interaction with your content.
If a person likes your content, you’ll get likes, comments, or maybe they will save some of your posts – and that’s where your profile gets interaction. The important thing in this step is to respond to every comment or message you receive. If the form is such that you can answer the comment with a question, do it to continue the interaction and get more.
Step 4: Maintain and Increase Quality Even When You’re Followed
The fourth step is that if a person follows you, you must strive to continue with quality and even better content in order for that person to remain interested in your profile.
Many rush to new followers and forget about the old ones because those old followers are your loyal audience and a potential group that will buy your product or service in the future. Of course, the goal is to gain new followers and potential customers for your product or service, but those who have been with you for a long time are the witnesses of your work.
Step 5: Don’t Neglect Old Followers Because They Are the Key to Sales
That’s why there is the fifth step – increasing the presence and interaction with old followers. Make an even greater effort to keep current followers with you during each new post, whether it’s a product or service promotion, or a simple visual post.
Remember that the best advertisement is a recommendation, and from whom will you get the best recommendation than from someone who has been following you for a long time, right? And if they are satisfied with your product or service, the sky is your limit. Remember that a good voice is heard far away and it spreads even faster.
Step 6: You’re Ready to Sell
From that group of followers who follow you for a long time and regularly, those who would like to buy your product or service will stand out. Give your old followers a loyalty reward and make a sale via email with which they will receive a special offer. There are four types of popular email marketing campaigns that result in sales and lead generation. The first one is the newsletter, the most popular and most used type, so no wonder the features of the newsletter can be improved and sorted out using platforms such as Benchmark. The remaining types of popular email marketing campaigns are acquisition emails, retention emails, and promotional emails.
You’re more likely to sell services to those who have been following your work from the beginning or for a long time than to those who have just followed you and are yet to go through the Instagram sales funnel until the final sale. The new potential customer doesn’t have as much trust as the old one, so they must go through the sales funnel and become your regular followers of trust that will be built from the first to the last step. To speed things up a bit, ask old customers to review your product or service in order to introduce it to new customers and gain their trust faster.
Building an Instagram Sales Funnel: Top
Your Instagram sales funnel begins with your followers at the very top. You want as many people from your target demographic as possible to enter your funnel. The more individuals you can get to convert (perform a desired action) on your website, the more people you can bring into your funnel. Across all industries and online traffic sources, the average conversion rate is around 3%. A conversion rate is the percentage of individuals that come to your website and subsequently do something else, like make a purchase or fill out a lead-generating form.
Consider a conversion to be an online sale for the sake of today’s post. If 100 individuals visit your website from Instagram after seeing a post with a strong call-to-action to make a purchase, you may expect 3 people to complete the sale at a conversion rate of 3%. If you can get 100,000 individuals to visit your website through Instagram, you’ll earn 3,000 sales at a conversion rate of 3%.
Grow Your Instagram Followers Base
The more individuals who follow you on Instagram, the more people you’ll be able to persuade to visit your website. That’s why it’s critical to increase the base of your Instagram followers. Also, that’s why it’s critical to expand your Instagram following with people who are part of your target market.
You can buy false followers from a website, but those ‘bots’ will never visit your site and make a purchase, so it’s pointless. It’s preferable to put your time (and money) into building a genuine Instagram following base. This can be accomplished by going along with a consistent posting strategy, using popular hashtags for your business, and collaborating with comparable brands to cross-promote each other.
Building an Instagram Sales Funnel: The Middle
You’ll want to keep an eye on your engagement rate as you increase your Instagram follower count. This is the percentage of your total followers who actively like and comment on your posts. While having a large following is beneficial, it’s merely the first stage in the Instagram sales funnel. You must interact with those followers in order to persuade them to buy from you. Posting high-quality photographs of your items, responding to comments (especially queries), asking questions in your posts, and putting a strong call-to-action in each post description are all ways to make this evident.
In principle, keeping your audience interested is easier than increasing your follower count. You don’t have to go out and locate new people to add to your funnel, but you do have to create content that speaks to them. When a post has a high engagement rate, you know it’s solid material. Engagement levels vary by industry, but in most cases, they should be above 4%.
Consistently providing high-quality material is the best method to boost interaction, but you can also get more specific with recommendations like posting at the exact time of the day, say, between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. on Mondays and Thursdays, to further boost engagement, as these might be the days and hours when Instagram users interested in your niche are most active. Keeping track of your Instagram follower growth and interaction can be difficult at times, but there are tools to assist you. For example, you may schedule your Instagram posts in advance using free software like Buffer or Sprout Social. This allows you to schedule your updates whenever you have spare time, eliminating the need to remember to post at the best moment each day.
Building an Instagram Sales Funnel: Bottom
The folks who are most inclined to buy are at the bottom of your Instagram sales funnel. They follow your account and comment on your posts frequently, indicating significant interest in your brand and services. These are the people you want to bring to your website so they can buy something.
You should constantly check that the page you’re connecting to is relevant to your Instagram content and optimized for that specific audience. This implies that your landing page should be mobile-friendly and relevant to the content you’re sharing on Instagram.
Collect Leads
While you can link to something like your most recent blog post or a product page, raising your email list and racking up leads is the best method to use your Instagram sales funnel for linking to a landing page. This can be accomplished by marketing an Instagram-only offer and providing a lead magnet that’s specifically customized to your Instagram audience.
Instagram, unlike Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest doesn’t allow you to connect to each of your posts. Instead, your Instagram bio can only contain one link. You’ll need to include a strong call-to-action in your posts to persuade the most engaged followers to click the link in your profile. You’ll want to employ a trackable URL to better track the sales outcomes from your Instagram followers. For starters, you can purchase a new domain name that you’ll use solely for an Instagram promotion, and then have that URL forward to your main site. Then you may look up all traffic referred from that URL in Google Analytics to see if it’s your Instagram traffic.
Buying different domain names for each campaign you wish to run could grow expensive, so attaching UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters to your primary URL is a better alternative. UTM parameters are simply bits of code that you may append to the end of any URL to make it trackable in analytics software such as Google Analytics. There are plenty of websites explaining how to build a free UTM link that will add on UTM parameters for you. Naturally, a URL with UTM parameters is pretty long and would appear cluttered in your Instagram bio. As a result, you can shorten your trackable URL using bit.ly or any other shortening service once you’ve created it. Recall that it doesn’t matter what you use as your own UTMs as long as they have meaning for you and are easy to remember.
We don’t advocate devoting a lot of time to creating your UTMs. It’s just important to have them. The most important aspect here is to include a CTA (call-to-action) in your Instagram posts, such as clicking on a link. The purpose of this is to encourage followers to “click the URL” that’s visible in bio on your Instagram account to get them to proceed, reaching your website where they can buy something you offer (a product, service…) exactly from the very bottom of your Instagram funnel.
You’re All Set Now…
Build an action plan given that up by this stage of the process you learned a lot more about how an Instagram sales funnel works. Whether or not you’re just getting started or you collected a large Instagram base of followers makes no difference. To move them down the funnel, resume adding as many new, preferably, targeted followers to the top of your funnel as possible each day. This should be followed by leveraging engagement and making a compelling CTA.
It’s certainly clear to you that each level of the funnel builds on the one before it until you reach the sale stage or conversion. Your metrics should be checked on a daily basis to ensure that your funnel is working well.
- Check your follower count at the top of the funnel,
- Keep an eye on the number of comments and likes you get on every post, as well as how many people click on your bio link in the middle of the funnel,
- Check how many conversions you’re getting from your Instagram-specific landing page at the bottom of the funnel.
From there, you can confidently and skillfully manage your business-related Instagram account.
