How my team and I built our Instagram account from 25 – 3,100+ laser targeted followers in less than 2 months (and increased sales by 350%!) This is a continuation from Mark Khoders previous post who is a very close friend of ours. You can view the instagram account here: instagram/liquid_co If you are selling products (maybe services too, I haven’t thought that far yet!) and you arent on Instagram, you are missing out BIG TIME! Instagram is the KING of social media engagement. It has 58 times more engagement per follower than Facebook and 120 times more engagement per follower than Twitter! Study conducted by Forrester here: blogs.forrester/nate_elliott/14-04-29-instagram_is_the_king_of_social_engagement In early February my friends and I launched a niche product on Kickstarter with no list and with only around 150 ‘likes’ on Facebook. Our campaign doubled the amount we needed and launched our new business venture. I always thought Instagram was useless for business and just another social media gimmick for selfies so I paid very little attention to Instagram when we first made an account and only had about 25 followers, mainly from family and friends. One day I heard from a friend about someone who was making $2M a year from selling only through Instagram and this shocked my world! This was in late June. My team and I began researching and looking into Instagram marketing. We began posting pictures and adding hashtags and along the way learned that hashtags shouldn’t be put in captions but rather in the comments section – if you make a mistake or want to add/remove hashtags, you’d have to delete and repost the image, losing all the likes. If you put hashtags in the comments you can continue adding more or deleting as you need. This went okay for a while but wasn’t very effective, we gained about 50 followers doing this. I’m a firm believer in working smart not hard so we began looking at other ways. The next method we decided to try which we thought was pretty smart was to find accounts in the similar industry as ours and look at the fans who followed them. We started following those fans in order to get them to notice our page and follow back. This started getting tedious and we found that some fans werent even active. Again we changed to a different method of looking at similar accounts on their most recent photos and seeing the fans who liked the photos were (since we’d then know these people were active). We then went to each individual fan and started interacting with them by commenting on their photos, liking their photos, etc. This actually worked pretty well and got us to 800 followers between the start of July to the end of July. The only problem though, was that it was SOOOO tedious so we went back to brainstorming of how we could reach more followers without much effort, there had to be a more efficient and effective way! During July, one Instagram account that sold leather bags had emailed us asking for a shout out and we happily helped them out as they were preparing for a launch on Kickstarter as well, at the time they had around 1,000 followers. By accident, a few weeks later we found the same guys photo posted on a hugely popular Instagram account with over 1 Million followers and received almost 17,000 likes! This sky rocketed their followers to 4,000 and that’s when the idea clicked for us. We began researching and compiling a list of large influential Instagram accounts that were closely related to our products and that were our target audience (fashion, mens fashion, lifestyle, luxury, etc). We then crafted a customized email and emailed a few places. In the email we introduced who we were, what we wanted, and how we could return the favour (giving a freebie, hosting a giveaway of our product to their fans, returning a shoutout, etc). The very first Instagram account that agreed to provide us with a shoutout, gained us 600 RAVING followers within 24 hours. We knew we had hit something big so we rinsed and repeated the process. Each time we’d gain anywhere from 100 – 600 new fans. Our online sales from our products went through the roof, email list subscribers went through the roof, comments and engagement with new fans went through the roof! Our sales grew 350% from Instagram marketing alone and it has done wonders for our business. It’s only been 4 weeks since we began this method and have gone from 800 – 3100+ laser targeted fans. We are now aiming to reach 10,000 - 15,000 by the end of September Quick Summary: - Find large influential Instagram accounts that are your target market and resonate with what you do/sell - Craft a short, direct to the point pitch to them outlining who you are, what you want, and how you can return the favour - Rinse and repeat In case you missed it, you can view the instagram account here: instagram/liquid_co I hope this post provides some helpful tips and maybe spark some ideas on how to leverage Instagram for your business.
Posted on: Thu, 28 Aug 2014 10:11:25 +0000
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