Small Business Instagram Marketing 101 | | Coronavirus Update June 1st

June 1, 2020 quick update

June 1 Topic: Instagram Marketing 101 with Alexa, Natalie and Roland

Getting Started

• Create Your Goals & Objectives

• • The very first thing you need to do is define your goals and objectives. Ask yourself, “why am I on Instagram?” That’ll give you a good starting point to formalize what you hope to accomplish by being on Instagram. Your goals and objectives will shed light on every other step in the process.

  • Are you looking for brand awareness or direct bookings?

• Setup Your Account & Optimize

• • Once you’ve defined what your goals are, it’s time to put together your profile. Instagram bios don’t have a lot of settings or forms to fill out. But it’s often the first impression people will have of your brand, so you need to make the most of the space you do have. In this step, we’ll walk you through how to create an engaging bio that compels people to follow.

  • When building your business profile you are limited to 150 characters

  • • Make sure to let customers know your status of open or closed during COVID-19

    • Don’t add unique text and keep it simple with emojis

  • Don’t forget to turn your Instagram account into a Business account so that you can leverage business specific tools and call to actions.

Strategizing

• With your profile setup for success, next you need to create a strategy. This will include what type of content you want to publish, a publishing schedule and everything in between. Essentially, you’re going to plan out how you’re going to reach the goals and objectives you set.

• Figure out what your goal is, this is really the first step because everything builds from this

• WHen you look at your metrics, your feed is a brand or booklet, so don’t get stuck

• How many posts per week, when are you going to post, who is going to post?

• Will you require your technicians to submit a certain number of photos each week?

• Think about a tech takeover where a technician takes over your Instagram account for a day and posts/does a live story

• • You can do this by giving your technician your login or a safer option would be to use a tool like

    https://later.com/

    or have your technician send you their content in real time and post yourself. 

• Think about your posts in advance and remember that people like repetition so use scheduling tools to be consistent and assign a theme for each day of the week you post

• You want to have 5 categories or themes of posts on your Instagram Feed

• • Think about your products/services, your community, and partnerships, behind the scenes, before and after photos

  • • Remember that no one wants to engage with deals, they want to engage with other people’s faces

Research & Find Popular Hashtags

• Hashtags are a key function on Instagram. Their entire search functionality is built on them. As a result, using the right hashtags in your Instagram captions can give your posts more visibility and organic engagement. However, it’s not as simple as using the first hashtags that come to mind. You need to use hashtags people search for, and analyze which ones are driving the most engagement.

• Hashtags are boosting your post for free through their algorithms to people who follow these tags

• Shy away from the large generic hashtags like plumbing. You want to use hashtags that have anywhere between 100,000 -1 million followers. If under 100,000 you won’t get any exposure and if over 1 million, the hashtag is too saturated.

• • To find out how many followers search the hashtag you are thinking of using and you will see how many followers it has

• How many hashtags should you use per post?

• • 10 hashtags

• Where can you add hashtags?

• • Comment on your post with “….#xxx#yyy#zzz”

  • Include hashtags within the post itself

• Don’t forget to add a location hashtag

Implement & Analyze

• It’s time to put your strategy in motion. Succeeding on Instagram comes down execution. It doesn’t matter how well thought out your strategy is if you’re unable to implement it properly. You also need to analyze what you’re doing and be willing to make adjustments when necessary.

• Link your Facebook page and Instagram page

• • Make sure to post unique content on each platform though, don’t rely solely on double dipping the same content on both platforms

  • Give your customers a reason to follow you on both

• Start Sharing Content

• • The star of Instagram is visual content. The images and videos you share will mean the difference between growing your brand on the platform or falling short. It’s time to decide what and when you will post.

  • What do you already have to get started

  • There are templates for Instagram posts on Canva so use these to create on brand graphics

  • • Find templates that Housecall Pro has created for your

      here

Engage With Influencers & Your Followers

• There are local influencers in your community

• • Mom groups, little league and local sports teams, PTA groups, chamber of commerce

  • You want to make sure you cater to them and message them

• Build your loyal fan base by leveraging the Instagram algorithm

• • Create a DM group (engagement pod) with 15 people, ideally local influencers in your community and other home service companies

  • When one person in the group posts, everyone in that group will then like and comment on that post

  • • Instagram algorithm is looking for quick engagement with posts so that they think it is a trending post and will 

• Don’t overlook the importance of engaging on Instagram. If you simply post your videos and images and ignore your comments, you risk alienating your audience. Engagement also means interacting with other users by liking and commenting on their content. Focus on building a community rather than just thinking of Instagram as a place to distribute content.

Collaborations and Partnerships

• Collaborate with another business where you each post about one another’s business

• Do a joint giveaway to get in front of their audience as well as your own

• For Father’s Day coming up, think about collaborations within your local community that benefit both organizations

• You can find lots of resources online for how to create a contest or giveaway

• • https://commentpicker.com/

     

  • https://simpliers.com/en/

• You can always buy traffic, but building your community is key

• • Giveaways are investing in your community of followers 

  • Community isn’t built overnight and you have to consistently work on building your community

Boosting Instagram Posts

• Work very similar to Facebook Boost Posts

• Instagram announced that placing ads before IGTV is coming soon

• You can boost your account or a particular post

Monitor Your Progress & Results

• You’re putting in a lot of work to grow your Instagram presence. Now you need to monitor your effort to see what’s working. You can track key information like your top posts, audience growth and even do competitor analysis.

• There are tools out there to track your Instagram growth

• • https://later.com/

  • https://kicksta.co/

Additional Ways to Engage with Your Audience

• Utilize stories for 24 hour offers

• Support local stickers 

• • Add this sticker to your stories and this acts as a free boost

• For your website, use a

  https://bitly.com/

  link so that you can track that traffic to your website or directly to your online booking page through a bitly link