How to Create a Social Media Strategy Using Instagram

Use Instagram to Strategize Your Social Media

Staying up to date with how social media works can be a sure way to grow your business. Instagram in particular can be a powerful tool to build your brand and funnel leads into your booking process.

When you run an Instagram audit and analyze your client journey, you can build a strategy that maximizes your profile.

Understand the Role of Social Media In Your Client Journey

Think about how your Instagram account fits into your holistic client journey. Do you offer tools and products through your posts? Do your followers normally DM you to ask questions and schedule meetings?

Then consider your goals for the future. Do you want more leads from your profile? Or do you need a better way to organize the inquiries you get from Instagram?

Answering these questions will make it easier to make the most of your profile. When you decide on your goals, it’s easier to figure out the strategy you’ll use. Once you’ve set your goals, it’s time to conduct an Instagram audit to see how you’re performing currently.

Your Instagram Audit

When you conduct an Instagram audit, you determine how to create your own social media strategy. Your audit will show you what you’re doing right and what you need to improve.

Your Instagram Profile

When you first begin to create your social media strategy, you may be tempted to focus on your content first. The truth is, though, that your profile is what reflects your business. Once you start posting more, people will head to your profile to learn about who you are and what you offer, which is why it’s important to optimize first.

For starters, look at the most visible elements on your Instagram page, which are your username, your name, and your photo. Your username should be as close to your business name as possible, but easy to share. Keep it simple and avoid additional characters like underscores. Instagram limits you to 30 characters, so choose a concise name.

Your Instagram name is searchable. When people search for businesses on Instagram, it uses the keywords from usernames for search results. Remember this when you determine if your name is descriptive enough. Include your business type, as well as your location if you serve a specific market.

You can only change your Instagram name twice in two weeks, so it’s best to pick something that aligns with your core business value. Test your username in the notes section of your phone or use a character counter online to see how long it is.

Next, look over your profile photo. If you’re an independent business owner, you probably have the most client-facing position. If that’s the case, use a headshot for your Instagram photo. Potential clients will want to see who they’re working with and it also makes you approachable. If you don’t want to do that, you can use your company logo to make your profile cohesive with your website.

Bio

Your bio gives you a space for copy and a link. You get 150 characters to describe who you are and what you offer. People normally look this over first when they land on your profile because it’s easy to read quickly.

Describe your business with your personality, writing it in your natural voice. Clients will be reaching out to you directly, so they’ll enjoy getting to know your tone from the start.

The other element of your bio is the CTA (call to action). After your description, ask your visitors to do something – whether it’s visiting your website or contacting you directly. Your CTA should direct visitors to a link, but also tell them why they should check it out. What value will they get from clicking on your link?

The link you use depends on your social media strategy. If you get a lot of inquiries in your DMs, it’s a good idea to include a direct link to your contact form. But if you post a lot of resources, you may want to use Linktree, which lets you link to multiple pages.

Using Linktree is good at first, but you’ll get a lot more value out of your social media strategy if you create a custom Instagram landing page on your website. You’ll be directing all of your Instagram traffic to your website.

You might think it’s aesthetically more pleasing to shorten your bio link, especially if it’s long, but use the link the way it is. When it’s shortened, visitors can’t see where they’ll be going, so they might be reluctant to click. When the link is complete, visitors can see the name of the website.

Highlights

When you have information that doesn’t fit in your bio, your highlights are a great place to include it. Highlights are Instagram stories that you can feature on your profile, which provides a simple place for followers to look through your story, services, and whatever else you may want to share with them.

If you don’t have any featured highlights yet, start with what you have in your archived stories. You can always create temporary highlights as you create new content. You can create a new highlight once a month or once a week.

Feed Posts

Most people scroll through their feed or click on posts from a profile page. It’s rare for people to scroll through someone’s grid without clicking on something, so there’s no pressure to curate your posts perfectly. Your social media strategy will serve you better if you focus on posting the content that your followers engage with the most.

Include as many of your own photos as possible when you’re posting. If you serve many markets or don’t want to include your location in your bio, you can tag your photos with locations instead.

Unite Your Social Media Strategy and Booking Process

To take full advantage of your social media strategy, it’s important to know that you can seamlessly connect Instagram with your booking process to leverage your inquiries and follower engagement.

Link Your Contact Form

A good CRM can make choosing your bio link simple. If you get a lot of DMs, it may be in your best interest to directly link to a contact form. That way, you can save time answering questions.

The Contact Form lets you gather information about your leads to save time. If you use a smart field question in your contact form, your CRM will store that information for later.

An example of this is the question "How did you hear about us?" If you designate that question as a lead source smart field, your CRM will store responses later so you can view them in a lead source report. This is helpful in particular if you’re testing a new strategy on Instagram and want to check if it’s generating more leads.

Another type of smart field is the "Project Type" question. This question asks what type of project or services your potential clients are interested in. They get a drop-down menu of your customized project types, which you can put in your company settings.

Understanding your Project Types is great for setting up workflow automations. It offers better segmentation so you can better understand your target audiences with client workflow automation software.

Link Your Scheduling Tool

If the contact form doesn’t fit your Instagram account, you could also link your bio to the Online Meeting Scheduler. This option is best if you offer free consultations and don’t need a vetting process.

Within the Scheduling Tool, you can set your availability for different types of sessions, so you don’t have to worry about your calendar getting booked up. You can limit your free consultations to one or two hours each morning so the rest of your day is free.

If you can’t decide between the contact form and scheduling tool, you can offer both. Create a custom Instagram landing page. On this page, you can also include links to other pages - anything that you want to promote on Instagram.

Use a client management software for small businesses to help you navigate your business.

I write about the tools of crms to help other small businesses and freelancers who are getting started themselves or just want to gain more knowledge. I hope that the information I provide helps you grow your business!