Do you want more sales? Show me who doesn’t! Let’s try to drive some customers to your website from Instagram. You’ll find here both long-term strategies and quick fixes. The combination of both will show the best result. But you can try and see what works for you.

Instagram is great for getting to know new customers. With your Instagram account you say “Hello, I’m here, nice to meet you”. Only your target audience will want to form a deeper relationship with you. And these are the people you are looking for. You will drive them up your sales funnel. They will subscribe to your email list, browse through your shop and, eventually, become your buyers.

Growing your following with brand-building

One of the best-proven strategies to grow followers on Instagram is building a personal brand. In 2020 you need to be comfortable to show more of yourself. Stock pictures and business-related content only won’t do anymore. Showing bits and pieces of your life keeps your audience engaged better than anything else. You surely do not want to start blogging about everything. Here are your new shoes, here is your vacation, here is your dog, and here is your granny. Your followers won’t be following you, literally.

Instead, we advise you to choose 3 to 5 topics that will become touchpoints with your audience and blog about them regularly. Think about it for a few days: what can be interesting in your life? What is it that your friends ask you about and really eager to hear? It could be anything – your love for jazz music, your collection of soft toys or ceramics, your pets, your garden. Try to think of something really unique, don’t peak generic foodporn or gym sessions, it seems that everyone blogs about meals and sports these days.

The stories you tell about yourself will help build and maintain a connection with your followers. Invest some time into blogging regularly – this is an important part of your brand-building strategy.

Building an Instagram Sales Funnel

When you have some followers on Instagram it is important to channel them up into your sales funnel. Imagine there are a bunch of people who follow you closely and trust your expertise. They need no more convincing to buy from you. Yet, imagine, they have no ways of buying from you because you gave them no clue how to do it. You simply do not lead them anywhere. Sounds kind of silly, right?

Three ways to drive organic leads from Instagram

Generate Leads Using Profile Link:

Put a working link of your landing page to your bio on Instagram. As simple as that.

It can be your homepage or your shop, but there is a better option. For users, who have under 10k followers, this will be the only link they can use. That is why it is better to create a separate page on your website, where users from Instagram will land. There you can put everything you have promised in your posts and stories: freebies, sign-up to newsletter, shop, etc.

Tip: Make this page mobile-friendly, the traffic you will get is mostly mobile.

Here is an example of a UK publisher Penguin Books. They have a separate landing page for Instagram users. On this page they also copy their Instagram look in tiles. Thus, users can easily recognize what they came for from the pictures. This creates a seamless experience.

1 - Penguin Books Instagram profile with a link to the landing page; 2 - Website landing page; 3 - Landing Page scrolled down.

Generate Leads Using IG Stories:

Now, with Instagram stories, we have two possible situations. First, if you have over 10 000 followers, you can insert links directly into your stories. Go on and do this, make people swipe up. Only make sure that your stories are engaging.

British celebrity cook Jamie Oliver's account uses swipe up in stories on Instagram.

Second, if you have less than 10 000 followers, you will have to mention that link in your profile we have talked about earlier. Do not just tease people with your product or freebie, tell them where to find it. Choose the font and text color, that goes with your story and write: link in bio. Now they know where to go.

You might be worried about spamming your followers with too many selling stories. The trick here is to mix them up with stories on other topics in the right ratio. Choose the formula that works for you, for example 1 promotional story in 10, or 1 in 5.

You can also encourage people to send DMs with their questions and requests. Help them out, give advice where you can. Without being too spammy send them a direct link to your website Instagram landing page, when it is appropriate. Do not jump out on people with your link, though. Nurture the relationship first. It might take a few dialogues before you will be able to share your link or advertise something.

Generate leads using IG posts captions:

Finally, talk about your Instagram bio link in the captions of your posts. Don’t forget to mention your freebie in your feed every once in a while.

It is not possible to insert a link directly to the post caption, but you can always direct your followers to the place, where they can find it – link in your profile.

To make your IG captions more engaging, use copywriting formulas we outline in our Click-Worthy Website Copy Workbook.

Here’s one of them:

Problem - Agitate - Solve.

Problem - State a problem your potential customer is facing.

Agitate - Agitate the problem by describing more pain points and challenges

Solve - Offer a solution to the problem. And you guessed it - this is the place where you offer your lead magnet or product! Or both!

Headspace, New Yorker and Adobe all lead to their profile links in these posts.

How to make your Instagram profile link convert more people into leads (email subscribers)

All the aforementioned strategies boil down to one thing: getting people to click the link in your profile. If you have less than 10k followers, this link is your most important piece of digital “real estate” on Instagram.

In order to use this space efficiently, you need to create a small / mobile-friendly page that will promote the value you have to offer to your customers. One strategy is to create a “link farm” – and put all of the stuff you have in there – links to blog posts, lead magnets, shop, services, etc. This can be really overwhelming for users (and we here at Applet Studio are guilty of this, too).

An alternative strategy is to put a landing page for your lead magnet page up there. In fact, we noticed that when we just had our lead magnet page as a link on Instagram, we saw much better conversion rates.

Did we mention that these strategies are really easy to implement using Squarespace? Here’s a post where you can learn how to create an Instagram page on your Squarespace website.

Remember that your website is the most valuable marketing asset and the link you place on Instagram matters more than ever. Instagram can be a great source of traffic and leads but it is a rented territory, and you can never rely on it 100%. Having a strategic website amplifies your marketing efforts on Instagram. Browse our collection of amazing Squarespace templates and let’s set you up with a beautiful website optimized for conversions.