Looking for ways to improve your Instagram prospecting? Are you striving for an efficient Instagram prospecting strategy that will help you get a hand on your prospects, and successfully engage them with your brand?
You’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’ll cover how to prospect on Instagram and untap the business opportunities that this social media platform offers. Let’s dive in.
Instagram As A Prospecting Tool
Nowadays Instagram is far from being just another social network where people share pictures of their breakfast. This social media platform has become a vital tool for businesses, in both B2B and B2C, that are looking for ways to reach out to their prospects and successfully engage with them. Instagram has an unmatched potential when it comes to lead generation and businesses with savvy social media marketing departments acknowledge this advantage.
A quick check: What is Instagram Lead Generation?
Lead generation is the main objective of any business that wishes to expand its brand and increase revenue. Generating leads on Instagram means using the platform to spark people’s interest in a brand. The goal of the lead generation process is to eventually turn prospects into customers.
Get Targeted Emails from Instagram
Instagram has immense potential for assisting businesses and brands in connecting with their target audience and driving more engagement. I mean take a look at these stats:
- 400 million active users
- Over 60% log in daily
- Engagement on Instagram is 10x higher than Facebook, 54x higher than Pinterest, and 84x higher than Twitter
- Instagram advertising has a potential reach of 928.5 million.
- 3.5 billion likes every day on Instagram
For many users, Instagram is the go-to place for discovering new things that they’d like to buy. And what’s even better is that 80% of Facebook survey respondents say they use Instagram to decide whether or not to buy something.
If you’re not already taking advantage of these facts and figures to generate new leads, you’re missing out on tremendous opportunities to scale your marketing network.
Read on to find out how to utilize Instagram for lead generation and discover one growth hacking secret to boost your Instagram prospecting.
How To Generate Leads On Instagram
Generating leads through your Instagram account with content marketing, SEO, and advertising is the main marketing objective of all network marketers. But with Instagram being home to nearly 1 billion monthly active users, finding your target audience can be challenging and draining.
Prospecting on Instagram takes more than just a few hashtags and a post here and there. To successfully convert Instagram followers into customers you need an effective strategy to generate leads and boost your Instagram prospecting.
Let’s have a look at a few ways how to get more leads on Instagram and accelerate your sales in no time.
1. Targeting
First and foremost, it is important that you clearly define the image of the kind of leads you want to generate on Instagram. This is a critical phase in any lead generation cycle because it determines the output and steps you’ll need to take in the remaining process. Before setting out to generate leads, start by asking questions like How do your prospects spend their free time?; What goals and values do they have?; What kind of media interests do they have? Such character-defining questions help you to set the foundation for successfully prospecting on Instagram.
2. Optimization
After you have your ideal lead type defined, move on to setting up your Instagram account accordingly. This is how you can set up your IG profile for maximum lead generation:
Use your brand name
Use your brand name as your account name so that users could easily find you, and if this name is already taken make sure to put it in the first part of your username.
Add a recognizable photo
When adding a profile image to your account, take a professional photo of high quality that reflects your main message. Ensure that this photo is consistent across all platforms where your brand is present so that people unconsciously identify it with your brand.
Select the category
The category section is displayed under your IG account name and helps prospects realize what your company does. The category you choose should best describe what you’re doing. Instagram usually suggests only a few categories, but there are thousands of them. If there’s no relevant category, start typing it and choose the most appropriate one.
Write a relevant description
Your IG bio is the heart and soul of your IG profile. Your bio on Instagram is kind of your elevator pitch, which helps you make the right first impression in front of your prospects. In this section, you have up to 150 characters to make users familiar with your products and services, and tell them why your brand is unique.
Remember to use keywords as part of your IG bio. Including hashtags in your bio is an effective strategy to target leads more effectively by sorting out the people who’re really interested in your brand.
Include a powerful CTA and link
A CTA is the best push for Instagram lead generation. Your CTA should clearly tell customers what they should do to benefit from using your service. Instagram provides solid options for lead generation, like Book, Reserve, and Get Tickets action buttons. In addition to these, you can also include a link to your email, phone number, and business address so people can get in touch with your company. Here’s an example of how Burger Kind does this for their IG profile.
3. Promotion
Now that you have your ideal kind of leads defined, and your profile all set and optimized, the next step is to bring in traffic. Let’s look at some of the ways you can drive traffic to your IG profile.
Create content around your end goal
For successful prospecting on Instagram, you need to create content that revolves around your end goal. Marketers should strive to create high-quality posts, that reflect your brand and engage your prospects. Also, make sure to keep track of your posting frequency. The content you create coupled with a powerful call to action needs to be consistent and posted in the best IG posting times.
Engagement options
Community engagement is a very important aspect of driving traffic to your IG profile.
The traditional way of growing your IG traffic is by commenting, following, and liking other posts and profiles. To strengthen your traffic flow, you can partner with an IG influencer in your niche to help you reach a larger follower base and potentially boost your IG lead generation.
Run IG contests
Instagram contests are another clever way to rapidly accomplish lead generation. You can hold a variety of entertaining contests, sales sessions with fresh offers and discounts. Creating IG content enables you to establish a chain of people following your account for a chance to win.
Tracking
Instagram through its integrations with the Facebook platform, uses your personal data info to show you ads that you’re most likely to click on. It’s no surprise that every thumb scroll on your IG feed is being tracked and monitored. As nasty as this sounds, tracking brings to the advertisers’ table some of the most valuable information about prospects. The info collected through tracking helps enables you to make precise calculations about your ROI based on insights like:
- Landing page click rate
- Landing page conversion rate
- Lifetime customer value
- Customer acquisition cost
These are all great ways to generate more leads on Instagram, but having in mind Apple’s recent iPhone anti-tracking feature we might experience some problems here. Apple’s new policy prohibits collecting and sharing data unless users opt into tracking. Analytics found that 96% of US users opt-out of app tracking in iOS14. And without a precisely targeted audience, your efforts for generating new leads and prospecting on Instagram are doomed to fail.
So how can you create an effective strategy to get more followers and boost your engagement rate?
One way to make this word is by creating a custom audience with consumer email lists. Within the Facebook ads platform, there is an option that allows you to import consumers’ email lists and target people only within that database. This is known as Custom Audience. This is absolutely your best shot to boost your Instagram prospecting and generate more leads because it allows you to expand your reach to highly relevant audiences that are most likely to be a part of your niche.
How To Use Consumer Email Lists For Generating Leads Through IG
Since IG ads are managed the same way as Facebook ads, and their audience targeting works in the exact same way, this is the part where we ‘hack the system’. As Facebook doesn’t bother asking for a verification that the people in your database are opt-in on your list, this is where your cash on the opportunity to generate more leads by creating targeted IG leads ads. Here’s the tactic that Instagram marketers implement in order to help them generate leads:
- Add the email list in Facebook Business Manager (as custom audiences) and run ads only on people within that database;
- Run ads until the audience is pre-warmed and you’re ready to start sending emails;
Influencers Club can give you a hand when it comes to generating leads with customer email lists. We offer two highly effective strategies that can assist your lead generation efforts and improve your Instagram prospecting.
Read on to find out how to get publicly available Instagram data, generate a maximum number of Instagram leads, and boost your Instagram prospecting.
The #1 Trick to Scale Your Instagram Prospecting
Influencers Club is a data provider that can help you get access to super-targeted consumer email lists, as a simple, yet powerful way to generate leads from Instagram.
What’s Our Specialty?
We provide super targeted email addresses from Instagram by:
- Filtering users based on specific keywords or text in their Instagram bio
- Or, by analyzing followers of any public Instagram account (competitors, a relevant influencer, or a similar brand)
Generate Instagram Leads By Targeting Users Bio
Instagram does not have a feature that allows you to search for users based on keywords in their bio sections. But with our internal database of millions of users, searching Instagram using bio is just one simple query away.
Generally, people use the limited space in their IG profile bio to highlight the most important parts of their lives. Meaning bios are full of keywords. And keywords are what we’re after. So we activate our Instagram bio search engine and target anyone that has a keyword in their bios related to your niche.
Convert Your (or Competitors) Instagram Followers To Potential Customers
Other than getting emails from Instagram users based on keywords in their bio, we can also help you get emails from followers of specific IG accounts. We analyze the fans of your competitors and discover them in our systems. Allow me to briefly explain how we work the magic.
Step 1. Share with us a specific IG account, be it a competitor, an influencer, or any account that your customers follow.
Step 2. We use trusted, external APIs to analyze the fans of your competitors and discover them in our systems.
Step 3. You get consumers’ email lists along with 28 other accurate data points that you can match in your Facebook ads.
For example, let’s say that you’re a small business selling handcrafted sneakers and you’re looking to get more followers on Instagram. Now check out Nike’s IG profile.
For example, let’s say that you’re a small business selling handcrafted sneakers and you’re looking to get more followers on Instagram. Now check out Nike’s IG profile.
At the moment I’m writing this article Nike has 156m followers. What we can do to help your business generate more leads is provide you with roughly about 40% of the email addresses of Nike’s followers.
So how many followers does your biggest competitor have? Let’s go get them.
By purchasing a targeted consumer email list from Influencers Club you sort of get 2 in 1. You can use our targeted consumer email lists to create custom audiences, that are sure as hell to help you generate more leads, and also improve your email marketing strategy.
Instagram Mass DM vs. Email Marketing
Why bother with email marketing and cold email campaigns when you can just reach out to your prospects by simply sending a direct message to their IG inbox?
Hmm… Well, Instagram DMs are all fun and games until we come face-to-face with their limitations. You can send 50 to 100 DMs per day from an IG account, and then you have to take a 24 hours break from getting in touch with your prospects. Instagram DMs also have a character limit, 1000 characters with space. That leaves you with very limited space for speaking your mind to your prospects and convincing them to engage with your brand.
With email marketing, you can reach a prospect as many times as you want, for free or at (almost) no additional cost. And what’s even better, with email marketing you’re the owner of the data. With platforms like social media, you don’t own your contact list or even the information you post. Typically, it’s the social media platform that owns your material as well as your follower list.
Just think – If Instagram went away tomorrow, how many followers and customers would you lose? With email marketing, you own the data and the channel, and Zuck can’t randomly block your account.
Your best influencer can not just ask for x3 the amount you pay them out of nowhere. This shows just how important it is for brands to own their data and not depend on external channels for such a crucial part of a business like lead generation is.
How You Can Get 13x ROAS With Targeted Consumer Email Lists
Implementing a targeted consumer email list in your lead generation strategy allows you to generate Instagram leads more effectively and with a guaranteed increase in your ROAS. Not convinced? Check out this story of how one of our clients got 13x ROAS (that’s $13 for every $1 spent) from advertising for lead generation to their competitors’ fans. The short version of the story went like this: Our client was an eCommerce store owner who used Facebook ads as their only channel for generating leads. They kept running ads based on their audience’s interests but failed to generate any leads at reasonable costs. That’s when they decided to purchase a targeted email list from Influencers Club and tried generating leads with a custom audience. The end result? 13:1 RoaS on Facebook ads, or in other words a 100% effective lead generation strategy.
Back To You
With a little know-how, Instagram can be a very useful tool for lead generation. To find your ideal prospects on the platform, make sure that your IG profile is optimized, develop the right advertising strategies, and precisely set your targeting.
We can help you effectively target your prospects with our powerful IG bio search engine by finding users with keywords in their bio that are relevant to your niche. Other than that we can also help you sneak-a-peek into your competitors’ followers, and get their emails for you.
By owning such valuable data like your prospects’ email addresses, you can run effective PPC campaigns, create cold email campaigns, and successfully convert your prospects into high-paying customers.
Running cold email campaigns is a tried-and-true method for your lead generation strategy. Especially if you’re an e-commerce site, e-mail marketing helps you generate way more leads and web traffic than Social Media.
Ultimately, with your target audience on point and your email list perfectly optimized, there is nothing stopping you from getting new high-quality leads.
Influencers Club strategies are built to help you run effective PPC campaigns, and successfully convert your prospects into high-paying customers.
So if you want to learn how to successfully generate more leads for your business, Book a Free Strategy Call and sky-rocket your Instagram prospecting with our effective lead generation strategies.EW
