Instagram is super fun and it easy to use, but it can be a little intimidating for newbies. If you’re new to IG and trying to find your niche in what may seem like a party that started without you, I’ve got your back. Here’s your IG Marketing Cheat Sheet!

These six simple steps give you a can’t-fail approach to competitive, compelling, grid-worthy content.

Step 1: Brand yourself like a badass

Make no mistake, people follow brands and they're looking for some sort of connection with their hopes, fears, dreams, aspirations and other worthy goals and attributes. If you don't brand, you’re generic. That's the bottom-line. What's so wrong about being generic? It's simple: If you’re just another player, you’re forgettable. Forget about making money. Forget about conversions. Forget about making a lasting impression. That's just not going to happen if you don’t have a brand.

Step 2: Find your competitors on IG and reverse engineer them

List out all your competitors and search for them on IG. Take note of:

Their IG profile
Their content strategy
Their hashtags

Now, reverse engineer their success. Note any common hashtags and their most social content. Replicate their sales funnel strategy, then connect the dots. Figure out winning content themes and the most niche-popular hashtags.

Step 3: Curate top notch content and mix in your reverse engineered content

Create a better version of your competitors’ top materials. Improve upon ‘the best’ existing niche content on IG in any of the following ways:

Do an update
Slick up the production quality
Provide more details
Use better hashtags
Activate a better influencer distribution network
Use stronger calls to action and more valiuable offers

Step 4: Adopt a content-first sales funnel

IG and social media marketing success rely on content marketing. Why? Because raw traffic doesn’t convert at a high enough ROI. Smart modern marketers use the Know – Like – Trust process, and trust is built on content. You need to walk your engagers and visitors to the trust stage quickly. To do so, think about cornerstone content within your funnel, along with control over content and pacing of content.

Step 5: Use Facebook’s ad retargeting system to pull IG users deeper into your funnel

Use content to draw truly interested people
Use an episodic profile link; episodes change based on your marketing campaign’s content
Retarget visitors if they click DEEPER into your site or they went to a PRODUCT or ORDER page
Retargeting works because it reminds people to come back
Avoid these mistakes!

Step 6: Pay and interact with niche-specific IG influencers

Real influence means real engagement. Real influence means actual conversions. But how do you know who to work with? You really just have to put in the time and pay attention to the right details. ook at the total number of followers that an account has and look at the average number of engagements that person's post gets. If you do the math, you should be able to come up with some sort of ranking system between different accounts. You should also pay attention to the kind of commercial posts that they published. If they give you a tremendous amount of leeway then go for them, assuming that their followers are real.

Here are a few signs of FAKE influence:

Roughly same amount of Followers : Following
Low total engagement ratio
Little engagement with fans
Overly commercial account

Once you’ve got your list of influencers to test, start by using a SLOW and LOW strategy (ie., little pay – stick with the ones that produce the best results). Then focus on accounts that truly deliver results

Step 7: Continuously optimize all parts of your funnel

Make no mistake, Instagram marketing requires a tremendous commitment of your time, focus and attention to details because of the following: You will be focusing on patterns. These patterns won't happen overnight. These patterns only take place when you have enough traction. This means that you have to put in work over an extended period; you have to focus on the long-term. Pay close attention to these elements:

Photos
Tags
Descriptions
Posting time of day/night
Increased click through Increased dwell time
Deep clicks
Better conversion rates

Next Steps

Eventually, you would try to convert that traffic into a squeeze page conversion or a mailing list conversion. When you use a primary content on Instagram that attracts viewers to your profile page, you are more likely to get shares of that content. Use this primary content on your site to lead people to conversion.

Document your efforts
Focus on numbers
Optimize using an elemental approach (Elements: picture/video + description + hashtag)

Want to dig deeper into some of the topics summarized above? Contact me.

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