Grow Your Website Traffic With Instagram: Part 1

Having almost tripled its user base in the last three years to over 1 billion users, Instagram (IG) has recently joined the likes of Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp. With close to 400 million daily active users as of June 2018, IG is one of the most prominent business growth tools in the world today.

Widely known as the “everything visual” social media platform, Instagram is a must for companies, brands, and individuals aiming for online exposure to expand their reach. IG has become one of the biggest hubs for acquiring information, finding new brands, exploring new opportunities and, of course, driving website traffic through effective marketing.

Here are some facts for you to consider:

• Over 55 million pieces of visual content are being shared on Instagram every day
• 7 out of 10 IG hashtags are branded
• Around 30% of Instagram users will buy a product they found on Instagram
• 80% of users follow at least one business on Instagram
• Top brands post around five times a week on IG
• 60% of users find new products on Instagram
• 75% of users take an action such as visiting a website after viewing a post

Instagram has the highest user interaction rate for social media these days: a  3% engagement rate compared to Facebook’s and Twitter’s 0.5-1%.

Moreover, as you likely know, Instagram is owned by Facebook, which has probably the most sophisticated and advanced social media data collection system. With this data, users can create incredibly detailed and highly targeted advertisements for virtually any target group of consumers. Naturally, the same algorithms apply to Instagram, and when used correctly, they can become an invaluable addition to your marketing arsenal.

However, to take advantage of these benefits, you’ll first need a website. Luckily, creating a website today is almost as easy as downloading an app on your smartphone. There are tons of DIY tools like Wix, GoDaddy, and Web.com that help you create an outstanding website with next to zero technical knowledge and minimal effort. As a bonus, you can do it in about an hour!

Moreover, these website builders can seamlessly be integrated with Instagram, minimizing the amount of time you need to invest to get everything up and running. If you’re into cryptocurrencies, you’ll be pleased to learn that many website builder tools accept Bitcoin as a payment option.

Forming a Visual Connection

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a high-quality image is worth, at least, a medium-sized blog article. Your IG channel feed is no less important than your website content. In addition, visuals also help humanize your brand, allowing you to establish a deeper connection with both existing and potential customers.

Moreover, visuals directly enhance your sales effectiveness. Showcasing your products or services via visual representation, regardless of industry, is an easy way to add connect with your audience. This type of messaging is actually extremely complicated to achieve with words. For instance, images of people wearing clothing and accessories, using tech devices and gadgets, or having a great time utilizing a piece of software all bring you closer to consumers. These types of visuals encourage them to associate themselves with these people and share their experiences.

Finally, forming a visual connection boosts accountability. Science has proven that people are more inclined to remember and acknowledge something when they have a visual memory of it. This is especially important if you’re dealing with intangible products, such as technical software. It’s pretty hard to remember all the pros and cons of a specific software. But it’s much easier to recall the positive emotions associated with that software thanks to the visuals that accompany it.

Video Content

Video content has been gaining massive popularity over the past few years, and it shows no signs of stopping. Most importantly, businesses that make use of video marketing grow revenue 49% faster, which is pretty insane. Here are some more stats to highlight the importance of video marketing:

• 64% of consumers buy a product after watching branded social videos
• Videos generate 1200% more shares compared to texts and images combined
• 92% of mobile video viewers share the video with others
• Videos increase organic traffic by 157% from search engine result pages

As we mentioned earlier, Instagram has the highest engagement rate out of all social media platforms out there. According to research, the number of videos created by Instagram users increased four times since 2017, resulting in an 80% annual increase. Given that video content engagement is peaking, when combined with IG, it becomes a powerful traffic generation tool. So if you regularly post videos on your IG channel, you’ll likely experience a spike in your website traffic. Simple as that.

Sponsored Ads

Much like videos, ads tend to work best on Instagram primarily because of its engagement. Another plus is that by their nature, IG ads are less intrusive and meld with users’ feeds pretty well, making them less irritating for consumers.

In addition, using Facebook’s sophisticated targeting algorithm and applying it to IG can help increase penetration and reach the exact group of customers you need. There is also the fact that Instagram advertising is relatively new compared to that of other social media networks. This matters for the platform’s monetization; with less ad saturation, there is a lot of room for IG to expand this revenue stream. IG wants you to post ads, and their algorithm helps businesses like yours reach their target audiences.

Call-to-actions Matter

• 90% of users pay attention to CTAs in posts
• Using the words “like, share, tag, and comment” doubles the amount of those activities on your posts

Merely telling people to take an action means they will. In fact, it can actually double your results. Making sure that each post has a corresponding call-to-action to go along with it is probably as important as the quality of your posts. The beautiful thing about CTAs is that they can be used to drive traffic in different ways. For instance, if you’re doing a social media contest that involves prizes, your CTAs can serve as a way for customers to claim their rewards by visiting your website.

Moreover, you can use various CTAs to direct different clients to different pages on your website. You can set this up depending on their customer journey. This will not only help with traffic generation but also help improve conversion rates.

To Be Continued

If you want to build your brand, make people recognize it, increase website traffic, and improve conversion rates in the online world, Instagram is a perfect social media platform to accomplish all of this. With the availability of easy, drag-and-drop website builders like Wix, Hibu, 1&1 and Network Solutions, and their seamless integrations with Instagram, there’s nothing to lose. Any small business can easily use IG to enter a market, choose a target audience, and convert more followers into paying customers.

Stay tuned for more tips and suggestions for how to increase your website traffic using IG in the second installment of this article. Part 2 comes out next month!