Stop Wondering How To Instagram
Many people have a love-hate relationship with Instagram, but for most business owners, there’s less of the love part. It took me years of classes and practice to finally understand how simple marketing your business on Instagram can be if you have the right approach.
Know Your Audience
One big mistake I see small businesses make is they don’t know who their audience is. Lets take a coffee shop for example. There are surprisingly a lot of different kinds of coffee shops. Coffee shops for coffee snobs, coffee shops where people like to go and get work done, coffee shops that are convenient for commuters, etc. Know what kind of consumer you are talking to is important because your captions and content would be completely different if you were talking to coffee snobs vs. commuters.
For Coffee Snobs: Join our coffee of the week club! For just $10 a week, you can enjoy a brand new, exotic roast that is shipped to us weekly! Your membership gets you 1 bag of coffee and a large cup of our exotic roast of the week. Shoot us a text a 5617 to join our Coffee Snob Club.
For Computer Work: You asked, we delivered! We know you love hanging out in the mornings and now you can hang out with us during the afternoons too! We extended our hours and menu to include lunch and now you can hang out with us even more! For this week only, get a free cup of Joe with your lunch order.
For Commuters: Good coffee on the go just got more convenient! Did you know that you can text us your coffee order and we will have it ready to go for you? Text us at 6728 and your first cup is free!
Be Authentic
When I really started showing up for my Instagram and began doing daily stories, my older sister, Jessi, called me out hard! You know when you are with a friend and they start talking in a different voice when they are ordering at the drive-thru and you are like “WTF is that voice? Eww! It’s so fake!” (I know you know the voice I am talking about.) Well apparently, that was the voice I was using in my IG stories and, in true big sister fashion, Jessi came down hard on me for not being authentic.
Authenticity doesn’t just have to be the voice, but it can be a lot of different things depending on your audience. It could be having a real moment that you want to share with you audience, but your hair/makeup isn’t perfect. Sometimes authenticity is just making a video of yourself on IG stories and putting it out there for the world to see, period!
Whatever authenticity looks like for you, just do it, share it, and be yourself.
Add Value
Are you adding value through your IG? Every piece of content you put out there should be adding some sort of value to your audience. It can be inspirational, entertaining, funny, heartfelt, etc. But whatever it is, it needs to bring some sort of value to your audience.
Caption with No Value: Be persistent! Persistence is the key to the long term success of a business, after all, Rome wasn’t built in a day!
Caption with Value: Did you know that Chinese bamboo grows 80-90 feet in just 5 years? But there's a catch! For the first 4 years, the bamboo doesn’t even break through the ground. Then, during the bamboo’s 5th year, it can grow up to 3 feet a day and reach heights of 90 feet in just a 6 week period!
Business is a lot like Chinese bamboo. You have to show up for it, day after day and continue to care for it, even when it isn’t showing any signs of growth above the surface.
