Case Study – How Startups and Freelancers are Generating Leads from Instagram to Expand their Business

Following – targeting

Every successful business on Instagram is using some variation of this technique. Without exception.

Targeting is the process of following accounts online, based off recreational interests and followed accounts.

Sounds pretty obvious, right?

The clever part is that Follow Liker allows you to do this all on automation. This allows start up-businesses to scale up their social media marketing tenfold.

For example, as we want to get personal training clients from Instagram, we need to use a little bit of logic as to who our prospective clients are.

This will allow us to advertise our unique brand to our desired niche. These targeted customers are likely to follow us back, which in turn builds an online audience who are likely to interact with our posts.

However, you have to exercise some caution when setting up automated following. Let's clarify some rules of Instagram:

Firstly nobody really knows the exact number of how many accounts you can follow or unfollow within a specified time period. Unlike Twitter, who publicise their follow limits, Instagram is incredibly weary of user experience.

In short, you can’t go mad on the whole “following potential leads and customers” tactic when you’re devising your strategy for social media marketing.

Accounts that continuously violate Instagram’s guidelines can be temporarily blocked, have restrictions put in place on certain features, and in some instances, can be banned altogether.

Trust us, this is not an empty warning. We have pushed these limits in the aid of research…

Here are our recommendations based on trial and error after some wrist slapping from the powers-that-be at Instagram:

- Set-up to only follow 500 accounts per day
- Expect around a 15% follow back ratio
- Unfollow accounts after 3 days that do not follow you back
- Set the delay between follows for at least a minute.
- Set a daily photo like limit of around 600 likes.

Now you know how to like people (within the laws of Instagram) here’s the part you really need to pay attention to…

Who should you follow to build your audience?

As mentioned previously, if you offer a service specific to a geographic location, you should only focus on following accounts according to that location.

Building relationships with people on the other side of the planet is nice, but that’s all it is. They are never going to pay you, or invest in your service.

You need to be more intelligent than that to get clients for personal training on Instagram.

Conversely, if you’re an online marketing agency and believe you could help clients from around the world, you need to focus on the specific niches and fields that you have expertise in marketing.

Having the mind-set that everyone is a potential client is also wrong. In our case, we had to quickly admit that not everyone was interested in going to the gym, let alone in having a personal trainer.

So how to find the right kind of people?

Think of Instagram as a series of lists. It actually has your exact target market all nicely categorised for you, you just might not know it yet.

Through using the search feature on Instagram, or through the hashtag explorer, you can locate other users and small businesses who may offer similar services to yours in the same location.

Once you have found some appropriate accounts through this method, you can copy and paste their handle and insert it into Follow Liker.

And here’s the clever bit: the software will incrementally follow all of your competitor’s existing followers.

Remember, their followers will largely consist of existing clients, former clients, potential clients as well as local people who are interested in what they do. Such lists are invaluable if you are to effectively expand your prospective client lists.

Now listen up, because this next part is key...

Automated messaging: the key to generating leads from Instagram

Everyone on Instagram gets a notification when a new follower has followed their account. In this sense, think of the last step as giving your potential personal training clients a gentle nudge.

It’s kind of like saying, “Hi I'm here, and this is what I do.”

The aim, of course, is that they will like what you do, and will hit that follow back button. Without really doing much, this process is exactly how you can convert people from being casual followers into actual tangible leads.

But what does that mean? What exactly constitutes a lead?

A lead is a name and a piece of contact information, typically in the form of email or phone number, (but it can be in other forms too, as long as there is the means to get in touch). As a broad definition, it is any instance where someone actively gives you their details for marketing purposes.

Are you beginning to see why this is important in terms of social media marketing for start-up businesses?

Using Follow Liker, or a similar automation tool, you can set up trigger automated messages to new followers. This means, every time somebody follows you, the automated software will message them with what you wish to bring to their attention.

With this in mind…

How do you go about gathering information from potential leads on Instagram?

Now bear with us, because this part requires a little more investment. As they say, you have to speculate to accumulate!

Let’s assume you’re at the very start of your career as a start-up, and you don't even have a sales page on your website yet. If this is the case, you can use Ontrapages or Leadpages to capture people's information.