Sometimes is hard to contextualise how you are going to fit Instagram into your marketing strategy and why something on social media can help your business so much. So perhaps it may be easier to think of Instagram as your shop front. This can be for products and services, whatever you sell your profile on Instagram is your shop front.
I want you to try something right now; get out your phone and log into your IG profile. Have a look at it with the eyes from your customer. Try not to see it as your own profile but look at it in a critical and way and think, ‘is this profile something that would attract my clients. If this profile is offline and on a high street would it be something my client would be interested in stopping at?’
If it is something that you think is attractive to your clients then 🙌🏻woohoo 🙌🏻, you’re on track, if it feels a little bit off then lets work through four key areas of your Instagram profile to change your mindset towards thinking of it as your shopfront rather than something you just have to do.
1. Your Profile
The pictures that you see and your bio, your name, your profile picture, all together are an instant view of your shop front. Literally, take everything that you can see without clicking through and imagine it on a high street next to other shops that have their Instagram profiles as their shopfronts. Would yours stand out? Does it talk to the right people? Would someone stop and look at it? Does it reflect what your business and brand is all about? This is why your photos are so important to give someone a view of not only what you do but who you are and what your business values are as well as who you would like to attract. Your bio should describe what you are, who you are, what people can expect from you and give a little insight into your own personality with things like emoji’s and tone of language, your profile picture should be your face, for many statistical reasons that I’ll go into another time, your name should be easy to understand either are your personal brand name or your business name and the photos that you use should be of high quality and looking uniform to reflect your brand identity.
2. You Posts
So once you have looked at your shopfront, imagine that the content you are writing in each individual post is inside your shop. So they have opened the door on a post and are now stepping inside your shop to see what it is all about. The caption in your post should be enough to entice someone to stay, to take a little look around and to be intrigued to learn more and see what your business is all about. Again, imagine it in a real life setting. You want to encourage people to browse more, to spend more time in your shop and you want them to spend money with you but your are not shoving a sales rack in their face, you are putting your best foot forward and serving up captions that contextualise what you are about, who you are, who you want to attract and what your brand values are. This is why writing captions that are more personal rather than simply describing the photos will encourage someone to spend longer in your ‘shop” (Instagram profile).
3. Stories
Think of your stories as your staff to customer interactions. When you walk into a shop on the high street you are often greeted by someone who will explain what the business is, will ask you want you want help with, may direct you to specific areas of the shop that will benefit you the most. Try to think of your stories like this and perhaps even in a more casual way, to help people understand more of what your brand and business purpose is, more of your business values, more of where they can find out more information about you, and more to reinforce the trust that someone has with your business. If you try to take your stories into a real world setting they would be similar to your customer to staff interactions. You want to keep it attractive to your kind of clients and you want to stay on brand and informative as well as giving people value so that they understand what your business is and trust that you can deliver to their needs.
4. Highlights
Think of your highlights as your key pieces. Your highlights are your clothes or products that you would put at the front of the store so that they will be seen immediately. In your highlights I want you to think about sharing your key pieces of information, or your most popular products and think of these of your first ‘go to’s’ for someone who may be thinking about spending money with you.
All together I hope you can now see why visualising your Instagram profile as a shopfront may help you to manage it better and think a little more forwardly about how you are marketing it and what content you are putting out for the world to see. In essence, Instagram is just a huge online High Street.
If you would like an extra help in organising your own shopfront you are welcome to book an account review which you can find more information at https://www.ingehunter.co.uk/copy-of-the-social-method-elite
Inge x
