Instagram is the second-largest social media platform in the world – second only to its parent company Facebook. Every entrepreneur should be using this remarkable free platform to leverage their audience into sales, impact, and community.
Having a large, engaged group of followers can expand your reach online, keep you clued into the desires of your community, and help you build a tribe of raving brand ambassadors. All of this can and will happen without spending a penny – organic marketing at its finest.
But with over 1 billion people using the app, how can any solopreneur stand out on Instagram?
The most important factor to growing a profile is understanding your niche like you understand exactly how much coffee you’ll need to make it through the day.
When we’re establishing our marketing plans in business, we often take time to define our niche and then niche down. Carrying that same strategy into Instagram will allow us to attract our ideal followers then turn them into paying customers.
Establishing Your Niche
Many new entrepreneurs confuse their niche with their industry. For example, let’s say that your company sells gym equipment. Your industry would be fitness but maybe your niche is in-home fitness.
Already you can see that gym equipment could easily apply to commercial gyms with thousands of members where in-home fitness boils down to people working out privately.
A niche is a specialized segment of the market for a particular kind of product or service. The key phrase being ‘specialized segment’. A niche is a small fraction of the entire market that you’re in.
The more specific you are with targeting only your niche, the easier it’s going to be to appeal to the right follower on Instagram. I like to tell my students that the riches are in the niches because the more you niche down, the closer you get to generating revenue in your business.
Determine Your Sub-Niche
Once you’ve established your niche, take things up a notch by determining your sub-niche.
Niching down again will eliminate any confusion to a potential follower regarding if your Instagram profile is the right for them. At a glance, a potential follower should see products, services, verbiage, and imagery pertaining to them.
Sticking with our in-home fitness example to niche down again you could go from in-home fitness equipment to home-based workouts for expectant and new mothers. Expectant and new mothers looking to stay active have a unique set of challenges and desires that need to be addressed.
Design the elements of your Instagram account from top to bottom to appeal to expecting and new moms eager to stay healthy throughout pregnancy and thereafter. What are the goals they would like to accomplish? What issues are standing in the way? That intersection is the sweet spot of marketing where you want your Instagram to live.
Everything in your brand should speak directly to them offline, online, and on social media. Take the marketing package you have offline and on your website and translate them into content built for Instagram. Company slogans, logos, brand colors, and your brand voice should all be transformed into bite-sized posts perfect for consumption on social media.
Niching down twice to zero in on your ideal follower is essential to designing an Instagram account that is irresistible to your ideal follower.
About the Author
Asia Abston of The Luxe Life Academy extracted this article from her online course, the InstaMarketer Workshop, teaching entrepreneurs how to attract hyper-targeted followers and convert them to paying customers on Instagram.
