If you’ve ever felt like you’re posting on Instagram just to post without seeing any results from your efforts, it’s time to get clear on your Instagram business goals. Your IG goals drive your Instagram strategy—including what content you post, how often you post each week, and even the bio copy you put in your profile.
I’m Natasha Samuel, an Instagram strategist and video content creator, and I’m going to walk you through a few of the questions I take my social media management and strategy clients through to build an Instagram plan that drives results for your business.
First, identify your goals using Instagram for your business.
I suggest taking the time to reflect on these questions for your business:
1: What are your top three business goals? How can Instagram help you get closer to achieving them?
Avoid focusing on vanity metrics like follower count and likes. Focus on a quality goal that is measurable and achievable. Here are some examples:
Vague goal: I want to hit 10K followers make more money.
Specific goal: I want to have an engaged community so 50% of my leads come from Instagram.
Vague goal: I want to go viral using Reels and get 100K+ views on my videos.
Specific goal: I want to boost my reach and brand awareness with my ideal followers by growing my reach organically by 10% for followers and non-followers.
2: What’s driving results now? What isn’t working?
Go into your insights, your customer surveys, and any other analytics you might have to see where your content is driving results.
Depending on my current goals, I love to go into specific pieces of content during a campaign to see how they perform or dive deeper into certain metrics like Reach and Engagement.
Inside the Instagram app, pull up your insights.
Reach is great to look at if you’re focusing on growth. Engagement is the most important metric if you’re looking to nurture your audience.
3: Are you prioritizing audience growth or nurturing your audience for better conversion?
You don’t need to reach more people to better serve your current audience. While it’s amazing to work toward all the goals in your strategy, you can often drive the best results by prioritizing what will move the needle most for your business.
Then, let’s figure out who you’re trying to reach.
I refer to this as your ideal follower, AKA the specific type of follower you want to attract that aligns with your dream customer or client.
You can identify your ideal follower by reflecting on these questions:
- What type of content are they looking for?
- What solutions do they need for their most common problems?
- What are the mutual interests or topics that you can post about in your content?
This will help you curate a brand and experience with your Instagram presence that is interesting and engaging and will help you better serve your audience while attracting the right followers to get closer to your goals.
Create beautiful Instagram content
Now that you’ve set meaningful business goals, it’s time to start carrying out those plans by creating Instagram posts and reels. Start with an eye-catching design from Microsoft Create, and then customize it to be the perfect fit for your customers.
