Marketing Hacks: How to Generate Leads in Instagram (For Startups)

After all, people don’t know your company, and you don’t have tons of followers yet, making it challenging to run successful lead generation initiatives and gain significant returns. Plus, you’ll need to learn how to stand out from a sea of companies and brands competing for your target audience’s attention.  To address these issues, we share in this guide some of the best tactics and tools to generate leads in Instagram effectively.

1. Use automation

Effective lead generation can involve lots of repetitive, tedious tasks, from searching for highly relevant content ideas to publishing all of your posts.

The good news is, there are reliable IG tools with automation features that you can leverage so your team can avoid doing repetitive tasks.

For instance, Social Media Marketing (SMM) management platform Vista Social offers modern, sophisticated, and affordable features to streamline creating and posting content for IG among other social platforms.

Plan and create your IG content for a few days, a week, or a month and schedule them to post automatically on the dates and times you want. 

You can further streamline your automated IG post publishing with Vista Social’s Smart Publishing feature. 

Image source: vistasocial.com.  

The Smart Publisher searches and publishes content for you based on your selected category, including keywords for content you want to include or exclude. You can also prepend text and add hashtags, texts, mentions you want to include in your post.

Automate your IG marketing initiatives to accelerate your lead generation efforts on Instagram.  

2. Leverage Instagram lead ads

If you want to guarantee some level of lead generation success on IG, running lead ads can be your best bet. 

Instagram lead ads let you run ads within the platform while helping you collect customer information, including phone numbers, job titles, birth dates, and email addresses.  

To use Instagram lead ads, you’ll need to:

• Create an Instagram business account (or turn your existing IG account into a business account).

• Make a Facebook Business Manager account on FB (if you haven’t yet) and link it to your existing Facebook page.

• Use Facebook Ads Manager and choose the Lead Generation option.  

• Create your lead generation ad (as you would Facebook ads), but select Instagram as a placement under the Manual placements section. You can also use IG stores as ad placement. 

Image source: advertisemint.com. 

The lead ad will show IG users a lead form they can fill out with their contact information. 

Like most social media and display ads, achieving effective Instagram lead ads can require trial and error. 

The key is to test variations of your creatives, lead magnets, targeting options, and Calls-to-Action (CTAs) via Facebook ads manager to see what works best for your initiatives and audience.

If you use reliable customer engagement platforms, you can leverage insights from the software’s analytics features. Apply the relevant, actionable insights to your IG lead generation strategies to help improve your lead ad performance.  

3. Post shoppable content

Creating Instagram shoppable posts is an excellent way to entice prospects to buy your products.

After all, IG users can see the product description and prices instantly on your posts. It makes learning about the items you sell convenient and encourages shoppers to buy. 

Even if IG users tap your shoppable posts and product tags but don’t end up buying, you can still consider them as lead collected on interested customers. 

You can use the information to determine the products your audiences are interested in and target customers who engage with your shoppable posts with tailored ads. 

Additionally, shoppable IG posts are easy to share on your other digital marketing channels to help widen your reach and lead generation efforts. 

Start creating shoppable Instagram posts with these tips:

• Ensure your account is eligible for setting up shoppable posts. You’ll need to set up an Instagram business profile (if you haven’t yet).  

• Set up a product catalog associated with a Facebook shop. You can create this using the Catalog Manager feature on Facebook or with a Facebook Partner.

• Sign up for Instagram Shopping (after connecting your catalog). You can then begin adding product tags to your Instagram stories and posts. 

Image source: hubspot.com. 

Use the Instagram Insights feature to track product button clicks and views to help you determine whether you need to improve your shoppable post strategies. 

You can tweak your approach and leverage shoppable posts to support your lead generation efforts on Instagram. 

4. Work with influencers

Working with influencers is one of the most effective ways to generate leads on Instagram. 

Influencers often have thousands, if not millions, of followers with whom they already have established and built relationships with. 

With a solid marketing strategy, you can easily tap into an influencer’s audience and leverage it for your lead generation efforts. 

Follow these quick tips to find the best-fitting influencers for your lead generation and marketing initiatives. 

• Find influencers working within your industry or niche since they have experience working with companies similar to yours. It’s also easier to ensure the influencer’s goals align with your objectives. 

• Leverage handy digital marketing software and apps to simplify finding the right influencers and running your influencer marketing campaigns on IG for lead generation. 

• Research your shortlist of potential influencers. Check out their followers, follow them, and think of how they can help you generate leads, including how working together can grow both your audiences. 

Reach out to them and ask them questions to gauge whether they’re a good fit for your company and lead generation initiatives in IG.   

5. Run Q and A sessions through Instagram stories

Instagram users need to trust you first before acting on your offers and buying from you.

One way of building that trust is to host Question and Answer (Q and A) sessions through your Instagram stories. 

For instance, if you offer Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and digital marketing services, you can introduce some of your specific services, such as helping clients get content with links. 

It’s a great tactic to engage and connect with your target audience in real time and, in turn, generate potential leads. 

Use Instagram Stories to share brief details and answer questions your audience might have about your company, products, and upcoming events or updates.

Add question stickers to your Instagram Stories and answer questions on the fly to make your sessions easy to follow.

IG Stories can be more interactive and engaging than regular posts. These can also humanize your company, making it easier for your audience to connect with your company and increasing your chances of generating leads.   

Turn Instagram into a lead generation machine

Learn from the tried and tested marketing hacks in this guide to help turn your lead generation efforts in Instagram a success. 

Adopt the best-fitting tools and deploy solid lead generation strategies to ensure your startup company hits the ground running.