Context on Organic Instagram

Organic Instagram is a completely different channel than Instagram ads or influencer marketing—it’s less about pure acquisition than it is about community building and conversion.

And it can be paired with ads or influencers. In fact, ads or influencer marketing often work well to drive leads to your Instagram feed, where your organic strategy works to turn them into customers.

An organic audience on Instagram can also function as a hedge against competitive risk and volatile advertising costs—factors you cannot control.

So when you build an audience organically—before paid methods—you’re working to lay the foundation of a devout following who has real affinity for your brand. They care and they show it.

That’s why an audience is the ultimate form of leverage. And like we mentioned in the intro, your audience is already using Instagram on a daily basis and following brands they’re interested in interacting with.

It’s just a matter of cutting through the noise to reach them.

Instagram is where content, community, & commerce meet

People originally used Instagram to express themselves, follow friends and family, and get inspired. Today Instagram has become a fully fledged ecommerce platform—while managing to preserve the app’s core user values (community, creativity, and simplicity).

These values haven’t changed, but today people use Instagram to interact with individuals and brands alike and have the intention to do more than just window-shop.

Studies have shown that boredom and pleasure are key drivers of shopping as an activity. And 96% of Americans admit to shopping for “therapy.”

The point is, people were already getting inspired on Instagram and discovering interesting products. Now, through the convergence of social selling as a paradigm and native shopping functionality—they can also buy them.

What companies should focus on organic Instagram?

Most companies can build a sizable following on Instagram using the advanced strategies in this module. Growth comes down to figuring out how to fit your brand to the platform. For example, coaches, fitness instructors, restaurants, and travel companies all find ways to succeed.

But certain companies are better suited than others for growth on Instagram—creative companies that capture their products in a visually-appealing way do best.

There are three main types of companies that should consider investing in Instagram:

1. Business to consumer (B2C) brands that sell physical products

Ecommerce brands are a great fit for building an organic following on Instagram.

If you can capture the lifestyle that your product fits into, or emphasize the visceral quality in a compelling way, you can show people how much better life could be with your products in it. Within ecom, here are a few types of companies that have the potential to grow on Instagram:

• Beauty and cosmetics: Glossier captures the vibrant colors, diverse textures, and the visceral experience of using their products with makeup tutorial videos and high-res imagery.
  
  
• Fashion: Pura Vida (sells bracelets) portrays a fanciful carefree lifestyle with exotic beach locales, stylish outfits, and good times with good friends. Low-dollar value accessories are impulse buys.
  
  
• Food products: Legendary Foods sells healthy, pre-packaged versions of guilty pleasure baked goods. Through enticing visuals of sugary sweet treats, they invite their audience to cheat on their diet and indulge a little, guilt-free, while still making progress on their health journey.

2. Creative service businesses

If you have creative expertise that you sell as a service or product, you can do well with an education-focused approach to your content.

• Marketing agencies: Squared Academy is a boutique agency that teaches people about Instagram marketing. They show businesses what a job well done looks like—using Instagram’s native posting features to their fullest potential. Their recipe: great visuals plus great content, designed for Instagram.
• Graphic design: Dribbble is a design marketplace where creators and employers can discover one another and collaborate on projects. Dribbble features design work from community members to attract new users to the platform, and broadcasts their talent pool to people who might want to hire them.
• Personal brands, coaches, consultants: Dain Walker is a strategist who teaches people how to build brands and market them on the internet. Dain splinters his insights into visually-appealing, bite-sized pieces of content. He is consistent with CTAs and has a clear funnel in place to generate leads and schedule consultation calls with prospects.

3. Mobile apps

Mobile apps that either have a community aspect, are visual, or are genuinely remarkable can work well.

• Health and fitness apps: Carbon Diet Coach is a premium health and fitness app. They use Instagram Stories as a dedicated channel to repost user-generated content and testimonials that speak to the quality and positive experience of using the app.
• Design apps: Pixelcut is a simple app that removes the background from photos you take with your phone. Useful for DIY headshots and product page photos. They use a combination of testimonials and videos of the app in action and use one universal CTA: download the app in the app store.

We've just covered a number of examples, but if you still aren't sure if Instagram makes sense for your business, here are a few questions to ask yourself:

• Is your product innately fun to share or visual in nature?
• Is your product or service better with friends or colleagues?
• Is your product remarkable—something truly worth remarking about?
• Is there a simple way to build community through your product?

If you answered ‘yes’ to any of the above, then Instagram is worth considering.

Goals of organic Instagram

Now we’ll show you, in 3 steps, exactly how to execute a strategy to grow your Instagram account before buying ads or investing in influencer marketing.

Here’s what you’ll do, in a nutshell:

• Step 1: Decide on the type of quality content your audience will engage with
• Step 2: Continuously post that content to increase reach and get followers
• Step 3: Prioritize tactics designed to convert followers into leads and customers

These are the standard goals, but here’s what our curriculum will help you focus on:

1. Building brand awareness to reach potential customers (most common)
2. Showcasing products and services (social selling)
3. Establishing authority in your industry (great if you’re in an emerging industry)
4. Building a community of brand advocates (more for brands that are already well-known)
5. Humanizing your brand (company culture and value focused to build affinity)
6. Driving traffic off-app to promote other channels (e.g. website, blog, and YouTube)

You know what you’ll do and why you’re doing it. Let’s move on to metrics.

Key metrics

When you continuously expose great content to relevant new audiences, you will gain followers. On some level, it really is that simple.

Followers are fine. Customers are better.

Customer acquisition is the whole point of this channel, which means your strategy must be laser-focused on adding followers and bringing people into your sales funnel.

Authentic engagement (not shallow vanity metrics like follower count and likes) is the metric we’ll look at above all else because it’s the best indicator of an audience’s affinity towards your brand.

Here are the top 4 engagement metrics to pay attention to:

• Reach: Refers to the total number of unique accounts that have seen your post or Story on a given day. As this number increases, so does your brand awareness.
• Impressions: The number of times your content was shown to users. If your impressions are higher than your reach, it means your audience is viewing your content multiple times.
• Engagement rate: Your post engagement divided by post impressions. Engagement is measured in likes, comments, saves, shares, direct messages (DMs).
• Views and shares (video content): A view is anytime someone watches a video post or Story for three seconds or more. “Shares” are when a user shares another user’s content to their Story feed.

Together, these 4 metrics provide a snapshot of how many audiences are seeing your posts (reach and impressions), and how well your content resonates with people (engagement rate, views, and shares).