A guide for creative designers & health and wellness coaches

You have an amazing Instagram presence. Your feed is visually cohesive, your stories are fun and engaging. But you’re not converting people to your website where they can buy from you! Without conversions, your Instagram account is simply providing free entertainment – and you’re burning out with the content-creation work. That’s no fun, and it isn’t growing your business. 

Converting Instagram followers to your landing page is both about the underpinning technology setup on your site, using landing-page best practices and visual craftsmanship, as well as developing the right enticing offer. We’ll show you how to do all three of these! 

For this blog, we’re going to focus on two types of businesses, a creative product business (e-commerce) and a service-based coaching business.

For every small business:

Create an Instagram Landing Page that allows your customers to follow your link in bio to a specifically designed page that you can edit regularly to invite them to take other actions. This page is a sure-fire destination for your customers to visit that is specifically tailored to the content they’re connecting with!

You can create them using your EXISTING website (you do not need LinkTree or other tools for this). Our how-to blog post (our MOST popular blog post of the last year, which has hundreds of hours of viewing time!) explains how to set this up for both WordPress and Saas platforms like SquareSpace.  Learn how HERE.  

Create an offer:

This can be a product freebie (for creative designer commerce sites), a worksheet/guide/checklist (for coaches and service-based businesses) that is appealing to a wide audience. You can also use a discount coupon as well. Discount coupons aren’t just for product businesses, some of our life/health coaches use a 22% discount or a free session discount coupon with success, too! Once your customers discover how great your product is, they will want to come back for more.

Create the conversion page:

You want to land your customer on a page that is engaging and has an opportunity to convert your prospect to a lead or a paying customer.  The choice of landing them is usually related to whatever you’ve been posting on IG. If it’s your blog, use the same photo or graphic as in your blog and link each photo to the blog post (which contains that conversion offer opportunity as part of the blog post.)  If you’re landing your customer on a regular page, be sure there’s an offer there. And if you’re landing them on your shop page, be sure you have at least a popup for a coupon code on that product page. Conversion pages should do one thing: get the customer to buy or sign up. So land them on a page with a single topic and a single call to action that you want them to take. 

Create content to direct people to your conversion offer:

Once you have all three of these in place, create Instagram postsand stories that direct people to your offer via your IG landing page. Unsure where to start? Check out these 4 steps that map out content planning:

  1. Create an Instagram post for your offer
  2. Create stories for your offer that you can rotate into your regular stories posts
  3. Create posts that aren’t specifically for your offer but are related to it in topic or subject, or image. 
  4. Make sure your offer button, link or image on your IG landing page is always the first or second one on your IG landing page. If you set up your IG landing page (using our instructions here), you will not have to edit this page every time you produce a new blog post, it will refresh automatically for you. If you’re linking to a regular page, you will have to create a new button for each new page you add (but it only takes a minute!) 

Great, now you have a plan, but what content qualifies as good content? What should be offered to your customers? Check out some of our ideas below:

Great content ideas for creative ecommerce businesses (sewing & knitwear designers):

  • A simple pattern or project how/to freebie product. 
    • Pick your simplest product and create a free project download out of it.
  • A related product such as a downloadable:
    • SVG file for cricut/silhouette cutters, a worksheet, a checklist, a how-to printable lesson

Great content ideas for health & wellness coaches who provide services:

  • A checklist, or a quiz
  • A journaling prompt
  • A how/to mini guide
  • A reference sheet

Generating content, creating an offer, and posting to Instagram are all essential steps that need to be taken in order to convert more customers. If you master these steps, which are both technical and content-based, your efforts on Instagram will yield to conversions.

What happens next?

Email marketing takes up the next step (and it’s usually the most successful one!) Using that conversion list, email your prospects an offer they can’t refuse (usually a discount, coupon or timed offer code) along with compelling reasons to buy from you – testimonials and inspiration work well. Ongoing conversation continues with your email list, your Instagram account and other social accounts that your customer can use to follow and connect with you. Companion accounts like YouTube and Facebook Groups help engage your customer with content in different ways. Using them together (but posting different types of content on each) is a great way to have multiple points of connection with your customers.

Your business Instagram exists to convert people to paying customers. It’s a tool you can use to foster relationships, and connect with customers, but the ultimate goal is to convert prospects to paying customers and from paying customers to brand evangelists.