Can Instagram be part of a sales funnel? Can Instagram sales funnels be effective?

The answer to both of those questions is yes.

Where does Instagram Fall in Your Sales Funnel?

Instagram could be the beginning, middle, and end of your sales funnel (for example: if your account sells shoutouts). For most businesses that offer a product or service though, Instagram is usually the first part of a sales funnel.

Use Instagram to attract followers who are interested in your brand.  1,000 engaged followers can be exponentially more effective for your sales funnel than 5M followers who don’t engage and don’t care. You do this by looking at what your followers interact with the most and analyzing why. Once you know why, create more content that your followers like to drive that engagement up.

Once you have a community of engaged and happy followers who love your content, start posting more calls to action and links.  If you can get your followers into an email list, that will be immensely helpful in your funnel setup. Remember that you don’t own Instagram and that anything could happen.

It’s best to get the followers into a space you have more control over like email or your website. Remember to used calls to action and offers on Instagram sparingly.

This will do three things:

• The Instagram algorithm won’t action block you or shadowban you for spamming people.
• New followers won’t be scared away by a constant barrage of sales offers.
• Your current followers won’t get worn out from seeing sales offers 24/7 and they’ll be less likely to unfollow.

A good ratio on Instagram is: 80% feeding your followers the content that they love and 20% marketing to them.  Don’t go over 20%, or you may find yourself struggling.

The Power of DM’s

Instagram DM’s are also a great thing to have as part of your sales funnel.  Mass messaging people will land you in hot water with the algorithm for spamming though. You can get around this in one of two ways. You can take the time to interact with someone’s account for a few weeks, then offer them value with a concise, to-the-point message. Or, you can ask followers to DM you in one of your posts.  The latter method may be more time effective and useful, since people can reach out to you en mass. The fact that they’re reaching out to you, means that your offer is so important to them that they took the time to DM you.

Where Ads Come In

Ads on Instagram should primarily be used to gain followers. This is because users are more likely to buy from you if they’ve gotten the chance to know you a little from following your account first. Of course, you can use ads that link directly to the landing pages of your sales funnel too. Just make sure that you hire a great ads manager who can get you good conversion rates.

Other Funnel Options

Once you add a linktree link to your profile, you can direct people to many different webpages from Instagram.  If you have 10,000 followers or more, you can also utilize the “swipe up” story feature to lead people to a webpage via your link. If you’re an e-commerce brand, look into getting approved for Instagram Shopping. This enables you to add links to your product photos so that people can go directly from the app to your product page.

If you’d like a game plan detailing exactly what an effective Instagram funnel looks like for your business, check out my strategy sessions.