How a Software Company Wins Customers, Traffic & Leads with Instagram

Is your brand on Instagram? If so, you know one the greatest challenges of the platform is that you’re only given one live link to work with —  it’s in your account’s bio section. For this reason, most brands resort to updating the URL in the bio periodically — sometimes  every day. This practice can be exhausting and it has a couple big-time downfalls. For one thing, when you update your Instagram’s bio link every day with a new unique URL, your older Instagram posts that instruct users in your caption copy to “click the link in my bio” become out of date. This means when a user discovers your Instagram account for the first time, or one of your current followers decides to scroll through your photos, those users will be discovering wrong information. It’s like if you were running an ad that had a faulty landing page a day after it went live. Anytime anyone clicks on your ad, they’re directed to a page that has nothing to do with the message and/or content the ad promised. This doesn’t help your business. Nor does it help you make the most of your brand’s Instagram efforts.

Your Instagram(IG) Solution

ShortStack has a better way of making the most of the one live link IG provides you. Directing users to a mobile-friendly ShortStack-built Campaign from your Instagram’s bio URL allows you to have a controlled environment where you can capture data and host multiple types of content and tracking links.

And the best part: there is no daily maintenance (i.e., updating your bio link every day to reflect your latest post!).We wanted to test our IG features so we planned out a handful of IG posts based on a few goals we had and built a Campaign (you can see what it looks like on desktop here) using ShortStack to host the content that was relevant to our pre-planned posts.

‍Here are the goals we had in mind for our Instagram page:

‍1. To drive (and track!) traffic to our website, blog and an exclusive piece of content that made for and promoted only on our IG account.

2. To drive (and track!) sales from our IG profile.3. To collect data and grow our newsletter list through our IG efforts.Using ShortStack’s “time-based visibility setting” feature, we were able to configure our Campaign (i.e. newly updated IG bio link) to reveal content at the exact time we planned to promote specific content on our IG account.

Post #1: Drive Sales

For our first planned post, we wanted to promote our online t-shirt store, ShirtStack. When users clicked on our Campaign URL in our IG profile’s bio section, they were directed to the Campaign we made which hosted a “Get One” button which directed them to our store’s website.

We embedded an Improvely tracking link on every button on our Campaign. So when someone coming from Instagram lands on our Campaign via our bio link we’re able to track every click and/or sale that happens as a result.

‍This takes tracking the ROI of our Instagram efforts from measuring just followers, post likes and comments to measuring real conversions, traffic and leads.

Post #2: Drive Traffic to Our Blog, SociallyStacked

For our second post we wanted to test driving traffic from our IG account to our blog. To do this, we posted a picture on IG that teased one of our recently posted blog articles and linked to it from our Campaign.

Post #3: Attract Leads

Our third post was all about trying to attract leads. Demos are hands down the best way to learn about ShortStack and all that our powerful platform can do.

We wanted our IG followers to know this so we posted a pic of Adam, our V.P. of Client Relations, who is a demo superstar. Then, on our Campaign, we directed users to our demo sign-up page.

Post #4: Increase Video Views

This was a fun post. Last year our office made a Harlem Shake video that we wanted to share for #ThrowbackThursday.

The picture we posted showed on IG was a screenshot shot from the video. To actually watch it, users could go to our Campaign and watch it. There’s no need to take them off the Campaign to YouTube land where they would be lost forever.

Post #5: Grow our Newsletter List

Our fifth post was focused on growing on blog’s newsletter list. The first ten folks who came from our Instagram profile, clicked on our Campaign and signed up for our email list got a sweet little something from us in their inbox.

Post #6: Collect Data, Increase Followers and Engagement with an Instagram Giveaway

There’s no better way to increase engagement and collect valuable information like a giveaway. Where most Instagram contests nowadays fall short is collecting data. By requiring users to give their information to you as a means for entering to win your Instagram giveaway, your business is able to benefit so much more from your efforts. We made it super easy for users to share their entry information with us by directing them to our Campaign which hosted a giveaway promotion form.

Post #7: Share Exclusive Content with our Instagram Followers

For one of our last planned posts, we promoted a guide we made exclusively for IG. The resource could only be accessed via the Campaign linked in our bio. This post was a great way to discover if our content resonated well with our IG audience or not.