In this day and age, not many businesses, brands or personalities are still spending crazy amounts of money on television ads, physical billboards, or radio jingles. While these marketing strategies are still relevant, they are not exactly in vogue anymore. One could argue that social media has become the mainstream media of the 21st century, with millions of people getting all their news and information entirely off social networks. Social media marketing has the ultimate benefit of bringing a brand’s value to people’s attention faster and quicker than traditional methods. From progressive brand recognition and awareness to growing customer/fan bases and increasing sales exponentially, promoting on social media not only saves you remarkable costs but also ensures value for your money if the appropriate strategies are employed.
Instagram: From picture app to global hangout spot
Facebook’s Instagram is one of the most popular and most used social media apps in the world right now. With over 850 million active as of 2020, there’s no shortage of people to promote your brand to. Instagram digital marketing has become a full niche on its own, so much that it’s now very common to find people whose entire businesses are based on this app and nowhere else on the internet.
However, a lot of people have this misconception that Instagram growth is instantaneous and must be achieved in very short periods. In any kind of promotion or marketing, real visibility is progressive and takes time to build – expecting anything else would leave you with a porous audience filled with people but no real customers/fans. According to Instagram growth expert and digital marketer, Nick Rogers, a lot of digital marketers are easily falling into the inevitable temptation of using “spammy” and weak strategies for instantaneous growth. Tactics like giveaways, buying fake followers (which are mostly just annoying bots), paying for likes and comments, and some other annoying strategies would often leave you with a large following and absolutely no results. You’d spend thousands of Dollars on these tactics and get no value in return, no substantial sales, and the weak attention would fade away after a short while.
Strategies that stick: Getting value for every penny spent
Rogers, 21, is the CEO of PvstedMedia (pronounced “posted”), a million-Dollar Instagram growth company and parent organization to the popular pages, Business Driven Dream and Investing Authority. With his first-ever page hitting 100,000 organic and active followers within four months, scaling up to a million within a year, Rogers is now recognized as an expert in valuable Instagram marketing and has worked with several brands and personal pages over the past couple of years.
Rogers said about the foundational strategies that set Instagram aside from other networks: “Personality, relatability, and messaging are the key areas you need to focus on to succeed with Instagram. Unlike Twitter and other faceless platforms, these are by far the most important factors for success. Most people overlook them to create some “sick edits” or carousel posts. The truth is, the simpler, the better.”
The first client PvstedMedia handled was a tech entrepreneur who was having a hard time growing his page and barely making any sales on the platform. Rogers and his team worked with him for a year and were able to scale his followers up from 0 to 140,000+, increase his sales exponentially to over $500,000+, and help him raise millions of dollars from investors for his real estate business.
How did they achieve this?
Rogers highlighted three key points:
- Improving the personality on camera.
- Coming up with a catchy tagline.
- Hooking the audience with relatable storytelling
As a typical tech guru, this guy was a total nerd who only knew nerd speak. Rogers and his team coached him extensively every week for 8 months, encouraging him to speak with free and consistent charm, as one would “when you’re chilling with the boys or trying to pick up a girl”. The tech guy improved so remarkably that this personality became his own for whenever a camera is turned on.
People love taglines a lot. Entrepreneurs who make promotional videos would snag solid followership and build interest a lot easier when people have something to look forward to in these videos. Rogers said, “We made sure that he was known for some controversial opinion. Gary Vee has ‘eat shit’ and Grant Cardone has ‘multifamily only’”. They made him repeat his chosen tagline regularly in his videos and a time came when it became a huge selling point for his products.
Finally, excellent storytelling and relatable messaging effectively seal the deal. People love to hear an exciting story. Getting viewers to connect with your brand is mostly enabled by how they relate to your messages. You could be talking about how a part of your product or service works and instead of dropping straight into the technical points, starting off with a catchy, concise story is a sure bet to getting viewers hooked – long enough to get the core message and make an informed decision.
Rogers explains that the entire process is not essentially easier and requires a lot of dedication and commitment to push through. However, with just a phone, a camera, a laptop, and the Instagram app, they are pushing companies to thresholds of over 100K followers and $250k monthly in revenue within a year of working together.
He added, “The truth is, the simpler, the better. It’s not about the style, it’s about the message! And this can be carried over to multiple other platforms. It’s not just about understanding Instagram, it’s about understanding how humans interact.”
