11 Actionable Tips to Increase Instagram Engagement and Drive Traffic to Your Website

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Would you like to increase your Instagram engagement to increase traffic to your website? Or would you like to increase Instagram sales?

Regardless of the reason you use Instagram, you need to focus on connecting with your existing customers and followers, and also gaining new ones.

In our recent live session with Andrea D’Ottavio, founder of Webing and a digital marketing expert who is also known as VagabondCEO, shared his 11 tips to improve Instagram engagement organically. And in this blog, we are going to cover all those tips and tactics.

If you are not a reader and would rather watch a video instead, here is the video for you –

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Reasons why you need Instagram to sell more?

According to Andrea, here are 4 reasons you should not avoid Instagram if you really want to boost your sales –

  1. Instagram has 500M+ daily active users. (Instagram)
  2. India is the second-largest country in terms of Instagram users (Statista 2020)
  3. 200M+ of accounts visit a business profile daily (Instagram
  4. It is the 2nd most engaged social media platform after Facebook with over 60% users log in daily (Brandwatch)

That said, I hope these statistics will convince you that Instagram is the platform that you should be used strategically to drive traffic and boost sales.

Before going ahead, let’s first try to understand what Instagram wants from us and how it ranks our content.

Understand Instagram Ranking Factors –

First things first, understand that Instagram wants us to be hooked to the platform. They want us to spend more time on the platform so they can sell more ads.

And to succeed on the platform as a content creator, help them in achieving their objectives – make users spend more time!

Hence, the most important ranking factors are –

  1. TIME people spend on your content (posts, stories, IGTV)
  2. How people ENGAGE with your content

Time and engagement on your content are the prime factors of how successful you can be on Instagram.

Tips & Tactics to help you rank better and boost engagement on Instagram 

All said you have to always keep in mind that Instagram wants users to be engaged on Instagram, and your strategy should also be in the same direction to achieve your goals.

If you are ready, let’s get started…

1. Optimise your Instagram bio

Your Instagram bio is one of the first things that people see when they land on your profile, and you want them to tell the most attractive thing about your brand that makes them scroll down and follow your page ultimately.

However, bio isn’t just a place to tell about your brand but to make sure that your profile is discoverable for your primary keywords. There are two ways to add keywords in your Instagram profile. First is, you can add the primary keyword in your profile name. For example, if you’re an influencer, you can add a keyword like “Instagram Influencer” with your profile name as shown below –

keyword-instagram-profile-name
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Another way is, you can add the secondary keywords in the bio like Leadpages have added some of their primary keywords.

Keywords-instagram-bio
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Here are a few more ways to optimise your Instagram bio –

  1. Add emojis/symbols.
  2. Add your brand, hashtag.
  3. Add a UTM to the link and shorten it.

2. Use the right hashtags

On Instagram, users can follow specific hashtags which allow you to be discovered in the feed of people who aren’t following you but are interested in the topic you cover.

So, by using relevant and targeted hashtags in your post and stories can help you boost engagement and attract new followers which can be further translated into more customers for your business.

To find the most relevant hashtags for your posts, you can use tools like Tailwind, Keyhole and Social Info

3. Share infographic posts

Infographic or any educational posts are one of the most engaging content types on Instagram because such posts increase the number of saves on your post which is vital for Instagram algorithms. 

The more the saves you get on your posts, the Instagram algorithm finds it more interesting and boosts the reach of that specific post. And since these are informative posts, people like to share their own opinion around the topic which establishes the engagement on the post.

So, always to try to share informative posts which bring value to your audience about your product or service.

4. Post Long Videos

Instagram allows you to share videos of a maximum of 60 seconds in the post while on IGTV, you can share longer videos and share its preview on your Instagram feed and stories.

Now, the longer your videos are the more time people spend on your content allowing you to engage them and drive them to your website via the link in the IGTV description.

As mentioned earlier, Instagram wants us to spend more time on the platform and by posting long videos you’re keeping people on the platform for a longer duration. Thus, Instagram loves your content too and gives a broader reach among the relevant audience.

5. Use Interactive stories to grow engagement

 Instagram has evolved the story format since it was launched a couple of years ago. It is continuously bringing new interactive stickers that allow users to engage with the brands instead of just being an audience.

Interactive stickers like Questions, Quiz, Polls, and countdown enable you to keep your audience engaged and make them spend more time on your stories. For example, when we were about to go live on YouTube for this webinar, we used a countdown sticker in our story which allows users to set the reminder when the countdown ends.

Countdown-started-instagram story
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You can also add a link to stories which people can access by swiping up on your story. This way you can direct the interested people to your blog post, landing page or YouTube Live as we did –

Countdown-ends-instagram story
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6. Add your main products as story highlights

Using story highlights, you can add stories to appear on your profile right below your bio even after the original story disappears. Now, if you’re selling products or offering services, story highlights can be used as a catalogue from where users can visit your website and learn more about it.

For examples, if you’re an affiliate marketer then you can add your best selling or popular affiliate products in the story highlight. This way whenever a user lands on your website, they can go through all the tools recommended by you.

Instagram story highlights are really a vital section of your profile and you must leverage it to create awareness about your offerings to the first time visitors and drive them to your website.

7. Do micro-blogging on Instagram

Instagram is a picture sharing platform and it is true that pictures are worth a thousand words. However, a combination of a picture with a compelling story behind it adds more meaning to it.

You can use Instagram as a micro-blogging platform where you can dive deeper into the topic, share behind the scene story or tutorial with your followers in the post caption. For example, in the post below, we took a micro-blogging approach in the caption to talk about the image content.

The advantage of doing this is that users will spend more time on your posts and stimulates conversation in the comments which ultimately results in higher engagement and wider reach of posts.

8. Share Quotes

On Instagram, people love quotes, they save the quotes, they like and share with others which results in higher engagement.

So, whether you’re running a restaurant, retail store or building personal brand, quotes work for every type of audience in keeping them engaged and staying on top of their mind.

You can leverage Pinterest to find quotes related to your industry or product and use free tools like Canva to add quotes to your images like below –

Share-quotes-on-instagram
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9. Get more clicks on your link in bio

Since you cannot add links in your Instagram post captions, you want people to click on your link in the bio to visit a webpage for more information.

Now, encouraging people to visit your profile to find the link to get an offer, download an ebook or just to read the recent blog post is a big thing to ask. However, you can make this easier for your followers, by adding your profile username in the caption where they can click and visit your profile directly from the caption.

click on instagram bio link
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The objective of doing this is to offer a call-to-action directly from the caption instead of just asking “visit the link in the bio”.

10. Add multiple links in your bio

Well, you cannot really add multiple links in your bio but I have a hack to help you with it. You can add a link to an Instagram specific landing page where you can add links to other pages where you want to direct traffic.

For example, if you’re an Amazon affiliate, you can add your affiliate page link in the bio. Similarly, if you are selling ebooks or courses, you can add a link to the landing page highlighting the popular courses.

You can also use free tools like Linktree to create a link with multiple links to different websites or pages for the visitors. Here’s how SEMrush uses Linktree to offer multiple links to their Instagram followers –

SEMrush Linktree page
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11. Run Instagram Giveaways

Last but not least, you should run Instagram giveaways to drive more engagement and build an active follower base for your brand.

Instagram giveaways are limited-time contests during which the brand promises to give away something to one or more lucky participants who fulfil a specified set of criteria defined by the brand itself.

Running an Instagram giveaway contest may sound like a gigantic task and expensive, but it isn’t like that. Your giveaway prize has to be something that adds value to your audience and makes them feel good to win that. 

Here are two types of giveaways you can run on Instagram –

  1. Comment Picker giveaways – In this giveaway, post photos or videos and ask people to comment and mention a (or multiple) friends to enter the contest. Afterwards, you randomly select the winner(s) from the participants.
  2. Hashtag contest – In this type of giveaway, you ask people to post a photo or video with your product or anything related to a specific topic and a winner is picked from them. You can also add a few more terms for the contest participation like follow and mention your profile, tag 2(or more) friends in the caption to get better engagement.

Now, making an Instagram successful depends a lot on how you spread the words about the contest and how do you announce the winners.

When there are lots of brands running fake Instagram giveaways just to attract new followers, transparency from your part can play a significant role in attracting wider participation and followings for your brand.

Conclusion

Instagram is one of the most popular social platforms, especially among young people, so it doesn’t matter what industry, industry or profession you’re in, Instagram needs to be included in your marketing strategy.

And now that you know the best tactics to grow your brand on the platform, it is high time you put them into action and see the results. However, I must say that the greatest asset you can have in marketing is patience and consistency.

These strategies can help you increase engagement on any Instagram profile if you do it consistently and maintain patience to see the numbers grow.

Do you use Instagram for your business? If so, share your one tip with us that worked for you in the comments below.

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Authored By
A Blogger, Author and a speaker! Harsh Agrawal is recognized as a leader in digital marketing and FinTech space. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud, and a Speaker at ASW, Hero Mindmine, Inorbit, IBM, India blockchain summit. Also, an award-winning blogger.

5 thoughts on “11 Actionable Tips to Increase Instagram Engagement and Drive Traffic to Your Website”

  1. Elena Peter

    Hey, amazing post! These tips are really helpful in organic traffic on Instagram especially giveaways. I will surely run hashtag contests and comment picker giveaways. Thank you for sharing!

  2. I love it Harsh, especially the trick to add your username in the caption of your post to link to your bio. I mostly use Instagram to announce now post on my blog, I get tons of like for the infographic but not a lot of followers actually check the post. I am sure the trick will increase the conversion rate. Thank you very much.

  3. DHRUVKUMAR SANJAYKUMAR PATEL

    It’s really informing..Just have a quick question sir, if i am running the quotes page and I of course write for myself developing it as a hobby, is there any useful way by which can make some passive income, except paid promotions , i want to utilise it to help people and making a very little money.

  4. Harsh Nath Jha

    Hi Harsh,
    Fantastic Article, It was just a bull’s eye as this was the thing I had been surfing for on the Internet and I found It In my mailbox.
    This article is just full of value giving content, And I really love it.
    Hope To See More Article On Increasing engagement On Instagram.
    I Have A request Too, Please make an article for increasing engagement On Pinterest.
    ThankYou.

  5. I’m new to blogging but familiar with Instagram. Never thought about mini-blogging through Instagram. Thank you for the tip! I will try this immediately.

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