How to use Instagram to market your architecture practice (and turn Followers into Clients) - Part 1
A lot of architects use Instagram to promote their work and their services. For some, it is the main – or even the only – marketing activity they regularly undertake. Which in my view can be a big mistake!
That’s because few architects understand the role that Instagram should play in your overall marketing strategy, or how to use the platform to appeal to future clients and invite them to start a conversation with you via your other marketing channels.
So this blog (and part 2 next week) outlines:
the key purpose of Instagram in your overall marketing channel;,
how to work out if Instagram and other Social Media platforms are the most suitable channels for your business; and
if they are, how to enhance your Instagram presence to connect and engage with more people and Followers; some of whom may become Clients in future.
So what’s the main purpose of Instagram in marketing your architecture practice?
Instagram (and other social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest) are great for building AWARENESS of your practice, when potential clients are starting to think about engaging an architect.
Awareness is the first of five stages on an architecture client journey (the others are Consideration, Decision, Commission and Ambassador). It’s important because it represents the number of new people coming into your field of orbit, but you still have to guide them through three more stages before they become Clients, so it’s not the main game.
That means that while it’s useful to always be growing your Follower count, the number of Followers you accumulate is not the most important metric to monitor. If you’re not converting Followers into Subscribers and Subscribers into Clients, your Instagram Follower count has little direct correlation to the number of new enquiries you receive, or the number of new projects you bring into your practice.
(To measure your client acquisition statisticss, you need to collect data about how many people visit your Social Media platforms, and your Website, choose to subscribe, or make an enquiry, and how many of THOSE convert into clients and projects. That’s a bigger topic than I cover in a blog post; it’s an activity I undertake with clients in my Review + Reset consulting package.)
So, back to Instagram. In the past, there was a strong emphasis on growing your Follower count – and many businesses wanted to achieve the magic number of 10k followers – because verified accounts could insert WWW links into Instagram Stories (rather than relying on the “link in bio”). But that changed in October when Instagram launched a new feature that enables ALL users to add a link from Stories to any website, regardless of their Follower count.
Now that anyone can insert website links into Stories, you should definitely take advantage of this feature to direct traffic to your Website.
To do that, click on the smiley face Sticker button at the top of the Story page, then choose the Link Sticker, and type in the URL you want people to visit. The great thing about this feature is that you can direct people to ANY page on your website, not just the Home page – which is likely your “link in bio” page, so you can use Stories (and then Highlights) to direct traffic to particular locations, in a way that you can’t for posts on your feed. Handy huh?
Click on the Sticker button
Then click the Link Sticker
And add your website link to your Story
So how do I work out whether Instagram is a useful marketing platform for my architecture practice?
So if Follower counts are not the main game, what is?
The key metric you want to track is how many Instagram users visit your Profile, and then make the leap to visit your Website (or from Stories, the number of visitors who click on your URL Links to your Website).
Assuming you have your Instagram Profile set to a Busines account – which gives you access to more insights and analytics – you can view these datasets from your main profile page by clicking on Insights > Content that you shared > Select Metric (click on Reach) > Profile Visits / Website Taps.
Check which Posts prompted the highest number of Profile visits over the past 6 days, 30 days, or year.
Also see which posts delivered the most visitors to your Website, via your Instagram Insights
Look at the figures for the past month, and the past year, and see if you can identify particular types of content that delivered more visitors to your Website. Those are the types of Posts and Stories that you’ll want to prioritise in future.
There is a second – and more useful way – to access analytics about how effectively your Instagram profile drives traffic to your Website. It’s via Google Analytics or – even better still – the Seeking Digital dashboard (see this post for more details).
There are many advantages to using the Seeking Digital dashboard such as:
It provides the ability to compare the volume of Social Media visitors with other traffic sources (Search, Referrals, Email, Direct, etc);
You can also compare Instagram visitors against visitors from other Social media platforms (such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest etc), and
You can plug in any date range to see particular weeks or months, or the year to date, or to drill down to one specific day, to see what was happening on your Website in relation to a particular Instagram post (the image below is from Monday, when I posted about Julia Cambage resigning from the Institute)..
Look at the Traffic Sources pie chart and Social Network data to determine where your Website visitors are coming from - Instagram or other channels and platforms?
Looking at these figures, you may be surprised at how few of your total website visitors actually arrived via your Instagram profile (or your other social media platforms, for that matter). The Traffic Sources pie chart at the top left provides an easy-to-access overview of where all of your traffic is coming from, and often the Social Media slice of pie is one of the smaller serves.
Yet another benefit of using the Seeking Digital dashboard is that you can see user behaviour from your various Social Media channels – in the Social Network box – such as the number of Sessions, Page Views, Average Session Duration, Pages per Session, and the Bounce Rate.
All of this information will help you to understand whether Instagram visitors were more or less engaged and interested in your Website content than other types of visitors, based on:
how much time they spent on your site,
how many pages they looked at,
whether they left without looking at other pages (that’s what Bounce Rate measures), etc.
And analysing this data will help you determine whether your current diet of Social Media and Website content is meeting the needs of your ideal clients, which in turn can inform whether your marketing materials are effective or might require some refinement in future.
You may find when you look closely at the source of your Website traffic that other marketing channels – such as Referral, Email, Search and even Direct – are doing the heavy lifting in terms of delivering visitors to your Website.
If that’s the case, I’d urge you not to spend too much time or energy on Instagram, because for many architecture practices, it plays a small role in the overall marketing jigsaw.
Or if you find that you’re putting a lot of time and effort into Instagram but it’s not delivering consistent traffic to your website (and then Subscribers to your Email list, who later become Clients), you can adjust your strategy by following the tips I’ll provide in Part 2 of this article, next week.
Understanding how Instagram works – and the role it plays in raising awareness of your practice – can help to alleviate any anxiety you feel about losing a few followers, which is actually no big deal, if your Website and other channels are performing well.
Or is it??
Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash
In fact, a drop in Followers suggests that those people weren’t your ideal clients anyway, so it’s fine to shed people who don’t require your services (this applies to your Email list as well). It means that the Followers and Subscribers who remain are a good fit for your practice.
That’s it for the Part 1, so feel free to look into your own analytics and report back to me about what you find.
You can leave a comment below or send me an email.
And you can read Part 2 here, where I outline the 6 steps you can take to enhance your Instagram activity to deliver more visitors to your Website, so you can start turning Followers into future Clients.
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