The algorithm for finding clients on Instagram

Gone are the days when Instagram was closely associated with food pictures and sponge-duck-style ladies. Now it is a complete tool for finding clients. But the main fear that torments all advertisers is the ability to stupidly drain the budget and the time spent on advertising, which does not bring any results. Therefore, today we will consider how to find clients on Instagram and save nerve cells. From words to deeds.

What is what?

Let’s start with a little digression. How to advertise on Instagram? Let’s look at two working strategies – targeted advertising in Facebook placements and Instaplus. If everything is more or less clear with the first one, then Instaplus is an automated service that allows you to find your target audience, that is, real people who need your product. You can search for clients by cities, hashtags and even competitors.

In this article, you will get an effective algorithm for finding customers on Instagram, taking into account two options for driving traffic. And we will not just hit the sky with a finger, but we will work with a hot target audience, obtained in a few steps. In the end, you will have a working strategy for running an advertising campaign on Instagram.

Let’s start with the tools that come in handy:

1. Let’s find the target audience in Pepper.Ninja.
2. Let’s start Instaplus.
3. We are using Publer. Why – a little later.

We start looking for the target audience

Suppose that you are faced with the task of finding customers in the niche selling women’s dresses. Let’s start with segmentation:

• search for groups by keywords “beauty and fashion”;
• groups of competitors;
• newcomers to the groups of competitors, we set up monitoring through Pepper.Ninja;
• audience of opinion leaders in the field of fashion;
• community audience with clothing accessories.

There are, of course, other segments like apps and websites of top stores, for example, Lamoda, but we are looking for clients on Instagram.

Using the example of groups on the topic “beauty and fashion” I will explain the working algorithm for finding a concentrate of the target audience:

1. Register at Pepper.Ninja.
2. Open the “Search Communities 3.1” tab.
3. We register keywords. In our case, it is “beauty, fashion”. If you work within the same city, then it is appropriate to set it in the geography settings.
4. To find the target audience, we will collect data on 10 activities over the past six months. To do this, press the “Parsing Results” button.
5. Let’s go to the “Intersections” tab and set the search parameters that allow you to collect users who are simultaneously members of, say, from 2 to 4 thematic communities. We set the filter parameters – gender, age and any other necessary data.
6. So it will turn out to find a common audience among active and those who are members of several thematic communities at once.

The webinar “Step-by-step audience search” will help you figure out all the possible options for finding an audience in Pepper.Ninja.

Read also:

• 4 services for automating work with Instagram
• How to get on the recommended Instagram
• How to show ads to your competitors’ Instagram followers

Launching traffic

So, we have two options: advertising on Instagram through Facebook and Instaplus placements. To work with the second one, we need to convert the received IDs into links on Instagram. This can be done through the filter of other social networks in Pepper.Ninja:

We get a list of Instagram accounts:

Install the Instaplus application, connect your account and select a list of tasks. You can collect subscribers of a specific profile, those who liked or commented on a post, or those who geotagged, hashtag, and then filter all users.

As we said earlier, this is not the only advertising option. Now let’s set up targeted advertising on Instagram through Facebook placements. To do this, we need to create a custom audience based on phone numbers or email addresses.

We return to Pepper.Ninja. I recommend unloading phone numbers from the received audience, since VK users prefer to specify them. In the task in which we were looking for intersections between activities and intersections, we find the phone numbers of the resulting audience:

In the settings of the individualized audience of the Facebook advertising cabinet, select the phone numbers and upload the resulting file.

Leah Canary, SMM specialist:

In 2021, Facebook made us happy with a new feature: now, after creating a custom audience based on a list of customers, you can update it in Audience Manager, replacing customers with a new list.

Moreover, all ads that use this audience will be updated, and the training stage of the advertising campaign will not be reset. This update is really important and useful for target researchers, because changes in existing campaigns during the training phase led to a reset of learning outcomes and a loss of budget (in the recommendations of Facebook itself, an important rule was always mentioned not to make changes to campaigns during the training phase).

We form an advertising offer

In order to accentuate the proposal, we need to set more detailed settings for gender and age, and then create an advertising post. To set the gender and age settings, go back to Pepper.Ninja. In the tasks, we conduct analytics on the audience of the intersection between activities and those in several communities. We get the following data:

If everything was initially clear by gender, now we have highlighted the age category here, it is on it that you should focus. Next, we form an advertising offer. The Publer service will help us with this. In demo mode, you can watch 3 ads per request and enter a maximum of 6 requests per month. This is quite enough at the initial stage.

We register the keyword “dresses” in the section “Advertising on Facebook and Instagram”. We get:

In fact, this is a list of competitors in a niche that you can use to promote your account through Instaplus.

In terms of structure, the post looks something like this: reliance on social proof (for example, a new arrival of goods, the start of the May photo sessions) – unique properties / composition / price / delivery terms. This business can be backed up by a lead magnet. For example, a discount.

Let’s summarize

A ready-made algorithm for finding clients on Instagram:

1. We segment.
2. We are looking for target audience in Pepper.Ninja.
3. We are testing Instaplus and targeted advertising on Instagram through Facebook placements.
4. We form an advertising offer using Publer.

We hope this article will help you in finding clients on Instagram.

The article has been updated. First published: July 13, 2017