What I'm about to show you is how, in 5 days, we made $579.42 and got over 1,075 new visitors to our brand new site.

All by spending $165 on one Instagram Promo.

And I'll show you how you can do the same. (With Templates)

Background

BestSelf Co. finished 2015 rocking and all of December we focused on getting over 10,000 Self Journals in the hands of our backers. Not an easy feat, especially for the Holiday shipping season.

We knew we had to start working on obtaining new customers, but this time, we focused on the ones we did have and made sure they were happy and received their products they backed on our Kickstarter Campaign.

Because of this, the marketing ideas we had and the channels we wanted to go after were on the back burner. We didn't even have a website completed yet.

Then January 1st came, and we launched the new site. Finally, I could focus on driving traffic to the site and start testing the different ideas we had for acquiring new customers.

Beginning The Process

Know Your Customers

We knew Instagram was a great way to promote our product, so I started looking for accounts that would have our target customers interests.

For us: success, entrepreneurs, motivation, positivity, self-improvement

Start Searching For Accounts That Relate To Your Customer

You can start searching Instagram for handles, hashtags, or keywords.
I just started to go down the list of terms I listed above.

I would locate all the profiles that came up while searching and put their information into the spreadsheet. Most important was to find their email address.

Compile The Information

I started by gathering all the profiles data into a spreadsheet- It will make your life so easy, especially when you're reaching out to dozens at a time.
Here's what I wanted to know

1. Handle Name
2. Follower Count
3. Contact Email

Reach Out To Account Owners

I then sent a template email (I use aText for this, which makes life so much easier) to all the accounts I thought would be great to target.
Here's What I said:

Their Response

They would normally reply with an auto response with their cost per post, bulk rate, advertising times, and add ons (links in bio).
I then took all this information and put it into the spreadsheet. I used all this information as a way to evaluate the target market, costs, and potential reach.

Compile Your Ads and Ad Copy

Before you can decide on which profile you want to use for your promo, you need to compile your ads and your caption text.
I used picMonkey to create, crop, & add text to our product pictures.

Here's What Our Ads Looked Like:

Each picture had a different message overlaid on it. Therefore, each caption text needed to be different for each one. I made sure to label each picture with a number, and then put all the caption texts into one .txt file.

For the Caption Copy, I made it very easy for the publisher to find the caption copy for the appropriate picture and choose one of 2 options for the caption.

1. If they didn't have the link in their bio
2. If they put the link in their bio

Sending It

I put all the images and the text file into a Dropbox folder. I then shared the folder after discussing the promotion process, schedule, & costs with the owner.

Tracking Your Data

If the Instagram owner used the link in their bio (which I highly recommend paying the extra fee for), I would create a unique URL for them to use for analytics tracking.

I used a tool called Google Analytics URL Builder to help streamline this process.

I then gave the Instagram owner both the long string URL as well as the Bit.ly URL

Here's the exact email I used:

(Side note: I must admit as far as "best practices" goes, I did not use the UTM parameters correctly per-say. You can learn about the URM parameters here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1037445?hl=en)

The Results

We ended up doing a 5-day promo w/ @SuccessDiaries for the total amount of $165 including a link in the bio for all five days.

(disclaimer: our cost are what we paid, the prices for Instagram promos change on a daily basis per account- do not be surprised if there is an increase, and SuccessDiaries is not obligated to offer these prices for your promotion)

I was unsure about what the results might be because this was our first Instagram promo.
Once I looked into the data, I was shocked about how well it actually did.

Traffic:
This promotion was the third highest source of traffic for us that week. Resulting in 10.10% of traffic and a total of 1,075 unique visitors over the 5-day stretch. This is excellent for only launching our new site a few days before.

Revenue:
The revenue was one of the best aspects of this. Over the same 5 day stretch, we made a total of $579.42 which was the 4th highest source of revenue for us that week.

The total Return On Investment (ROI) was 251.16%

Keep in mind, this does not include any revenue that we generated from people seeing the ads and coming back to us on their own. These results and metrics are strictly through the link inside SuccessDiaries Bio

Now it's your turn to schedule your Instagram promotion. To make your life easy, I put together everything inside this Instagram Promotion Cheat Sheet. Including Spreadsheets, all our images and caption copy we used, and the email templates I sent to the Instagram Owners.