Top 7 Digital Marketing Trends for 2021

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Goodbye and good riddance to 2020. The global pandemic had an impact on every business. From a digital marketing standpoint, what will 2021 bring? Several digital marketing leaders shared their thoughts on coming trends.

Teddy Heidt, Founder of The Gauge Collective, offered this prediction:

Digital business pivots may become permanent. “Virtual Events and Experiences for audiences to engage outside of your traditional sales messaging. We helped Mariano's launch Mariano's Meet-Ups, Virtual Events spanning Chef Demos, Mixology Classes, and Live Music, and Tricoci market Virtual Consultations for at home treatments. Diversify your social media activity to connect with more engaged users. To that point, enrich the user experience on your social profiles by leveraging shop and other features that break down barriers towards purchasing from you. We helped Tricoci launch Instagram shop to complement their new ecommerce program.”

Massimiliano Tirocchi, CMO and co-founder, Shapermint, sees a shift in social media:

Social media will become a top channel for purchase, instead of just discovery. “Social media platforms like Facebook are making it easier for consumers to go from discovery to purchase without ever having to leave the platform, creating a simple and seamless path to purchase. With social commerce continuing to grow into 2021, retail brands will have to adapt to these platforms with new rules, similar to what many did with Amazon.”

Sherene Hilal, SVP, product marketing and business operations, Bluecore, predicts:

Informed buyers want to buy from informed brands. “This means evolving even beyond the age of personalization and entering an age of personal commerce, where consumers co-curate their experiences with brands to reflect their preferences at any given moment. They expect for brands to understand what they’ve bought in the past and help them to determine what they should buy next, based on all the data that they’ve consciously shared with them by engaging with their sites and channels. This is not just a matter of brands meeting consumers where they are; it’s about brands telling them what they want, when they want it. If brands and retailers are going to continue collecting first-party shopper data, they will need to begin actioning it in meaningful ways, predicting what their shoppers want to see next, and understanding where shoppers are in their buying cycles to predict when they’ll want to buy.”

Jim Kruger, Chief Marketing Officer, Veeam, offers the following:

Virtual events started out of necessity, but are here to stay because of ROI and accessibility. “In the face of the COVID pandemic, events became virtual out of necessity. As we move into 2021 and beyond, many events will stay virtual not only because of continued safety concerns, but also as a result of lessons learned in 2020. Companies found that by going virtual, they opened up their event to an entirely new audience as virtual events are more accessible than in-person events. For virtual events, visa issues, travel restrictions and costs aren’t as much of a concern as with in-person events, and many companies have found that this allows for higher attendance and more participation. That means lower cost for more people and a higher ROI. The key is to get creative and drive engagement through great speakers, rich content and some fun of course. In 2021 and beyond, virtual events will continue to be a popular route to engage with a broad set of customers as companies see the many benefits of online events.”

Lisa Apolinski, president of 3 Dog Write Inc, who I met when I helped her edit a book, offers these insights:

Culling social media channels. “Many companies are starting to reduce the number of social media channels they are using to share and influence, and rightly so. With so many channels available, and many companies having tried to stay relevant on all of them, the need to declutter is almost pervasive. Reducing social media channels to only the most relevant will be not only popular but necessary.”

Live interactions with virtual events. “Virtual events have great power but not if there is only one-way communication. There is a mistake among many associations and companies that virtual events should be broadcast versus being live. Yes, there are complications that can happen with live events, but the reward is so much greater than the risk. This is what attendees are looking for, something that can substitute, even in part, for a live event.”

Using AR in digital engagement. “With Facebook owning Oculus and dozens of augmented reality patents, it is only a matter of time before digital growth experts have to learn and incorporate AR into digital engagement. This is still on the periphery but now is the time to research, learn and consider how AR could be used in current digital assets.”

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10 Useless Tactics To Cut From Your Marketing Now!

The fast-paced world of digital media — with its new technologies and iterative improvements — has theoretically made marketers’ lives easier.

But the counterpart is that marketers are overwhelmed. It seems like every week there’s something new we NEED to be doing, lest we get left behind.

But a lot of this new “stuff” has already become outdated. Or worse still, most of it was never a good use of time and budget to begin with.

To help transform you into a more efficient business thinker, here are 10 tactics you can cut from your marketing plan today, and where to spend that previously wasted time…

1. ON-PAGE SEO OBSESSION

Most marketers are really comfortable with optimizing their web content for SEO, because they know it’s something well within their control to do. They hit the biggies —

• H1

• Page Title

• Post Title

• Image

• URL

• Content

— with their keywords, and sit pretty thinking they totally nailed their SEO.

Unfortunately, what we’re comfortable with isn’t always the best use of our time.

On-page SEO, while something you should certainly spend a couple minutes checking out before you publish new web content, isn’t something marketers should be obsessing over anymore.

Google’s algorithm is much more sophisticated than it was even a few years ago, so keyword optimization isn’t going to cut it anymore.

CUT THE ON-PAGE SEO FIXATION AND START FOCUSING ON:

• Keywords

• Links

• User Experience

• Conversions

[FLASH SALE] The Ultimate SEO Strategy Toolkit

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2. THE FIREHOSE BLAST OF BLOG CONTENT

Much like the social media bandwagon we’ve all jumped on, most marketers are convinced they need to be blogging for their business.

Of late, some marketers have taken this concept to the extreme, pumping out content at assembly-line pace.

More blogging is better blogging, right?

Not necessarily.

If you’re trying to compensate for low quality with high quantity, you’re doing yourself more harm than good — readers won’t regard your content well, and as a result, Google won’t hold your domain in high regard, either.

Additionally, if you’re resource-strapped, there’s a blogging volume sweet spot you can rest comfortably in.

92% of businesses that blog multiple times a day have acquired a customer from it.But 78% of businesses that blog on a daily basis have also acquired a customer from it.

That differential isn’t too big.

If we bring down the volume just a tad to 2-3 times per week, still, 70% of businessacquire a customer from their blog.

Test the frequency of your blog publishing volume, and uncover the volume you need to hold to maintain the customer acquisition you need from that channel.

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3. YOUR GO-TO LEAD MAGNET

To generate leads, you need a blow-out marketing offer that your site visitors can convert on.

But then you need another.

And another…

And another after that…

After a while, you’ll start to realize some offers perform better than others for lead generation, so you start using that offer all of the time.

Problem is, that offer can get really over-saturated really fast, and what once yielded your best click-through rate will end up being mediocre at best.

Start focusing on creating a new lead generation offer that’ll capture people’s attention. Look at historical data to see what topic has performed best for you, and find a way to make it 10 times better.

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4. MILLIONS OF MINDLESS BACKLINKS

To be great at SEO, you need inbound links. But to get inbound links, you need other sites to link to you. That doesn’t give you much control.

Oh, I know! I’ll create my own little websites — many marketers have come to refer to these as ‘microsites’ — and link to my domain from those!

Drop this.

First of all, maintaining a bunch of websites takes a ridiculous amount of time and money.

I mean, where are you getting all the content to keep them going?

Plus, for your inbound links to mean anything, they need to be coming from a wide variety of high quality sites. Unless you plan on creating hundreds of microsites that have a ton of clout with the SERPs, this strategy is a waste of your time.

START FOCUSING ON: Attracting organic inbound links. Work on creating content and marketing people love. Do that, and you’ll see the right kind of linking — the inbound kind.

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5. OVER-REPORTING

We’re the last ones to say you shouldn’t be reporting on your marketing, but with the Big Data explosion has also come a whole lot of time wasted interpreting numbers and analytics that don’t really mean anything for you right now.

It’s easy to spend an entire day just diving into, say, conversion reports, but what is all that information getting you? A lot of spreadsheets and numbers does not make a marketing strategy.

Figure out exactly what numbers you need to know for your business’ marketing, and do deeper dives into specific metrics as needed. It’s a better use of your time, and frankly provides more actionable advice than running hours of reports at the end of each month that you never use.

START FOCUSING ON: The metrics you need to succeed. Analyze where your business has performed well, and where it has potential. Start focusing on these areas.

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The Ultimate Book of B2B Press Contacts

6. PRESS RELEASES

The thinking behind the millions of press releases businesses produce each year is that they’ll get placed on an external site when picked up, and the coverage will come with an inbound link.

Also, you know, getting press coverage.

Unfortunately, almost all of the press releases getting churned out of marketing departments is not landing any actual press coverage. And the releases that are picked up?

Those aren’t exactly valuable inbound links when they’re getting funneled out to low quality sites.

Stop trying to weave an amazing story out of something relatively unamazing just so you have PR fodder.

It’ll just make journalists get really used to ignoring you, and your writing time is better spent on other types of content — like blog posts, for instance — that attract qualified readers and quality links.

START FOCUSING ON: Writing other types of content — like blog posts, for instance — that attract qualified readers and quality links.

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7. UNTARGETED PAID MEDIA SPEND

2015 saw a ton of advancements in paid advertising targeting options. For instance, did you know…

• Twitter paid advertising now allows marketers to target their audience by interest or username?
• Facebook paid advertising now lets marketers target their audience by desktop or mobile?

If you’re investing in PPC in any capacity and using targeting like this, congratulations, you’re doing it right.

If, however, you’re dumping money into completely untargeted PPC, it’s kind of like emailing your entire contacts database without doing any segmentation.

Turn off your paid media spend that isn’t leveraging targeting functionality, otherwise you’re throwing your marketing budget right out the window.

START FOCUSING ON: Targeting your PPC campaigns to people you want to reach. Even if that overall volume is lower, the conversion will be higher.

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iOS Mobile App Marketing Strategy Template

8. THE MOBILE APP YOU’RE DEVELOPING

You unequivocally should be investing in mobile marketing.

Investing in mobile application development, however, is a distraction and resource sap for most marketers.

There are well over one million mobile apps on the market, and they’re being released at rapidly increasing rates — not to mention 25% of apps are downloaded only once, and never used again after their initial download.

With a cluttered market and stickiness challenge, unless your mobile app is going to drive some serious results for your business, reroute your efforts to something that will give you a bigger bang for your buck.

START FOCUSING ON: Optimizing your entire web presence for mobile. The negative impact from having an unfriendly mobile presence will be far greater than the success of a mobile app.

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2016 Website Design Strategy Checklist

9. UNNECESSARY WEBSITE REDESIGN

Full-fledged website redesigns start out sounding like a great idea, and end up being a massive headache — typically pulling in more people than you thought would be involved, spending more money than you budgeted, and often adversely impacting conversion rates.

It’s not that you positively do not need a website redesign in 2016 — you very well may — but before you overhaul what you’ve got, ask yourself if you can work in smaller chunks.

Consider a series of A/B tests in which you incrementally improve upon parts of your website, and apply your learning on a wider scale once they’re statistically significant.

And if you do learn that a bigger redesign is needed, assess whether you have the in-house resources required to pull it off without derailing all your other initiatives.

If you don’t, for your sake and your marketing’s, outsource it to a vetted digital marketing professional.

START FOCUSING ON: A/B testing various components of your website to discover what smaller changes you can make to have a large impact on conversion.

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SOCIAL PROSPECTING WORKBOOK: HOW TO USE SOCIAL MEDIA TO FIND NEW LEADS

10. SOCIAL MEDIA CHANNELS NO ONE USES

Do you remember around 2007 when a small handful of marketers started using social media as a marketing channel?

And do you remember how almost everyone in the industry thought it was either…

1. Ridiculous, or
2. Not applicable to their niche business or industry?

Fast forward to today, and most marketers are really scared of being the equivalent of the one who said “Facebook is dumb” back in 2007.

As a result, there’s a whole lot of time wasted on social networks that, frankly, don’t really work for you.

But you keep using them out of fear of getting left behind. If the social networks you’re using aren’t working, now is the time to stop using them.

For example, if you gave Pinterest the old college try, and it simply is not driving any meaningful business results for you, let it go.

Just make sure you’re making your decision based on analytics, not gut feelings.

START FOCUSING ON: Optimizing the social media channels that are driving success for your business. It’s okay to admit that a particular network doesn’t work for you.

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CONCLUSION

There’s no time like the present to take a look at your marketing activities and figure out what’s working, and what isn’t.

And if you’re setting aggressive marketing goals for yourself, cutting some of the time-wasters and ineffective tactics mentioned in this ebook will give you the bandwidth you need to pursue those new strategies.

Whatever it is you’re resolving to do with your marketing strategy next year, make sure you resolve one extra thing: To constantly evaluate whether your activities are moving the needle.

It’s always a good idea to experiment with something new — as long as you know when to say “when” with the latest and greatest.

This kind of self-analysis will keep you running an agile, up-to-date, and efficient marketing machine!

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How to Make Twitter More Relevant (Using Existing Functionality)

What to do about Twitter, the platform that everyone references but (seemingly) no one actually uses.

This week, Twitter announced a new Explore tab to help people find the best tweets – replacing Moments, which had been given prime position in the app.

The move effectively reduces the relevance of Moments, which the platform had once seen as their great hope at fixing their core problem – that being that Twitter’s hard to understand for newbies, which has limited growth.

The new Explore, meanwhile, is their next solution, showcasing all the best live video, trending content and Moments - in that order. Twitter says their tests showed this new option was a better way to highlight the best tweets have to offer.

“Over the past year, we’ve been exploring different ways to make it simpler for people to find and use trends, Moments, and search. During our research process, people told us that the new Explore tab helped them easily find news, what’s trending, and what’s popular right now.”

So, cool, right?

Except, it’s not really. As noted by M.G. Siegler in his post on the change:

“’Explore’ is an abomination. Worse, it’s a bland abomination.”

Okay, maybe I wouldn’t got that far, but Siegler does make some excellent points in his piece – most notably, Siegler says that Twitter is such a great resource for trending news and content, yet the new Explore only offers a very basic discovery tool, with no personalization or built-in smarts.

“Twitter is filled with great content. Content you can’t find anywhere else. Content the media increasingly has to report about. If you sign up for Twitter but don’t follow anyone, Twitter should highlight such tweets.”  

And he’s right, there’s so much available in Twitter, so much real-time, active conversations of relevance that Twitter could use its systems to uncover and highlight. This is probably the most frustrating element about changes like this, that Twitter could do more and provide a better experience.

How do we know Twitter could do more? Because other, more effective, more personalized platforms, have been built using Twitter data.

I’ll give you an example – Nuzzel is one of my go-to Twitter tools, something I check every day, because it highlights the key topics of discussion amongst my network without me having to sort through it all myself.

How Nuzzel works is it analyzes your network - the people you’ve chosen to follow - then it pulls out the most shared content among that list of users and shows you what’s trending. Simple. Stupidly simple, really. But it works.

I’ve noted several times that Twitter should purchase Nuzzel and integrate it into their app, then use that to make their own recommendation tools more effective.

I’ll give you a (very basic) example of how that might improve your Twitter experience.

The full image is a bit hard to see, so I'll below up each element - first the right hand side.

And the left:

Now, this is the desktop version, of course, and most people access Twitter via mobile, but you could adapt the same functionality to mobile, shifting the ‘News from Friends’ over to ‘Explore’ as the first thing on the list, etc.

As you can see, immediately you get an understanding of the key topics of focus amongst the people you follow, with links to the relevant tweet conversations. In my opinion, that increases Twitter’s value immediately, while it also gives users more motivation to cull their following lists down to the people they’re genuinely interested in to improve the focus. Doing this should ultimately increase engagement, as you’re incentivized to make Twitter more engaging for yourself (rather than simply chasing follower counts)

Trends needs to be more personalized – part of the problem with ‘Explore’ is that it's just Trends on a new tab. Not improved. Not more targeted. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has noted that this is something they’re looking into, but even if you were to use a similar model to Nuzzel, you could detect the top trending hashtags from each users’ network and highlight them here, immediately making them more relevant.

The risk with this is that if your connections are always talking about the same topics – for me, #socialmedia would be high on the list - then those same trends would keep coming up every single day. But Twitter could build an algorithm that detects fluctuations above normal levels – so if everyone was always tweeting about social media, that wouldn’t make my list, as it’d on par with normal levels. But if there were a sudden spike in any new tag, that would be highlighted. Facebook does this with their monthly ‘Topics to Watch’ reports.

On the other side, you could improve the ‘Who to follow’ recommendations by highlighting not only profiles, but what they tweet about.

At present, ‘Who to follow’ is too unfocused – for example, 90% of my tweets are about social media and digital marketing, yet if I engage with my friend, who’s a massive Chicago Bulls fan, just a couple of times in a week, my ‘Who to follow’ tab quickly switches to a range of Bulls-related accounts.

It is getting better, but it would be good to have some additional context – maybe highlighting each users’ top tweets would help, though admittedly this does make the screen space more crowded (less of a concern on mobile, where it would have its own section).

I’ve even added in an ad unit for them – and if they could improve their targeting in the other sections, these ads could be increasingly focused and relevant.

As noted, this sample does look crowded – and my novice design skills probably don’t help - but you can see how just a few changes could make your Twitter experience more compelling, could provide you with links to content you really want to see.

Of course, it’s easy for me to say this, I’m not on the Twitter Dev team who’d have to make this actually happen, but the idea here is to highlight that such tools already exist, there are already apps built on Twitter data that provide more targeted, focused functionality.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey did recently ask users for recommendations on what they’d like to see improved, and he made specific note of more focused alerts and topic options.

29 Dec

Peter Heacock 

✔ @PeteHeacock

@jack channels for different types of people I follow. Swipe left or right for politics peeps, friends, sports etc.

 Follow

jack 

✔@jack

@PeteHeacock been thinking a lot about this. More topic focused v account generally

6:36 PM - 29 Dec 2016

 
•  77 Retweets
 
•  130130 likes

So this is something Twitter is aware of, something they are looking at.

It’s all possible, the capacity does exist. Let’s hope Twitter can make explore into a more valuable option, and maximize the capacity of the platform as a more individually relevant news source.

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How to Get 300 Real, Targeted Instagram Followers Per Day

A few years ago, I wrote a post about Instagram on how to get more followers and likes.

But there’s a problem with that post. I wrote it in 2012!

Instagram is a completely different animal today. If you read my old article, you’ll get some useful tips and tricks. But you won’t know how to leverage all of Instagram’s new features.

Since that time, Instagram changed their entire look!

The shiny new Instagram has more users, more power, more capabilities, more features, and more potential than it did in 2012.

It was time to produce a new article on Instagram. That’s the main reason I wrote this article.

But there’s another reason I wrote this article. I want to help you succeed on Instagram.

What does it mean to succeed? It means that you’re attracting all the normal stuff like followers, likes, mentions, and comments.

It also means that you’re engaging at a deeper level with your audience. You’re connecting with them in a way that truly matters.

In this article, you’re going to learn how to get 300+ real, targeted Instagram followers per day.

I’ll show you how to do this step-by-step.

Introducing Instagram

In case you’re new to the platform, let me give you some quick facts on Instagram.

Instagram is a photo sharing mobile app. It was launched in 2010 as a typical freebie app. There were a lot of other photo apps, but Instagram hit the sweet spot and started to grow.

They grew so fast that Facebook took interest and bought them for $1 billion in April, 2012.

As of June 2016, Instagram has 500 million monthly active users!

Instagram used to be a really basic app. You took a picture. You put a filter on it (to make yourself look better). You shared with your small Instagram following.

That was it. No bells. No whistles. Nothing fancy.

That’s no longer the case.

Today, Instagram is packed with tons of features. Once Snapchat started attracting millions of followers, and when apps like Periscope leveraged live video, Instagram rushed to offer these features as well.

For example, you can edit photos using more advanced photo editing features instead of relying on Instagram’s built-in filters.

You can also post Stories. Stories appear at the top of your friends’ feeds, and appear there for only 24 hours. If you want to keep your stories discrete, you can send them only to select friends or curated groups.

Like Snapchat, you can edit your pictures with text, drawing, and other special effects.

Unlike Snapchat, however, there are no filters that make you look like a dog.

Instagram’s Live Video feature is still catching on. It’s not like most live video platforms, because the video disappears as soon as you stop streaming. You can watch live videos only while they’re being filmed.

My goal in this article is just to show you how to get followers, not teach you how to use every feature.

Still, it’s important to be aware of these features, because you’re going to be using them as you grow your audience by thousands per week.

The first five steps are foundational, so I’ll go through each of them briefly. Then, I’ll dive into details in steps 6-8.

Step 1:  Design your profile for maximum engagement

The first thing you’ll need to do is to create an Instagram profile that people will be interested in.

This matters. Your picture, your name, profile name, and your description are your digital billboard on Instagram. People will look at it, browse your photos, and check out your website.

Everything starts here.

If you’re just getting started with Instagram, the process will be simple and straightforward during the signup process.

If you already have an Instagram account, you can change your profile name and username.

First, tap on the profile icon at the bottom right corner.

Then, tap “Edit Profile” at the top of the page.

Now, change each of the following to something that accurately reflects who you are and the value you provide.

1. Name. I recommend using your personal name.
2. Username. Your username needs to be unique. If your name is already taken, add some words or phrases that make it distinct.
3. A URL. Point this to your website if you have one. This URL is the only clickable link that you’ll be able to provide on Instagram.
4. Information. A brief description about yourself. Make this description as warm and engaging as possible. An emoji or two doesn’t hurt.

Step 2:  Post photos that grab people’s attention and make them want to engage with you

Instagram is all about the pictures. In this step, you need to build a collection of attention-grabbing posts.

Here’s how.

Post original photos

No one likes to see an Instagram account that is stacked with stock photos or reposted viral pictures. Use your own photos.

Make sure your photos are relevant

Whenever you post a photo, think about the group that you want to attract. Who are these people? What will grab their attention? I’ll provide some examples of relevancy below.

Add a location

When you add a location to your photo, you’ll get more visibility. Why? Because your photo “lives” in that location. Anytime someone searches for photos taken within an area, they will see your photo.

Tap “Add Location” on the new post screen.

Instagram provides you with a list of possible locations to choose from.

However, you can type in any location you want to, and Instagram will show you a list of the popular nearby locations.

I recommend choosing a popular location, so your post will get more visibility.

Step 3:  Add a long image caption to the post

This is one of the most overlooked tactics in sharing photos. You should add several paragraphs of valuable written content to your post.

You’re allowed to write 2,200 characters. That’s a lot! For reference, 2,200 characters in this article will take you from the beginning all the way down to the paragraph that ends with “curated groups.” (CTRL + F to find it, and see how long 2,200 characters can stretch!)

Instagram will show only three lines of your image caption in user’s feeds. But that’s okay. If you can grab attention with those first three lines, you’ve won.

Instagram has a nasty thing about not allowing line breaks. The easiest way I’ve found to overcome this issue is by writing my post in my Notes app, copying it, and pasting it into Instagram.

To make things quicker, I open Notes on my Macbook which syncs with Notes my phone. I type the caption completely, and spell check it.

I open the note on my phone and copy it. Then I open Instagram and paste it into the caption.

Boom. Instant juicy content, and line breaks where I want them.

A long and interesting image caption is the number one way that I’ve found to get people to comment on and like my posts.

You have to lead with a great picture, but a good picture isn’t enough. Everyone’s already doing that! You have to add more value by producing more written content!

Step 4:  Add hashtags

You can Instagram all day long, but if you’re not using hashtags, you won’t grow your audience.

It’s that simple.

Hashtags give you visibility. Instagram users hop around on hashtags like a bored person channel surfs. They click from hashtag to hashtag to hashtag, occasionally stopping in to check out an interesting user.

But which hashtags should you use?

If you use the bland hashtags like #happy and #selfie, you’ll get some people to notice your post, but it won’t be the right kind of people.

Your goal is to get targeted followers, remember?

Here’s how to do it.

Add hashtags in a comment, not in the actual photo

I recommend putting your hashtags in a comment on your own photo.

Why? First, it looks a little bit nicer. Your image caption should be clean and nice-looking. Hashtags tend to make things look messy.

Second, it keeps your caption distinct. Hashtags aren’t for people to see. They are for people to find you.

Third, you can add more hashtags. If you’ve filled out your image caption at the character limit, don’t worry. You have more room in comments.

Start by typing a general hashtag that relates to your industry or audience

Go ahead and type a broad hashtag that is relevant to your audience.

For example, you may type “#digitalmarketer”. Notice what happens in Instagram when you do this.

Instagram shows you a list of popular hashtags!

You don’t need to guess which ones are popular, because you can see the post count on the right hand side.

Add as many of these hashtags as possible, as long as they are relevant. Doing this will give you a clear idea of the types of hashtags to use, and where to use them.

When you find a list of hashtags that gets high levels of engagement, I recommend copying these and saving them in a note file on your phone. That way, instead of typing them out every time, you can copy and paste them into your comment.

Use 30 hashtags

How many hashtags should you use?

Here’s a good rule of thumb:  No less than 5. No more than 30.

Why no more than 30? If you add more than 30, Instagram won’t let you post the comment.

Step 5:  Create a posting schedule

If you don’t post on Instagram, no one is going to bother following you.

Here is what I recommend:

• Post 1-2 photos or videos per day.
• Add 5-30 Instagram stories per day.
• Post 1 live video per day at the same time each day.

Let me break this down for you.

Post 1-2 photos per day.

The most popular Instagrammers post a lot of pictures.

There is a correlation between how often you post and how many followers you have.

So why do you want to post every day? Because you’ll get more followers and more visibility (which also gives you more followers).

Don’t stick to photos only. As Nike’s feed shows, you can get a lot of engagement from posting videos.

Add 5-30 Instagram stories per day

Wow. That’s a lot of stories!

Sure, but it’s relatively easy to do. You can post videos or still photos. I recommend a mix of both.

Your Stories will cycle automatically like a video playlist. Even though each story lasts only 15 seconds, you can string them together to form a long video.

This Instagrammer keeps up a regular stockpile of 30+ stories. The technique is effective, because she appears regularly at the top of her followers’ newsfeeds.

Post 1 live video per day at the same time each day

Live video hasn’t taken off on Instagram like it has on Facebook, but it’s still powerful.

I recommend doing your live video at the same time each day.

Why? Because a live video appears only while it’s being broadcast. If you broadcast at random times — times when your followers aren’t actively on Instagram — no one is going to know you were even on live video.

There’s an easy way to overcome Instagram’s live video limitations.

1. Post a photo to your feed that announces the time you’ll be broadcasting live.
2. Post a story every day that announces your upcoming live broadcast.

You’re ready to roll. Your audience will be prepared for your broadcast, and ready to tune in.

To start a live video, tap the camera in the upper left corner.

Then, swipe left to get to “live.”

You’ll see a three-second countdown timer.

Then, you’re live!

Live videos are the first in line in the story carousel. In other words, as long as you’re live, more people will see you.

The more often you can post live videos, the better. Experiment with different times of day to see which time works best.

Step 6:  Locate your target users, and begin following them

Believe it or not, everything we’ve discussed up to this point has been simple introduction.

You may be thinking what?! What about the massive amounts of followers?

If you follow the steps above, you will be attracting users at a rate of 20+ per day, and probably more.

First, you’ll get followers slowly, and then the speed picks up over time. During your first few days following this guide, you may only get 5 new followers a day.

Within a week, however, the velocity will pick up.

Now, however, it’s time to put things into hyper gear. In this step, I’ll show you how to find your tribe and prepare for an avalanche of followers.

First, locate your top competitors.

Who is the Instagram user who already has a big following in your niche?

Find them, and start to follow their followers.

Here’s how.

Tap the find icon from the Instagram feed screen.

You’ll see a display of popular videos and posts.

Tap the “search” bar at the top.

Tap “tags,” and begin searching for a term that is relevant in your industry.

I noticed that “#digitalmarketing” has nearly 900,000 posts, so I tap it first. Here’s what I see.

There are nine photos at the top. These are considered “top posts,” because they were posted by users with a lot of followers, or they have a lot of likes and comments.

One or more of these photos was posted by a power user — someone with a lot of followers.

I’m going to tap the photo of Warren Buffett.

Immediately, I notice that this photo has 1,230 likes. That’s a lot of likes.

I also notice that the photo was posted by @successfield. I may have never heard of @successfield, but they are obviously posting photos within my niche. And those photos are obviously popular.

So, I tap their name in the upper left corner. Here’s what I see.

I notice that they have 69.6k followers. This is a large following. I want to follow their followers.

Here’s the rationale. If these 69.6k people chose to follow @successfield, then they might choose to follow me, too. I’m in the same niche, same industry, and am providing just as much value (if not more!).

I tap “69.6” to see the list of followers.

I can follow every one of these users by tapping “follow.”

You should follow this process multiple times in order to find more influencers in your space. Also, you should find the influencers who have the most engaged audience.

Repeat the above process every day as you seek to build new followers. Every time, the experience will be different. Experiment with it until you find the pattern that delivers the highest number of followers.

Here’s that process in bullet point format:

• Tap the search icon.
• Tap the search bar at the top of the screen.
• Tap or swipe to tags.
• Type a tag that is relevant in your industry.
  • There are probably dozens if not hundreds of tags you could use. This is where you should branch out and experiment with different tags.
  • I also recommend exploring the “related” tags that Instagram displays at the top of the screen. You can find valuable tags and users that people are engaging on using this list.
• Tap a top post within that hashtag.
• Make sure that the account who posted has a lot of followers (rule of thumb:  They should have more followers than people they are following).
• Tap the number of followers they have.
• Begin following these followers.

Step 7:  Follow 50 users per hour

How many users can you follow and at what rate?

Nobody except a few select Instagram developers know the exact numbers.

Obviously, Instagram wants to keep users from abusing the system by spamming people with useless information. Therefore, they have some restrictions in place that keep you from following too many people.

The limit seems to be 7,500.

It’s going to take you a long time to reach 7,500. So what should you do?

Follow at least 50 users per hour. If you try to follow too many people within a certain amount of time, you’ll no longer be able to follow people.

Instagram won’t ban your account. They will simply prevent the “follow” button from working.

What should you do then? Wait an hour, and try again. Most likely, you’ll be able to follow more people.

Do you think that following 50 users might take too much time? It doesn’t.

Here’s how it works. You can do this in just a few minutes each hour.

Repeat this process as often as possible.

As you follow users, many will begin to follow you back. If you are actively posting, engaging, and providing value, then you will quickly begin to attract a following.

Step 8:  Become an active member of the Instagram community

Instagram isn’t just a broadcast platform. It’s a community of people who are helping each other, providing value, learning, and growing.

Personally, I’ve found a lot of inspiration on Instagram. I’ve met new people. I’ve learned new things. It’s been a great place for personal development and networking.

Here are the things that you should do in order to become an active member of the Instagram community, and to grow and cultivate your audience at the same time:

• If someone follows you, follow them back. Obviously, you want to avoid following spam accounts.
• If someone comments on your photo, reply with a comment directed toward them. Mention them, using @, in the comment.
• Like the photos that have hashtags that you’re interested in.
• Comment on the photos that contain hashtags you’re interested in.
• Like other people’s comments on photos that you’re interested in.
• Send direct messages to people who you’re interested in, or who provide a lot of value.
• In your photo, tag users who you know personally, or with whom you’ve formed a relationship on Instagram.
• Ask questions or invite feedback in your posts.

There’s a difference between being a publisher on Instagram vs. being a participant.

I encourage you to become a participant.

Conclusion

Instagram is a valuable place for personal branding and sales. It’s easy to neglect it, though, because it seems challenging to build a following.

There is a way to building a powerful tribe of targeted followers.

These are the exact steps that I and my clients have used to attract more than 300 followers every day.

One of the best parts about it is that these followers are loyal. As long as I’m providing valuable content and regularly contributing as a member of the community, they won’t unfollow me.

Instead, they’ll tell other people about me, and my following will continue to grow.

Eventually, you’ll reach a point where you won’t have to follow other users as aggressively. Instead, people will start flocking to you.

By that point, all your hard work has paid off, and you’re well on your way to becoming a powerful Instagram brand.

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