3 Proven Steps To Kickstart Your Instagram Account
If you've been feeling frustrated with the lack of growth and engagement on your Instagram despite consistent posting and high-quality content, this episode is for you. I share 3 proven steps and strategies to help you leverage this free platform to work for your business.
In this episode, you’ll learn about:
[00:06:36] Having a crystal clear intent for Instagram.
[00:10:32] Discovering your ideal audience.
[00:12:50] Niching down for Instagram growth.
[00:19:44] Developing a content creation system.
[00:21:19] Your new Instagram mentorship program
[00:24:20] Instagram content creation strategies.
But that's not all!
I also have an exclusive offer for my podcast listeners. I've recently launched a 30-day private Instagram mentorship program called InstaGrowth. This program is designed to kickstart your Instagram account and set you up for long-term success.
During our time together, we'll work on creating an Instagram roadmap, doing an audience deep dive, refreshing your Instagram bio, developing a reel strategy, and more.
Plus, you'll receive unlimited Instagram audio coaching from me during the program to ensure you're on the right track.
As a special offer for being a valued podcast listener, you can save $200 off the program by using the code "podcast" at checkout.
If you're interested in learning more about InstaGrowth, DM me the word "growth" on Instagram, and I'll send you the link to get started.
Don't miss out on this opportunity to take your Instagram account to the next level and start seeing real results for your business!
Links mentioned in this episode…
Insta-Growth: The 30 Day Private Instagram Mentorship - https://www.elizabethmarberry.com/insta-growth
SAVE $200 WITH CODE "PODCAST"
7 Mistakes Businesses Are Making On Instagram -https://www.elizabethmarberry.com/podcast-episodes/005
Free guide to Monetize Your IG: Seven Simple and Proven Ways to Finally Make Money on Instagram
Apply for your FREE Instagram Breakthrough Call with Elizabeth
Quotes
[12:37] "Experiment and test. See what feels good for you."
[03:42] "If you don't have a system, you're going to feel so spread thin and all over the place."
TRANSCRIPT
S3 Ep06 3 Proven Steps To Kickstart Your Instagram Account
**Elizabeth Marberry 0:00**
I see you. You've posted consistently on social media for months. You've learned how to edit your reels and pimp out your messaging and your images and videos are top quality. But why no new followers or engagement or growth to your account? Why is there no impact on your bottom line? Today you are in luck because we are going to be covering three proven steps to kickstart your Dead in the Water Instagram account so you can start leveraging this free platform to work for your business. Let's dive in.
Welcome to Strut It, a podcast about creating bold visibility on social media with zero apologies. I'm Elizabeth Marberry, your host and Instagram marketing coach. I help small business owners get seen on Instagram and monetize their offers so they can make more money doing their soul-led work. If you're tired of spinning your wheels on Instagram and you're seeking simple, proven Instagram marketing strategies that actually work, you're in the right place. Let's dive in. As always, welcome back to the show. I'm so honored that you take this time to invest in yourself and your personal growth, your business growth. I so appreciate you being here. Before we dive into these three ways that you can kickstart your Instagram account, I want to share with you some little behind the scenes that I've been working on for our podcast community.
My goal is to bring you all of the social media experts so that way you can really understand how social media marketing works and how you can leverage it to grow your brand or your business. In the past few weeks, I have been looking for the top experts on LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, and YouTube. And I'm super excited to share with you that I found an incredible person that I'm going to be interviewing this week on TikTok. She is a major leader in the space. She has over 360,000 followers on TikTok. And not only that, she has learned how to leverage TikTok to grow her bottom line in her business. So I am going to be interviewing her this week. And that was just a huge win for me to find her.
Sometimes it's kind of amazing how hard it is to really nail down these experts in this space. And I also found this incredible Pinterest expert, and she is not only just, you know, an authority in her own right, but she meets with the head office of Pinterest regularly, and she's gonna be bringing us her insider insights, so you can really start to leverage all of these different platforms to grow your business. Now, if you're starting to feel a little bit overwhelmed with thinking that you need to be posting on every platform, Let me reassure you that my angle in bringing in these experts is really how can we take our Instagram content that we're already making and repurpose it for other platforms. So my goal is to teach you how to create one piece of content and put it five different places or 10 different places.
So you can work smarter, not harder. So get ready for the social media experts that are gonna be joining our community here. Be sure you have subscribed to the podcast so you don't miss when a new episode drops. Okay, so let's dive into three ways that you can kickstart your Instagram account. I want to first discuss like why your account isn't working for you in the first place. If you have not already listened to last week's episode where I shared seven common mistakes that businesses make on Instagram, you absolutely must go back and listen to that episode because I share a lot of common pitfalls that brands and businesses make on Instagram and exactly the tips and strategies that you need to be implementing to make this platform work for you. So I will link last week's episode in the show notes, but I also invite you just to go back and listen last week because it was a really valuable episode. So I really want to honor that I have been in this place many times on my Instagram growth journey. where I feel like I'm checking all the boxes. I'm doing all of the things. I'm posting consistently. I feel like I'm always working on my messaging. I'm focused on my hashtags. I feel like I'm doing all the things and my Instagram is just not going where I want it to go. So first, I just wanna normalize that part of showing up on social media consistently is it's not a linear growth journey. It just isn't. there's gonna be times where you're growing and it's, you know, you have a video going viral or you're starting to get all these followers, people are finding you, people are DMing you. And then there's gonna be times where it falls off a little bit. And I, first of all, I just really wanna normalize that. It is completely normal to lose followers. It is completely normal to have those dips.
So try to not get too caught up in that. Try to always come back to your why of, Why are you here and who are you here to serve? And it always helps me to kind of think of that one person that I can help today. And that motivates me to keep creating content even when I'm getting those lackluster results. So when this happens, when you feel like your Instagram has just hit a dead end or You feel like you're shouting from the rooftops and no one is listening. It's understandable that you may be feeling overwhelmed or you may be feeling confused about why your efforts are not resulting in the ROI that you hoped for. And so today I want to talk about three proven steps that you can start to implement that will help to kickstart your Instagram account and really leverage this free platform to work for your business. So let's get into the steps. Step one is have a crystal clear intent for your Instagram account. This seems really obvious, but many times as business owners, we kind of open our Instagram account out of obligation. Like, I guess I'm supposed to be on here. I should be posting.
Elizabeth says I should be posting, so I'm gonna just start posting, right? And what we need to do is we need to narrow your intention and get really clear on your goals and vision. I want you to know what you want your Instagram to do for you or your business. It's not always, it can be more sales and more money with a product or a service that you sell, but sometimes your goal is just to boost your visibility and your influence. Maybe one of your big goals is to be a keynote speaker on a stage one day. So your goal is to get on camera as much as possible, develop your speaking skills, and establish yourself as an expert in the speaking space within your niche. That is a very different goal than wanting to sell a product or a service.
So depending on where you're at in your business journey, you may have a different goal. So in the beginning, your goal may just be to build a community. Maybe you don't even have a product or service ready to bring to the market, but you know that it's kind of stirring inside of you and you want to start to cultivate a community around your one thing, your one focus or niche for your brand. So it's really important that you get clear on how you want Instagram to work for your business. Once you feel clear on that, it will help you in all of your content creation because you will be moving toward one goal. Now, you may be thinking, if you're like me and you're a multi-passionate entrepreneur with so many things going on, you may be thinking, well, Elizabeth, I have more than one goal or intention for my Instagram account. And that's perfectly fine. What you need to do though, is really focus on what is your next step?
Like what is your next one degree upgrade that you can make in your focus because if you're spread too wide and you're doing too much all at once that's probably why you feel like you're not going far enough fast enough is you're just too spread thin right so I invite you to ask yourself, maybe write down all of the goals that you have for your Instagram account and say, okay, looking at all of these, like what is my one thing that I wanna focus on for the next 30 days? And that will help you to just sort of put all those other goals aside, they're still there, they're still part of your big vision for your business, but pick that one goal that you can focus on for the next 30 days. Step two is, You need to discover who your audience really is. So this is an audience deep dive that is a requirement of marketing. So this is not just social media marketing. This is marketing wherever you're showing up.
And it's the part of marketing that I think a lot of us struggle with the most. And if your account is dead in the water, it's most likely due to this step. You may be going way too broad with your audience focus. So an example is I've been seeing a lot of digital marketers popping up on my feed and following me. All of their bios look the same. And really, essentially what they say is, I'm gonna teach you how to make money online. Okay, well, that is way too general. You need to get really specific. Like, I'm gonna teach stay-at-home moms how to make money online in 10 hours or less a week doing X, Y, and Z, right? Like, think about how much more specific that sentence is versus I'm gonna help you make money online. So it's really important to discover who your audience really is. What keeps them up at night? What are their biggest dreams and aspirations for their life? And how can your product or service help them?
And the more you can really paint the picture of your ideal dreamboat client, the easier it will become for you to craft your offers to appeal to them. You want to have an offer that is just a no-brainer to your ideal client. And the only way you're going to have that is if you really understand what are the struggles and pain points of your ideal person, what are their dreams and desires, and how does your product or service help them to get from point A to Z. When I launched my personal account, I was really focusing on building my personal brand as a dance studio CEO who had built a successful dance studio business while also teaching others to live out loud and dance like no one is watching. So my brand has always been permission to take up space and be yourself in every moment of life. And my brand has pivoted over the years.
So you can totally pivot. Like if you are in a place where you've been doing something and it's not working, full permission to pivot. You're not stuck. We need to put a little less pressure on ourselves when it comes to social media. Like we need to be less precious with every piece of content. And listen to our hearts, listen to our intuition and what our brand is asking of us. And if you are in a position where you're like, you know, Elizabeth, I've been speaking to this big, broad audience and oh my gosh, I want to speak to this one sect of my audience, but it's a little scary. I invite you to do so because that is truly how you're going to grow on Instagram. You have to niche down. You have to focus and really speak to that one person. And when I did this in my personal brand, that's when my account blew up. When I decided that I was only going to create dance content with the intention of positioning myself as a successful dance studio CEO for my dance studio business. That's when my account grew because people knew what to expect when they came to my page. They knew that they would see dancing. They knew they would be inspired and motivated to take up more space in their lives, to go after their bold business dreams. Like if Elizabeth can do it dancing in her kitchen, I can do it too. And so I invite you to find what is your thing, right? Like what is your focus? And even if you're listening to this and you're like, Elizabeth, I'm so focused. I swear I'm focused.
Maybe could you go even more? Could you go a deeper level, a deeper layer of focus and really narrow down who it is that you want to serve? And when you do that, not only will you grow on Instagram, but content creation will just become so much easier because you're not speaking to everyone. You're not speaking to all women everywhere. You're speaking to women in their 50s. You know, like being really specific will help you so much in your messaging and it will help you to stand out in a crowded marketplace. Step number three is you must design a simple content capture system and strategy. So one of my favorite books is Atomic Habits and the author James Clear says, you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. So going back to step one, you could have the best vision and goal for your business But if you don't have a simple system in place of when are you going to create content? How are you going to get content? When are you going to edit it?
When are you going to write your captions? If you don't actually create a system for yourself, it's never going to happen and you're always going to struggle with consistency. So what I want to ask you today to think about is How can you refine your system of capturing and creating content strategically? How do you fit Instagram content creation into your weekly marketing tasks? Because I want you to maximize your time, your energy, and your efforts. And if you don't have a system, you're just gonna feel so spread thin and all over the place. This is actually something that I'm trying to work on currently in my business because I'm promoting so many different offers. I have different projects I'm working on and I'm actually in the step right now of really refining my system. So that way when I sit down to work and do my marketing tasks, they're all streamlined. I know exactly what I'm doing and when I'm doing it. And then I can create a repeatable system that is actually scalable for me.
So this is an ongoing thing. No matter what level you're at in business, you should always be refining your systems. But specifically getting back to Instagram, I think a lot of us just kind of fly by the seat of our pants. And that's why we're inconsistent, right? Is you feel motivated one week and you're filming all these videos and you're posting all these reels. and then the next week you just lost it. So you need to add some structure into your week, into your calendar that will work best for you. So I wanna give you a couple different examples of ways that people create content on Instagram. And there really is no one way of developing a content capturing system. It really is personal. It's all about like how you work and what motivates you and what feels aligned for you. So here's an example. One way that you could do this is you could batch five reels at once when you are feeling super high energy. So maybe you notice that like every Friday you are just feeling like awesome. Like I don't know about you, but there's certain days of the week where I tend to have like higher energy than other days. And of course, it's not always the exact same, but I have days where I just feel more high vibe and energy. Maybe I slept really well the night before. I'm feeling really good. So in those moments, maybe you batch five reels and you change your outfit for each reel, but you create five videos and you don't edit them necessarily in that moment. You don't add the captions or the text, but you have the video footage. and then you have another day on your calendar where you edit those and then now you have, you know, content for a week that you can post. One of my clients, she has committed to posting a reel every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
And so what her system is, is she creates her reels on Monday because she has a chunk of time on her calendar every Monday morning for all of her marketing tasks. So not just social media, but everything that she does for her business. And she has woven in all of the Instagram strategy and content creation trainings that I have given her. And she does that on Monday morning. And then she has all of that done so she can post her content throughout the week. So that works really great for her. Another hack that you can use to develop this habit of content creation and posting is asking yourself like when do you do your other marketing tasks? So let's say you are really great about writing an email newsletter to your list like once a week. Could you tie that task to your Instagram real creation or your post creation? So it's easier to develop a new habit when you weave it into something that you're already consistently doing. So that can work really well for a lot of people. So as always, with all of these steps, I want you to have the mindset of experimentation and testing.
I wish that entrepreneurship was the type of thing where you and I sit down and we write out your map and we write out your perfect marketing schedule and you're, you know, on Mondays I'm doing this from 12 to three and on Tuesdays I'm, and having it all figured out before you actually go and do it and implement it. And that just isn't how it works. I wish it was, but it's not. So the only way that you are going to discover like what system works best for you is by trying out different systems. I mean, that's the truth. So I invite you to experiment and test and see what feels good for you. And maybe you set an alarm on your phone to kind of check in with yourself once a week. I do think it's important to have those visual reminders in my calendar or alarms or things because we're all so busy. We're all juggling so many things. But I invite you to invest some time and resources into figuring out this system piece because once you have a system in place it will save you so much time and energy and it will make growing on social media so much more scalable and more pleasurable for you. Now I want to share a pro tip that I wish I had learned earlier. I've been an entrepreneur for 14 years and it wasn't until about six years ago that I started investing in mentorship. I honestly wish that I had hired a business coach or a marketing mentor much earlier in my business. I kind of had that mindset of, I'm going to do it myself. I'm going to bootstrap everything.
I'm going to watch all the YouTube videos. I'm going to listen to all the podcasts. I'm going to take the free webinars and I'm just going to figure this out myself. And that took years and years and years. And when I finally took the plunge and invested in a business coach, that is when I had my biggest breakthrough months in my sales report. And not only that, but within my nervous system, like there's a whole nother experience when you feel supported in your business. When you're learning from someone who has already done what you want to do. So you don't have to toil and work for years trying to decode the magic of Instagram when I've already done that for you. And that's why I'm so excited to share with you today about my newest private mentorship program called InstaGrowth. the 30-day private Instagram mentorship. And I have such a special offer for you, my podcast listeners, and you're gonna wanna hear this because this is an exclusive offer just for you. I'm not gonna be sharing this on my Instagram. I'm not sending it out to my email list. It is not a public offer. It is for you, my beloved listener, because I so appreciate you being here and being invested in your growth personally and within your business.
So InstaGrowth is a 30-day high-touch private mentorship program that will kickstart your Instagram account and set you up for long-term success. And here's what we're gonna do inside our 30 days together. First, we're gonna put together an Instagram roadmap for you, so you can really crystallize your goals and your vision for how you wanna grow your business on Instagram, so you feel totally clear on your next steps. We're also gonna do your audience deep dive. We are going to really get you laser focused in on the type of content you should be creating and when, so you feel totally confident that you know exactly who you serve and how you help them. We are also going to do an Instagram bio refresh because you absolutely need to optimize your bio to attract more of your ideal Dreamboat clients and followers so they know what they'll get from you the moment they hit that follow button. We're gonna cover beginning. Next, we're gonna develop a simple reel strategy for you because you absolutely must be leveraging reels to grow your following and establish your brand authority. And we're gonna move at your pace. And my favorite part about the InstaGrowth program is that I get to spot you on implementation during those 30 days. So what happens is we have a couple private coaching calls throughout the month And in between our calls, you get unlimited Instagram audio coaching from me during my business hours.
And that is where the magic happens because as you go to implement all of these things, inevitably you're going to have questions. you might face a roadblock, and I am there to spot you as you implement. I'm there to give you real-time feedback on your content to ensure that you are not forgetting anything, that you are doing the right things, and it is such a boost to your confidence, so that way, when you move on from the program, you feel so rooted and certain that you know what you're doing, and you're doing the right steps to grow your business on Instagram. Lastly, you will feel so much clearer about what kind of content you should be creating on Instagram. to attract your dreamboat client. You're going to feel energized and inspired, and you will know the precise content that will pull your ideal clients into your orbit reliably and consistently. So I'm super, super pumped for you to check out this InstaGrowth program. We'll definitely link it in the show notes, but I want you to go to ElizabethMarbury.com. that's elizabethmarbury.com, slash insta, I-N-S-T-A, dash growth, G-R-O-W-T-H, to get all of the details. And here is my special offer for you. As my podcast listener, you save $200 off of your investment of this 30-day private mentorship when you use the code podcast at checkout. If you are already connected with me on Instagram and you want to talk more about this program, DM me the word growth and I will send you the link to learn more about the program.
And as always, if you have questions, if you're not sure if this is the right mentorship for you, then send me a DM on Instagram and we will go back and forth and I will be happy to answer any questions you have about it. I am so excited to support you in really making waves and getting seen on Instagram, and I cannot wait to dive into more value with you next week. Thank you for listening to Strut It. If you're ready to start leveraging Instagram to grow your business, then you're going to want to grab my free monetize your IG guide, where you'll learn seven simple and proven ways to finally make money on Instagram. You can grab your guide at elizabethmarberry.com slash freebies. That's elizabethmarberry.com slash freebies to get my monetize your IG guide. If you got some incredible value from today's episode, be sure to leave a review and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. And I cannot wait to start it with you again next week.