When our Kingpin Marketing Team attended the Explorer Tattoo Conference in May, we walked away with a surprising takeaway. Many tattoo artists use Instagram to display their work—but then what? How can likes and follows translate to growing their business? Well since we live and breathe social marketing and analytics, we thought we’d answer some of those questions and more.
As a tattoo artist, one of your goals is probably to network with other artists and companies,gain more exposure, and book more clients. Maybe it’s to showcase the kind of art you want to do more, therefore attracting the kind of clients that will fill your creative cup with like-minded requests. No matter the goal, one thing applies to them all—generic won’t cut it. Instagram has evolved beyond just a collection of great photos. Constant algorithm changes and an endless supply of content means you all have to be strategic, tailoring your message to the kinds of followers you want to have. And when we say specific, we mean specific.
Here are the best tactics we’ve learned to start, and maintain, a better, business-building Instagram.
#1 Define Your Business Goals
Before you even open the app, you need to know what you want to do with it. Start by examining and listing your business goals. They should be actionable, measurable, timely, and relevant to the industry. For example, “get more clients” is general while “increase client base by 25% in 6 months” is specific. Or “get featured” vs “be featured on a specific account in Q1.” To get you started, most business goals that overlap with social media tend to fall into the following categories:
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Brand/ Artist Awareness: Having more people know who you are
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Reputation Building: Garnering positive reviews and sentiment
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Community Engagement/ Following: Expanding client base and creating fans
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Revenue Growth: Growing the business
While this step can feel like something standing in the way of your Instagame, it is the basis for ALL successful marketing—it creates a meaningful context to create and measure success. You wouldn’t make a billboard just for kicks, so why treat instagram the same way?
#2 Apply it To Instagram
Now it’s time to apply that goal to Instagram. If your goal is to expand your client base you should look at not only increasing your follower count. To get even more specific, you might identify what kind of followers. Where do they live? What are they interested? What kind of art do they gravitate toward? What kind of accounts do they follow and how can you bring them to yours? Similarly, if your goal is to increase bookings, explore how you can use Instagram’s “book now” feature. No matter the goal(s), make sure you aren’t taking on more than you can chew. There’s nothing wrong with focusing on one goal a month, quarter, year, etc.
Unfortunately, the best and worst part of social media is that there are no true rules, so figuring out what works for you specifically might take a bit of trial and error. They key is knowing what you want and making a plan to get it. Otherwise, you’re spinning your wheels creating content without seeing results. In general, you want to make sure you:
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Post and create call to actions (a message to your customer to like, tag, follow, etc) often and consistently.
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Stay true to your brand. Your current and future fans want you, not something manufactured for likes.
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Create a content calendar that explores different facets of your craft. For example, instead of only posting client work, mix in your shop, about you, etc.
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Utilize Instagram’s tools. Fill out your profile, use your stories, and link your book now button.
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Most importantly, measure, optimize, and repeat.
#3 How to Measure Your Success (what’s a KPI and how you should use them):
You can’t be successful if you don’t know what success is. By defining and measuring your KPI’s (key performance indicators), you’ll always know how your content is performing, what’s working, and what’s not. Traditional KPIs are:
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Engagement Rate: How many of your followers are liking, commenting and sharing your posts. Basically, the percentage of your followers that are really into your work and showing it.
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Audience Growth: This is your follower count. Specifically, this is how many followers you have and how fast you’re gaining new ones over each week, month, etc. Follower count tells us if new people are finding your posts/ profile and stcking around to see more.
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Reach: This is how many brands and artists determine who can see your stuff. It’s not as important as ensuring your audience is growing and engaging, but it can be helpful in seeing how many eyes are landing on your posts. Instagram Insights shows you howmany accounts you’ve reached each week in the Activity tab. Monitoring this can help you decide if you are posting too much or not enough and adjust as necessary.
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Leads:
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Conversions:
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Webclicks: Instagram website clicks are exactly what they sound like: a metric for how many people clicked from your Instagram profile to your website or landing page.
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This metric is crucial for some Instagram accounts and relatively unimportant for others. If your main priority on Instagram is to drive traffic, conversions, or sales, you need to be looking at analytics on website clicks. On the other hand, if you’re on Instagram mostly to build a community and raise brand awareness, you don’t need to monitor Instagram web traffic as carefully. For most accounts, we’d argue that Instagram generally works better as a branding and community channel than as a sales or traffic channel. However, Instagram’s increasing popularity andbroadening ecommerce options like shoppable posts mean the network shouldn’t be ignored as a way to boost your traffic or conversions. If you’re getting a lot of website clicks, it probably means you have a lot of visitors to your profile and a compelling CTA in your Instagram bio (as we recommend in ourbest practices for creating a professional IG bio).If you’re not getting clicks, you should change up the CTA and link in your bio regularly. You can also direct people to your chosen URL by hyping up the page it links to in your post copy or latest Story, then saying ‘Link in bio’ at the end.
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Tracking web traffic from Instagram
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Instagram Insights offers basic data on how many people have clicked the link in your bio over the past week in the Activity Section under Interactions. While this is a good start, you can get much more detailed information by using a web analytics tool like Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel. To see how much traffic is arriving on your website from Instagram (along with a ton of other data), we recommend adding a UTM code to the link in your bio, shortening it with a URL shortener, then looking at Google Analytics data on that URL. If you’re more interested in analyzing conversions from your ads, you may want to set up conversion tracking with Facebook Pixel. To learn more about tracking web traffic from Instagram, here’sHow to Use UTM Tracking on Social Media. For conversion tracking, this isHow to Install the Facebook Pix1. Engagement rate
Based on your Instagram goals, determine which of these is most important to focus on. However, it’s important to also keep an eye on the corresponding business goal. Otherwise, a spike in business due to an instagram campaign may go unnoticed.
Now how do you find all this information? Since the integration of Business and Creator Accounts, you can change your personal profile (peep the bottom of the article to see a step-by-step) into an account that automatically tracks the performance of your posts for you and delivers the information back on your phone. Instagram business account reports show you things like audience demographics, year over year growth, and measures all of the KPI’s for you.
In addition to that more generic status report, it’s important to be aware and in tune with your followers and activity. Keep an eye on each post and look for trends to leverage by viewing your posts in categories like topic, video vs photos, etc. Because while your report may show you an increase in likes per photo, you won’t know what kind of content is causing the spike. If you can identify it, you can post more of it. Things to keep in mind:
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What are the “themes” in your content?
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Are your followers more into one style of image vs another?
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Are you gaining new followers when you are liking and interacting with specific hashtags?
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Are you seeing more people watch a story of you giving someone a neo traditional tattoo or talking about shop supplies you find really helpful?
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WHO is your audience? For instance, if you own a tattoo shop and Brooklyn and see the majority of your audience is 65+ men in Russia, it might be time for some updates.
Looking at your Instagram analytics is one of the best ways to identify failures and successes on your account. By reviewing them carefully, you can get useful feedback to help you improve your social media strategy.
#4 Optimizing (The Long Game)
With your goals set and your success metrics determined, now comes the fun part. Optimizations are part science, part creativity, part luck. It’s about getting rid of what doesn’t work, creating more of what does, and always leaving room to experiment. Nothing is right or wrong, only helping you achieve your goals or not.
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Becoming a Business Account:
Viewing Your Insights:
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Tap your profile picture
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Tap menu icon in the upper-right corner
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Tap insights to the right of the graph icon
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Explore between the activity, content, and audience tabs