How to Use Attraction Marketing on Instagram

The best kind of marketing doesn't feel like marketing at all. Here's how to make your Instagram feed a non-marketing lead and sales generator.

Have you ever watched a video on YouTube or seen an influencer’s Instagram Story, and found yourself wanting the products they’re talking about? Sometimes it might be a product you never even considered buying, like a harmonica, or an electric cake maker? Or let’s say you’re reading a blog on insomnia and relaxation. Before you know it, you’ve ordered melatonin, a hand massager, and a $300 ceramic scent diffuser! This is attraction marketing. The goal of attraction marketing is to make your audience feel like they aren't being marketed to at all - and it's found its home on Instagram. Every time you've seen an influencers or brand advocate write a review, post a photo of a picture-perfect travel destination, or release a makeup tutorial featuring a brand’s products, you've been looking at attraction marketing. To turn your Instagram feed into an attraction magnet, we're going to take you through exactly what attraction marketing is, how it fits into your Instagram marketing strategy, and how to use it to get leads, customers, clients and sales.

What is Attraction Marketing?

Attraction marketing is all about making your brand, services, or products as appealing as possible to your target audience. This “attractiveness” should be so strong that it will set your brand apart from competitors and guarantee future sales. With attraction marketing, you’re showing, not telling. Instead of raving on about how your products can change someone’s life, you’re showing them, using influencer content, videos, testimonials, memes, blogs, and so on – the list goes on! Being such a visual platform, Instagram is perfect if you want to master attraction marketing. With photos, Stories and Reels, it’s one of the best social media platforms to “show” your Instagram followers just how great your brand is!

Should You Be Using Attraction Marketing on Social Media?

You can use attraction marketing on any channel or social media platform, but the best part about using it on social media is that you can utilize the power of customer testimonials to build hype around your brand and your products. Whether you’re encouraging user-generated content, launching an Instagram marketing campaign, or collaborating with a trusted brand ambassador to create viral content, attraction marketing is all about harnessing the power of storytelling and word of mouth. The reason why attraction marketing is so damn effective is that it flips the script on the consumer/brand relationship. Instead of telling people about YOU and your products, you’re talking about the CUSTOMER and how you can solve their problems. It focuses on giving something valuable to your leads instead of just taking their money. But not only that; attraction marketing can also become incredibly cost-effective, once it’s all set up. If you’ve got a video with an interesting story or a free online resource like a guide, checklist, or other information, your audience is far more likely to engage with you. And if they’re not ready to buy yet, your brand will remain top of mind for when they do need to buy in the future! For instance, Neil Patel offers endless amounts of useful content in the form of videos, podcasts, blogs, and social media posts containing tips and snippets of information. Within this content, he will often add links and information about his tools and products, which can be used to help his audience solve their problems, like in the post below.

By offering subscription-based tools and courses, Neil Patel can harness the power of his content. He can continue to make sales on an ongoing basis – all because he attracted an audience using helpful resources.

How to Implement Attraction Marketing on Instagram

So, now you know why you need to use attraction marketing for lead generation and for boosting your sales. Now let’s talk about how you’ll use it as a key component of your social media marketing strategy. There are countless attraction marketing strategies out there, but we’ll start from the top and make sure you’ve nailed the basics first!

1. Understand Your Target Audience

Your first step in nailing attraction marketing is to define and understand your target audience. Only through doing this will you be able to connect with them and share the stories that really matter to them. If you’re an existing brand, try the following:

Email a survey to your customers asking them a variety of questions. You can even incentivize your survey with a prize or secret discount code
Try a post-sale quiz with a few simple questions for customers
Use social media tools like Sked Social to give you valuable data about Instagram users visiting your page. You’ll be able to understand just who you’re speaking to. You can also analyze past content and discover which Instagram posts performed well (and which posts were a flop) and create content your Instagram followers love
Use Polls and Questions on Instagram Stories to ask your audience what they’d like to see more of – and what they’d rather not see!

Define your brand’s customers, your buyer personas, and their pain points. Only then will you be able to understand how you’ll be able to attract them with the promise of solving their problems!

2. Solidify Your Instagram Marketing Strategy

Success for any business, big or small, starts out with a well-considered marketing strategy. Some businesses make the mistake of thinking that mastering social media is easy. But this isn’t always the case. Sure, it’s easy to set up an Instagram account and start posting pretty pictures on your page. Any man and his dog can do that! But what about creating a solid Instagram marketing strategy and actually using your account to generate a consistent stream of leads and sales? Well, that’s a whole other ball game. Once you know who your audience is, you can formulate a foolproof social media marketing strategy. Part of that strategy is using the strengths of each social media platform to your advantage. Instagram, for instance, is a highly visual platform. That means the best kind of content to create for Instagram is videos, high-impact stills, Instagram Stories that incorporate interactivity, and engaging infographics. But, as so many brands have shown us, Instagram isn’t just for travel brands posting jaw-dropping photographs or beauty brands trying out the latest makeup trend in a tutorial video. As Neil Patel shows us, the power of Instagram can be harnessed by any brand – either B2B or B2C – that understands its customers and can create high-impact visual content to resonate with that audience. Shopify is another B2B brand that uses the power of Instagram to its advantage, using brightly colored, high-impact visuals, relatable videos, and motivational quotes. These snippets of information and inspiration speak directly to Shopify’s audience; small business owners and entrepreneurs.

3. Post High-Quality Content Regularly

Succeeding on Instagram starts and ends with high-value, relevant content. But, before you throw your hands up in the air, “high-value” doesn’t mean you need to have a million-dollar annual budget. There are so many different types of content when it comes to Instagram. High-value content is any content that brings value to your specific target audience. That might be a useful video tutorial, a post with tips, a webinar posted on your page, or education around a certain theme in an effort to solve your audience’s problems. Focus on the “how” or “why” associated with topics related to your brand, such as a “how-to” tutorial or guide. With each Instagram post, focus on connecting with your audience instead of writing a straight sales pitch. That doesn’t mean you can never mention sales – as long as you’re positioning your product as a solution to a problem or in the context of helping people, you won’t sound too salesy. You don’t need an enormous budget to create this content and succeed at attraction marketing. Try the following to create effective, yet affordable content:

Ensure your Instagram business profile, including your Instagram bio and Instagram feed, are optimized for success. You’re not going to be attracting any new followers if your Insta feed isn’t professional or doesn’t actually communicate what your brand is all about. Sked Social’s Feed Planner can help you plan your Instagram feed posts using a simple drag-and-drop tool. This way, you can see what your feed will look like before you post new content
Use less polished content on Instagram Stories. Your audience won’t expect to see high-definition, TVC-quality content here
Plan your content in advance, create your content in batches and schedule it months in advance with a post scheduler like Sked Social. This will allow you to create strategic content so you can post regularly and “set and forget” your social media content calendar
Work with influencers or set up a UGC marketing campaign. These marketing tactics are effective on their own, but, over time, they can also become a valuable resource, providing you with a steady stream of new content to re-share with your audience on your page

Regular posting is the key to becoming useful in the eyes of valued Instagram users. If you’re posting great content but you’re only posting once a fortnight, your followers can easily get bored. This also won’t do you any favors when it comes to the Instagram algorithm, which prioritizes accounts that post regularly. That’s why it’s so important to be organized and have a social media scheduling tool. Besides, who wants to be posting content on a Saturday afternoon, anyway?

4. Create Influencer Campaigns

Sometimes the best way to promote your brand, products, or services is through the voice of another. Influencer campaigns can be a huge success. But before you select your influencers, ask yourself the following questions:

Are your chosen influencers followed and respected by your target audience?
Do your chosen influencers actually have influence in a specific field that’s directly related to your business? This could be anything from skincare to fashion to home styling to digital marketing to environmental science
Are your influencers authentic? Do they truly like your brand? They may even be someone who has already posted about your brand or a similar brand, which shows they have (or will have) a genuine interest in your products or services
Have the influencers launched successful brand campaigns in the past?

Once you’ve chosen your influencers, be sure to give them a detailed brief and specific posting criteria, while understanding and respecting that they have their own unique voice, opinions, and style of creating content. Influencer campaign content needs to be relevant, relatable and needs to “attract” new audiences to your brand or products by solving a problem for your target audience.

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5. Focus on Instagram Stories

When it comes to attraction marketing, video is key, as it’s all about showing, not telling. You can use Instagram Stories to entertain and educate your audience. The feature also lets you add a spoonful of your own creativity, as it offers you the option to add Polls, or just colorful stickers, GIFs, and text to help you engage with Instagram users. Here are our top attraction marketing tips for using Instagram Stories:

Use Instagram Stories to tell stories! Share stories of your customers. If you don’t have the resources to create videos you can use photos with a text overlay, and use these customer testimonials to promote your brand
Add interactivity within your Stories to engage your audience, such as Polls or Questions. You can do an “Ask me anything” session with your audience where you can answer all your audience’s queries in a limited time frame
Make your Stories as colorful and engaging as possible. Opt for video instead of still images wherever possible, even if you’re just posting a quick “Boomerang” video
Share user-generated content from your customers or influencer content

6. Build Your Brand

Attraction marketing is all about building connections with customers, but you can’t do that if you’re a faceless brand. Your brand needs to have a specific niche and a well-defined brand identity if you want to have a hope of cultivating a loyal following. But attraction marketing requires more from you, as a small business owner or a marketer. As well as having a well-established brand identity, your brand needs to be human in order to establish those all-important human connections. Even if your brand typically uses a formal tone of voice, you can still show personality in your marketing communications. Try to think about how your brand fits into your current customers’ lives and then attempt to connect with new customers using those learned insights. And, if you find it difficult to break out of a formal tone of voice, why not speak through the voices of others? Use your Instagram to share stories on video from staff, customers, or clients, to demonstrate your brand values and the power of your products or services. Intel does this particularly well on their Instagram, using customer stories to relate to fellow Instagram users who may be going through a similar journey and starting their own online business.

7. Work on Your Instagram Hashtags

You might be creating some amazing content, but if no one is seeing it yet, what is the point? The last thing you want is for content that took hours to create to get buried deep down within your Insta feed! It’s the same principle as SEO – you wouldn’t create a whole lot of awesome blog posts without using any SEO keywords, because fewer people would see them. To avoid this, you need to work on your Instagram hashtags by creating a comprehensive hashtag strategy. This strategy will outline the hashtags you can use for each post. These hashtags will likely change according to what you’re posting, but should include:

A couple of branded hashtags
About 10-15 standard hashtags
Theme-specific hashtags
Any location-specific hashtags
Product-specific keywords or service-related hashtags

So, for instance, a fast-food restaurant posting a video about a new cheeseburger might use a couple of branded hashtags, 10 main hashtags relating to fast food, then some product-specific hashtags, like #doublecheeseburger or #burgersofig.Instagram users can add up to 30 Instagram hashtags for each Instagram feed post. They can also add keywords within Instagram Stories. With Stories, we recommend only using a couple of hashtags or swiping your hashtags far off to the side so they don’t appear on the screen.

8. Tell Stories

Storytelling has always been a key component of social media platforms because stories are such a good way of building those prized connections with your customers. Eventually, this will help you to form a community of followers on your social media platforms. These stories allow Instagram users to feel like they’re part of a community, but, critically, they also encourage engagement on your social channels. Engagement causes your posts to get ranked higher in the Instagram algorithm, which leads to more engagement. Eventually, your brand will benefit from increased leads and sales, and voila! Your Instagram has turned into a money-making machine! To tell stories, you can try the following:

Instagram Stories and Reels featuring videos
Use IGTV to post longer videos, or post a shorter version on Instagram with a link to an extended version hosted on YouTube
Instagram feed posts with long captions
Colorful quote posts with snippets of people’s stories
Carousels with a series of images that tell a story

Ready to Put Attraction Marketing to The Test?

Attraction marketing can revolutionize your social media marketing game and put you in a prime position to scale and grow your business. Yet, to see success, it’s crucial that you think strategically about any exciting new marketing idea before diving in headfirst! As with any social media marketing approach, brands need to implement a range of attraction marketing strategies and test what works best for them. What works well for one brand might turn out to be a massive fail for another, even if they’re in the same industry. Look to other brands for inspiration for content, rather than directly copying them! High-value content alongside consistent Instagram post scheduling is a pivotal part of leveling up your Instagram marketing and bringing those attraction marketing strategies into play. There’s no point posting once every fortnight; Instagram users want to see regular content. Sked Social can help bring structure to your social media marketing plan and can slice hours from your task list by helping you create batches of content all at once. That way, you can optimize your profile for success and beat the Instagram algorithm. Learn how to automate your social media marketing with our easy-to-use scheduling tool and start smashing your social media marketing goals. If you focus on attracting more and more customers to your business through genuine, authentic connections and high-value content, it won’t be long before you witness your engagement, leads, and sales skyrocket. Ready to supercharge your social media marketing strategy? Then get to work implementing these tips, stat!

How to Use Attraction Marketing on Instagram

What is Attraction Marketing?

Should You Be Using Attraction Marketing on Social Media?