How To Market Through DMs On Instagram

In the past, you may have heard me talk about the leads accelerator program, and this is actually one of the necessary steps in order to generate more leads online for your local business. 

Before I figured this out, we went to every networking meeting possible and did everything manual. The goal with this video is that once you watch it, you'll be able to reach out to potential customers, build a relationship and grow your business with a solid Instagram direct message strategy. All right. Make sure that you start with creating that account, because if you don't, it's gonna be impossible for you to message people. 

When you are looking for a business as a business consumer, so you're a restaurant owner, you're a chiropractor. You're somebody who's going through that customer, who is not a business. Instagram is a great tool for you to reach out to these people. Most people don't know how to do this. They create a bunch of content, but they don't know where to go or how to do anything. So they go more of “I'm going to tell you what to do” versus creating hand-to-hand combat as we call it, or creating those relationships. 

So let's just say you're local here into the Allen, Texas area. Click in the Search bar at the top of your Instagram Page. 

You would type in #AllenTX or Allen Texas, and you can search by tag or location. Let's do this.

So I'm going to search by location first, you'll see other accounts, but obviously this popping up. So when you see this grid here, these top accounts are the ones that are getting the most engagement. 

For example, this right here, 2000 likes.

So you can go here to this page or you can go to recent, which is people who have uploaded the most recently. 

This person right here uploaded something eight minutes ago, this other person uploaded something thirty four minutes ago. So pretty active with how many people are on here. 

What you want to do is reach out to these people. So if I'm a business owner in Allen Texas, I'm a chiropractor. I would be going out and looking at people who are using the #AllenTX or Allen Texas, or using the location tag and reaching out to them and looking at their profile, checking out to see if this is somebody who actually lives in Allen. A lot of people will say that they live in Allen but don't. This person lives in Allen. They're from Texas. They're also tagging Allen Texas quite frequently. Looks like she's some kind of food enthusiast. This may be a good person to reach out to and say, “Hey, look! We have a free consultation for a chiropractic session.” Looks like somebody who's active probably cares about their health. More than likely, you'd care about going to see a chiropractor. 

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So, you can message them. Technically you would want to follow them first and engage with them. 

Looks like they're posting pretty frequently. One hour ago, four hours ago, she's posting a lot. Seven hours ago. 20 hours ago. So she's posting two, three times a day, which is not normal for most people, but we would reach out to her because we know she’s active. I would follow her and then just make a list of the people who are similar to this account. Active and great engagement. 

All right. So once you've clicked following on there, click that button down arrow click notifications and then you can get notifications for anyone of them. So posts, stories, IG TV, live videos. This will help you keep track of this person and keep track of when they post. 

You want to be one of the first people engaged and you also want to leave a legitimate comment. So you can see that she posted one hour ago and she has 76 likes. Pretty good! But there's only been one person to comment on it. Therefore, if you comment, you're going to stand out. Same thing for a different post of hers. She posted four hours ago. There's eight comments. Four of them are from people, four from her. 

So what's happening is even a person with this many followers is not getting that much engagement as far as comments. She's getting a great amount of likes, but she's not getting a ton of people commenting. So you want to comment and reach out. 

Then the last step here is to message them after you've been following them and say, “Hey! You're local in the area. I want to offer you a free chiropractic session. It's normally sixty dollars or one hundred dollars” or whatever the value is, whatever your pitch is. But just make it conversational. If you're about to type out a message and it seems like you're writing a novel or like an e-mail, then don't do that. Direct messages should be more like a text message. So, “Hey! Happy Monday. I've been following you for a while. Loved your posts,” or, “You're local in the area and I'd love to have you come out and check out our new facility and get a free chiropractic session, if that's something you're interested in.” 

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So just have a natural conversation with her. If you want to step it up a notch, you could do an audio message or you could even create a video for her. 

We suggest that you have been engaging with this person for about a week. So you want to make sure that you want to follow them and engage for about a week so they at least know who you are. Because the last thing you want to do is just message them out of the blue and say, Hey! I want you to try out a session versus now they've seen you pop up multiple times and they think, Hey, this person's always liking my stuff in the very beginning. They're always commenting. They're super engaged. Now, they reached out and they want to add value, that's even better. 

And what's going to happen is this person, they're either gonna say yes or no. OK? It's not good or bad, it's a number strategy, but you have a much better chance of closing that deal. And the good thing is, if you add value to her, she's got a decent amount of followers in the area that she may tag you at the chiropractic place at your location or she may put you on her Instagram stories. You may get free promotion out of this to hundreds or thousands of people who didn't know who you were previously. So that's just one person. 

And I will tell you right now that most people won't do this because it's going to take time. I would say if you could reach out to 10 to 20 people a day just like this. It's gonna take some time to find the people. Let’s say, for example, a lot of these realtors put stuff on here. But let’s just say, this person, Missiefit, looks like a fitness person. She's a lifestyle girl and taking a lot of videos and pictures. Same kind of thing. Decent engagement, posts somewhat regularly, do the exact same kind of strategy for her. 

Now let’s try it with a hashtag. Let's do #AllenTX, that’s a popular hashtag here. 135,000 posts. 

Follow this hashtag, or the hashtag that you are looking up. You can follow the hashtag and see who's popular there and check out top posts and then go check out people who have less than a thousand or two thousand followers. Let's go to recent and see what comes up there.. 

So here we have Jordan Skylight and she appears to be a hairstylist, works at a boutique style location but is definitely individual. 

But she's got a good following. She posts regularly, even posted today, two hours ago. Exact same kind of thing. The benefit here is that if you're going after people who are less than 2,000 followers, they're going to know that you're commenting to them, engaging with them, and you're actually reaching out and doing something much more than most people do, which is leaving a comment saying, Hey! Come buy my product or come, you know, check this out. 

Here’s another person, Landon Gideon. It looks like he goes to the Allen Skatepark quite a bit, spends a lot of time in Allen outside of a skate park too. Maybe another guy, just another person. He's 24. He's told us that. They've got a website. So just do as much research on them as possible. If it's somebody legitimate reaching out to them, engaging with them and doing things that way. 

You could also, as a B to B strategy, if you are going after somebody who is in your area and you could be partnering or collaborating with them. For example, we saw a bunch from Results Roofing in the Allen area. You could be partnering with, let's see here, the Miracle Closet they're over here as well. We also see a place called Cinnaholic McKinney. They appear to be a cinnamon bun place. 

And that's just for Allen. So if, you know, people are coming around and in your Allen, if you go there, you can do Allen, Texas. So not just Allen TX, but Allen, Texas. If you search that by the hashtag we can see that there's 30,000 followers there. But even with this, you can find people who are recent and reaching out to them.

After doing all of that, you want to reach out to the, like I said, 10 to 20 people a day and reach out to them, follow their accounts, turn on the post notifications. And once you do that, engage with those people and build the relationships one by one. But imagine getting five or six new clients each week by just doing this. Costs you no money just costs time and allows you to grow your business. And this works for both B to B and for B to C. 

OK. Hopefully that helped you figure out how to prospect for clients with Instagram if you'd like to learn more about our leads accelerator program. You can get our free training on how to attract, qualify and convert more leads online for your local business by clicking here. 

If you would like to watch our How To video on this subject, you can watch it here. Make sure to like the video as well as like and subscribe to our YouTube Channel and hit the bell so that you don't miss out on any of the content we put out every single week.