I tried to make this checklist really simple, easy to follow, and practical, so you can use it no matter what level you’re at. Make sure you go through the steps in order and don’t skip any of them, because skipping a step and not doing it can ruin the whole thing.
Before Launching the Page
Figuring Out Your Expertise
What’s your expertise? If you had to pick one topic you could talk about for five years, what would it be? It doesn’t matter whether your product is a physical good or a service, you need to be obsessed with something. Even bloggers have a talent and ability that lets them tell stories and capture those stories in the form of a vlog, so self-awareness is the most important thing and the first step is figuring out what you’re actually good at. Just because someone starts a trading or Instagram training page and gets rich doesn’t mean everyone should do the same. Be sure to focus on the thing you’re best at, and if you’re not good at anything yet, start learning and gaining experience right now.
Checking the Market’s Needs
Once you’ve found your expertise, you need to see what people and businesses in your field actually need and where the gap in the market is. For example, if you’re a tailor, what clothing style is missing right now that you could produce, or if you’re in the import business, what help can you offer other businesses and what could you import that doesn’t exist right now but people need. It doesn’t have to be something extraordinary, for example:
- Maybe the quality of your product or service is better, like a drill that lasts five years instead of one.
- Maybe your customers are different, like tools made for women that are lighter and come in feminine colors.
- Maybe the way you deliver your service is different, like everyone else being in-person while you’re online.
- Maybe even your content style is different, like one being formal while you’re casual and friendly.
Understanding Your Audience
Now you need to figure out who your audience is and who you’re going to offer this product or service to. What’s their gender? What age group are they? What tone do they like? What’s their biggest problem? What question is on their mind? The more you know about this audience the better, because you can find them more easily, speak in their own language, and give them exactly what they want, which results in more sales.
Studying Fresh, Highly Successful Examples
People in cinema say that if you want to capture good images, you need to watch good images too. Instagram is pretty much cinema, and you need to get familiar with the successful examples out there, both in your own field and in others. It’s better to study pages that were recently created and managed to get really good feedback with just a few posts, where most of their posts have high views, more than their follower count, and a high number of comments, saves, shares, and likes, meaning their audience engagement is strong. These pages have good potential, and you can analyze them and pull out the right patterns from them. What pattern is the right one is a long discussion, and since we’re going to walk through this checklist step by step on Instagram together, I’ll talk about it there.
Finding Your Format
Almost every page that grows really well has a consistent format. By format I mean the template and style of the posts. Since my explanation is probably getting a bit complicated and I promised to keep it simple, let me put it simply. Have you ever looked at an Instagram page and felt like its posts look like another page you follow? Have you ever recognized from the first few seconds of a video whose video it is, even if there’s no face in it at all? These are the signs of that page’s content format. If a page has its own format and deletes its Instagram today and starts from scratch, its audience will quickly find it again and it will grow. The best approach is to build your own format based on your field, your audience, and the analysis you did of successful examples, which is exactly what I did with my new page. If you have your own format and you’ve understood your audience correctly, someone who comes to your page won’t leave and will engage well with you, because they won’t be surprised in every video by something completely different and unrelated to the previous ones that they don’t even like.
Goal Setting
Goal setting has many definitions, but what I mean here is: what do you want to achieve from running an Instagram page and creating content, and what’s the outcome you want from all this? Maybe “defining the audience’s destination” is a more accurate phrase. Where do you ultimately want to guide the person who comes to your page? For example, do you want the customer to call you? Sign up for your online course? Buy your service package? Listen to your podcast? Where do you want to lead them in the end? You need to know this so you can map out the right path for your customer.
Maybe a Content Calendar
When I say “maybe,” it completely depends on the personality and style you’ve chosen. Instagram is no joke and you need to be active on it regularly. Instagram’s algorithm works in a way that if you’re not active, it won’t even show you to people who follow you, and that forces you to throw your whole page away. Now this effective activity can range from a few posts a day to, at the very least, one post a week. But you need to be able to keep up this consistency, and suddenly disappearing for two months with excuses like “I was traveling” or “I wasn’t feeling well” doesn’t cut it. The proper approach is to at least mark on a calendar, for yourself, the publishing times for different types of content like reels, stories, and lives, so your activity stays consistent and not random. A more professional approach is to define exactly what content you want to publish. But if you’re a committed, organized person and your style is tied to news and daily life and you’re going to publish a post or more a day and you’re seriously involved with your page, in my opinion you can forget about the content calendar, because you’re posting content every day and nothing is going to slip your mind, and since you’re so deeply involved, there’s no specific topic that needs reminding and you’re already on top of everything and all the plans.
Building the Page
Choosing a Name
The first step for a page is choosing your account name. This completely depends on the previous section of the checklist: what your goal is, who your audience is, what format you’re going to operate in, and so on. Generally, people either want to make themselves known as an individual, or they want to introduce and promote a brand. For example, it doesn’t matter who the CEO or digital marketing manager of a store like Digikala is, and maybe 99% of Digikala’s customers have no idea. Digikala’s Instagram page introduces its various products, with a different person appearing on camera each time, and maybe a lot of the content is even faceless; here the goal is to promote a brand called Digikala, not a specific person. The other case is the Instagram pages of bloggers, artists, specialists, and instructors; for example, look at Ali Hatami’s page on Instagram, where the goal is to introduce Ali Hatami himself as a specialist. So you either need to be branding a company or branding yourself. If your goal is a personal brand, the page name can be your own name, an abbreviation or nickname of your name, or whatever you want to be known by; for Ali Hatami, for example, you could pick names like a.hatami, alihatami, ali_advisor, or sales.advisor. And if your goal is to brand a company, it’s better to choose the company’s own name as the page name; for example, if you have a clothing shop called Sogol, names like sogol.gallery or sogol_art work well.
Profile Picture
The choice here is really simple. If you chose a personal brand in the previous step, you should use a photo of yourself as your profile picture, and if you want to brand a company, it’s better to have your logo on your profile, or if you don’t have a logo, put a symbol of your products or a photo of your shop; for example, a photo of your clothing shop or one of the nice outfits you have.
Bio and Page Title
Page Title
When it comes to the title, there are two approaches; one is to write the name in both English and Persian, for example: شارخ کیومرثی | Sharokh Kiumarsi or دیجیکالا | Digikala.
Or you can use your name along with what you do, like: شارخ کیومرثی | Online Sales Growth Advisor or دیجیکالا | Online Goods Store.
Overall, the goal is for the audience to be able to see you in the results and find you when they type, so it comes down to figuring out what gets searched more. For example, if my last name were Reza Golzar, anyone searching my name would definitely see that famous actor, so if they’re looking for me they might search “Reza Golzar coach”; for that reason it’s even better to write my name as “Reza Golzar coach.” My general recommendation is: if people know you by name and you’re active and well-known in media and in-person events, and your full name isn’t that of a famous person, use the first approach so people find you no matter how they type your name; and if you’re not well-known, it’s better to add your field after your name the way people search it, so that if someone searches “video editing,” your account also shows up in their results.
Page Bio
For Creator and Business pages, Instagram has something called the Category label that it displays by default; make sure you turn it off, because it shows one line of your profile in English and no one understands it.
Next, you should write three more lines for your page bio, and this is the best formula, and it’s better to use relevant emojis in your bio too:
- Line 1: Give a reason why they should follow you and what value you offer them.
- Line 2: State the advantage you have over others.
- Line 3: Invite them to take an action, like checking out a specific highlight or a particular story.
Starting Out
Now it’s time to start being active and posting. My advice is to come out strong from the very beginning, but you shouldn’t drift into perfectionism. If your first content is high quality and gets good views and you manage to attract the right audience, your page will grow really fast. It’s better for your posts to be engaging from the start and to attract the target audience, the kind of person who will keep enjoying your content and find it useful; that way you can grow better and faster. One of the best tools you can use to get engagement is a smart DM auto-responder, and inviting others to comment for you and follow your page; this can really help your growth.
Keeping It Going
Analyzing Your Posts
Success lies in constantly reviewing the stats of your posts, seeing which post did better, and being able to repeat that pattern. For example, if a certain format worked on your page, or a certain topic worked, or a certain editing style, you should take that winning element and use it in your next piece of content. If your audience asks a question, answer it and create a new post about it, and try to chat with them in the comments and make them feel valued; this way your posts and your page keep growing, your views go higher, your audience becomes bigger fans, and they trust you more.
Highlights
There’s a set of highlights that’s a must for every page:
- About Me: which tells your own story or that of the brand, and how it got from where it started to where it is now.
- In Stock: this is for shopping pages, which should keep the products currently in stock here with prices and kept up to date.
- Services or Courses: this is for service and educational pages, which introduce the list of their services and courses in this highlight.
- Customer Reviews: this highlight should show others’ satisfaction with your services or products.
- Best Sellers: this is also for shopping pages, and at most five of the best-selling products go in it.
There are other highlights too that differ depending on the page, like contact methods, a size guide, a guide to buying from the website or placing an order; they can exist depending on that page and its products and services.
Stories
Stories are usually used for more connection and engagement with the customer. The number of stories should be at least three days a week and should be a story sequence, not a single story. Every page uses different scenarios for stories, but the best thing, as the name suggests, is a story, and you should try to engage and converse with your audience in your stories and maintain your connection. A relevant daily vlog is one of the appealing things you can use in stories, and sales campaigns are also usually run in stories. So it’s better to post as many engaging stories as you can and make sure your stories are shown to others early on and don’t end up at the back of the line. The more your audience watches your stories fully and replies, or answers interactive elements like question boxes and quizzes, the better your stories’ feedback gets, and your stories show up at the top of the list for that person.
Going Live
Going live is usually used to revive people who forgot about you a long time ago, and a lot of pages might never use this tool at all. In general, the algorithm works in a way that based on how much someone engages with a page, it shows that page’s content to them with higher priority. Now if you skip someone’s post four times and don’t watch it, their posts probably won’t be shown to you anymore and their stories go to the back of the list for you, and it gets to the point where after a few months you don’t even know you follow such a person, especially if you follow a lot of people. Because a live puts your page at the top of the list and grabs attention, it makes the people who don’t even know they followed you see you again, and either unfollow you, which improves your engagement rate with the ones who stay, or follow your content again. On the other hand, it also helps you build a more intimate connection with others so they become bigger fans of you. Things that can usually be the topic of a live:
- General, everyday talk and checking in with people.
- A planned joint live with other people to share knowledge.
- Introducing a specialized product like a course.
- Introducing a festival, discount, and showcasing models, which is used more in physical stores.
The Customer Journey and Sales Funnel
I’ve previously explained the AIDA sales funnel and Philip Kotler’s 5A model, so if you want to understand the whole thing more deeply, I recommend reading those links. In general, at the start of the journey your audience needs to see you and become interested in and drawn to you, so your first goal should be creating posts that target a large group of interested audience. If you start out by talking about introducing the product itself, you probably won’t get any views at all, unless your product is something very special; it’s better to first grab the audience’s attention and interest with other methods like humor and sharing strange, useful information, so they come to your page and you just boost your follower count, and then you go after sales. After attracting a sufficient number of audience, even a hundred or two hundred people, only then can you go after sales and introducing products, in a way where you talk about the product’s benefits, the value it creates, and customer satisfaction, and you create interest and a sense of need in the audience, and finally with an attractive offer like a discount and a sales campaign you can turn them into a customer.
Maybe a Sales Campaign
A sales campaign is a sales method and strategy, and it doesn’t necessarily suit every business. The core of the sales campaign system is to make demand for a product or service exceed supply, put out an attractive and limited offer where only a limited number manage to buy, and then start showing the results and satisfaction of previous customers who took the opportunity, until the next campaign comes around. Many instructors and educational pages use this method to sell courses, seminars, and webinars, but it’s not useful for everyone. For example, if you have a clothing shop page, a sales campaign in this sense isn’t usable for you, and you could instead offer discounts on occasions like Black Friday, Yalda night, and Nowruz, or give the customer a unique selling proposition, which is also called a sales campaign.
Final Word
Wherever in the checklist you didn’t understand and have a question, ask right below and I’ll answer all the questions. Also, on my Instagram page I’m going to explain this checklist step by step, give plenty of examples for different businesses, and share key tips that I’m sure will be really useful if you’re serious about your Instagram activity. So if you haven’t followed the page, head back down right now and follow the page so you don’t miss the tips.