Is Instagram Marketing Really Worth it?
Articles,  Blog

Is Instagram Marketing Really Worth it?

– Instagram. It’s one of the most popular
social networks out there. You know, we all talk about
Instagram marketing tips, I’ve created a ton of videos on this, but is Instagram really worth it? Is it going to drive you business? Is it going to drive you revenue? Is it even worth you
spending time on Instagram? Hey everyone, I’m Neil Patel, and today I’m going to break down if Instagram marketing is really worth it. (upbeat music) Before we get started make sure
you subscribe to this video and if you’re on YouTube,
click the alert notification that way when I go live,
you’ll get notified. How many of you guys are on Instagram? Let me know your user handles so that way I can check your profile out and hey, I may even follow you. But, we all talk about Instagram,
we all use it, I have it, my follower count’s continually going up, is it really worth it? And I wanted to create a video that would answer that question
and the reason being is, I wanted you guys to have
realistic expectations because everyone continually ask me like hey how do I get more
followers on Instagram? You know, how do I get
to 100,000 followers? When you think about Instagram, from a B2B standpoint, and
I’ll cover B2C as well, in B2B if you’re expecting to generate a lot of
business from it, don’t. You may get more brand awareness and indirectly, yes, that can
help you generate business, but you’re not going to get someone buying $10,000 products from you
all day long on Instagram. I’m not saying Instagram isn’t profitable. I’m not saying you can’t generate sales. If you look at I’ve spent on Instagram and what I’ve generated in revenue, I’ve generated a hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars from revenue. Actually, it’s in the
millions of dollars in revenue and I haven’t spent nearly as much. Now, you may look at that being like oh that’s awesome, that
means Instagram’s worth it. Well, if you look at how much more revenue I’ve generated from SEO
or paid advertising, it’s way greater of a
return then Instagram. You can’t do everything so
you got to focus your efforts. In B2B, I do believe I’m not a anomaly, but it’s harder to do what I’m
doing and most people can’t, and for that reason you’re
not going to really get too much of a ROI, but hey,
it’s a good place to be because there’s a ton of business people. You won’t see a ROI just pitching your products and services. You will see a better ROI
if you just create content that other successful B2B
people that want to follow, they’ll get to know you,
and eventually some of those indirectly may turn into customers. On the B2C side, you know,
I know a lot of people who pay the Kardashians money and other people like
that for advertising. Here’s the thing. Like, I had someone the
other day and they’re like yeah, I paid Kris Jenner
$85,000 for a post. Now, what do you think
happened with Kris Jenner when she took that money? She promoted that product, but what do you think
happened to that company? They generated less than
$85,000 dollars in sales. On top of that, they have a physical good so there’s cost involved in their product. They’re hoping they can make it up in the lifetime buy up of the customer, but still, they lost money. With influencers, and Instagram, if you want to pay micro influencers, that works well as long
as the pricing is right. You can go to places online, there’s a lot of communities
like TheInfluence.cos where you can find them. And you can find all of these
people who are influencers and potentially get some of them to, you know, pay you or
talking more so you pay them and they can promote
your product or service. But in general, unless
their prices are reasonable, it’s not going to work too well and if you only get one
influencers to post, it’s not going to work too well. Yes, a Kardashian is different, and even that doesn’t
really work most the time. You need a lot of micro
influencers at once and create that big splash for it to work and if you don’t time it right, and you just spread it out over
a period of like six months, it’s not as impactful versus if everyone in a two or three day period within your space started
talking about you. It’s just like, you know when
Facebook gets a ton of press for breaching privacy or user’s passwords or whatever issues or
government regulations, I don’t know what, press
issues their running into and I’m not saying they’re doing wrong things or right things. It’s just, whatever press they’re in, when everyone talks about
them at once in the news, they’re more likely to
be the trending topic. That’s the same thing that
happens with influencers. So if you’re in the B2C space,
paying influencers works if you get a lot of micro influencers, that they talk about you at once. For in the B2B space, indirectly, yeah you may be able to make money. If you’re in the B2C space, you can also consider
creating your own profile. Yes, it helps a little, make a little bit when
it comes to making money, but if your profile’s not popular and you’re not leveraging some
of the other Instagram tips, and I have a lot of videos on that so I’m not going to regurgitate those tips on how to make your profile
popular, you won’t do well. But if you do make your profile popular by using those micro influencers, you’re using all the stuff
that I’m talking about from stories, posting
frequency, micro content, all that kind of stuff, sure,
yeah, from B2C it can help. But Instagram for most
people, it’s not as effective as let’s say Facebook
or LinkedIn or YouTube, and the biggest reason is, is it’s hard to link people from Instagram and get them to buy. Yeah, you can do things like swipe up, you can add links in your
bio, but unless you’re willing to spend the money on the paid ads, it’s hard to get people based
on Instagram’s restriction, to just have your post linking out to your latest product or service. And that’s why it’s really hard to generate a ROI from Instagram. Now, does this mean I’m going
to stop using Instagram? No, I already mentioned I make
decent money from Instagram. But also another reason I use it, isn’t for the reason you may be thinking. I really use Instagram so I
can see what my family’s up to. It’s a more of a personal
social network for me. From that standpoint to
me, Instagram is priceless and that’s why I love it. If you need help with your
social media marketing check out my ad agency,
Neil Patel Digital. If you enjoy this video,
like it, share it, tell other people about it. Thank you very much.


Leave a Reply
