With over 800 million users worldwide Instagram is one of the most powerful digital tools that wellness business are using today. A strong social media presence can help grow a wellness business, by building awareness for your brand and attracting new clients leads. For successful accounts with significant followers, Instagram can even provide a way to generate additional income.

There are many factors that determine a successful account. With so many users worldwide, simply creating an account and sharing occasional posts, will not result in the followers or traffic your business needs for growth. Although a simple medium, a successful Instagram account needs to be propelled by a clear marketing strategy. You don’t have to be a marketing wiz, but some added insights will help you make the most of your Instagram and translate that success into business growth for your wellness business. If you’re truly looking to grow your wellness business, Healthie’s practice management software can help through client retention strategies, facilitating partnerships and more.

Follow these 6 initial steps to using Instagram to grow your wellness business:

1. Make sure you have a business account

If you already have an existing account, or if you need to make a new account, switch it to an optimized business account instead of a personal account. A business account gives you the ability to add additional contact information like contact options, the category of your business type, and your Facebook page. If you want, you can also add your business’s physical location. You’ll also have the option to “promote,” posts which will allow you to target and reach your ideal client. Instagram promoted posts can be a low-cost way to market your business online.  

If you already have a personal Instagram account with a good amount of followers, you don’t have to create a new account.

Switch your personal account to a business account by:

1. Logging into your account
2. Go to your profile, click the top-right navigation button, and click settings
3. Scroll to the Account section of the options list
4. Click Sign up for a Business profile
5. Follow the onscreen prompts to set up an account
6. After the account is created, follow the steps in the section above

When it comes to creating consistent, valuable content on Instagram, maintaining multiple accounts can be time-consuming. If you have multiple accounts, you may want to consider a way to put them under one, effective umbrella.

2. Craft a compelling business profile

Once you’ve created a business account, you’ll want to set up your profile. Although simplistic, setting up your Instagram business profile is all about marketing strategy. A compelling profile will speak to your prospective followers, peak their interest enough to follow you and direct them in how to become a paying client. This is an important step to using Instagram to grow your wellness business.

Here are the important components of a successful profile.

• Setup a display name for your account:  many wellness providers choose to use their real name and their credentials (ie. Melanie Jane MS RD) or their business name (Melanie Jane Nutrition)  
• Create an easy to spell username: this is also called your “handle” and begins with the @ symbol (ie. @wellwithmel) and will be the way you share how people can “search” for you on Instagram.
• Link to your website or landing page (if you have one) + include contact information: do you want prospective clients to be able to email or call you? Do you have any client packages or free downloads that you can use to incentivize clients to provide their contact information in exchange for providing their email?
• Descriptive bio: your bio should relate to your ideal client, and clearly communicate what followers should expect to gain from your content
• Profile photo that hooks followers: your profile picture should be your logo or something identifies with your brand. And if you’re the face of your practice, use a professional picture, but use it consistently across your social platforms.

3. Create content that is valuable for your niche

As opposed to written text, Instagram depends more on visual content. Creating a clear visual story will allow prospective followers/clients to immediately connect with you and your wellness business. When a viewer initially clicks on your profile, they will see a series of 9-12 image tiles (grid). By looking at this image grid alone (and nothing else) — what’s the story that you are sharing? What is the transformation and/or education that you are showing followers as possible?

A successful Instagram operation, one of the key factors to growing your wellness business, is the ability to identify, attract and convert your ideal client. Creating clear and consistent messaging designed for your client needs to translate into the content you share on Instagram. General content that speaks to too broad of an audience is often lost in the sea of posts, unable to build a true connection with anyone in particular. With Healthie, you can take this even further by creating educational content that resonates with your clients.

A few takeaways in finding and remembering your niche on Instagram:

• Finely tune your content to speak to your client — always use this lens when posting an image or text
• Consistency is key — don’t get distracted by the professional looking accounts. When getting started, it’s more important that your story reaches and resonates with your ideal client.
• Use an online scheduling tool to create your Instagram posts in advance. These tools will allow you to schedule out weeks, or months worth of posts, and you will be able to preview your posts together — to ensure that your images communicate your story visually

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4. Find your target audience using strategy

Before even launching your Instagram account, it’s important to understand if Instagram is the best portal to find your ideal client. How is your audience typically finding wellness information, are they primarily using facebook or blogs? Are they not online at all? Do they typically not have access to smartphones at all, so likely aren’t using Instagram?

If you’ve clearly identified your audience as Instagram users, then you can strategize how to help your content reach them to grow your wellness business.

Using Hashtags

The ‘hashtag’ is mainly used by people that are trying to grow a larger following audience and is used to promote and draw attention to you and whatever you are trying to sell. Including relevant hashtags in your posts and following hashtags that your ideal client might be potentially following are vital to the overall growth of your business. Many individuals can fall victim if they don’t know how to identify what their target audience’s view the most. By using hashtags, this can eliminate your stress. The appropriate hashtags help put your content in front of those specific individuals searching phrases and words associated with your business on Instagram and contribute to a successful wellness brand.

What to do after you tag your post?

If you click the hashtag that you posted a picture with, you’ll be brought to another page that displays all of the uploaded photos and videos using that same hashtag you used.

To grow your wellness business, you want to use both popular hashtags to get a larger following and new hashtags that are related to your specific business. For instance, create hashtags as simple as “wellness” or more specific like your company name.

Once you find that most of your clients are using Instagram as an outlet to receive information, you want to start marketing your Instagram on other forms of mediums such as business cards and flyers. This way your clients can see how professional your practice is.

Promoting Posts on Instagram

Overall, a promotions’ purpose is an effective way to grow your wellness business. It can increase engagement and visibility by taking a post to the next level concerning the number of one’s likes, shares, and profile visits. Promotional ads give more room for customization and targeting the exact audience you are trying to market. The biggest use of Instagram promotions’ demonstrates brand awareness. This means you can effectively speed up your reach and gain higher visibility rates.

5. Gain followers and convert to paying clients through Instagram engagement

To boost your followers and gain more customers, engagement plays a large role in increasing your post visibility. The reality is, only a small percentage of your followers will actually see your posts on their feed (less than 7% of your followers!). Adding other ways to engage with your target audience beyond posts will help expand your reach.

Boosting Instagram engagement:

Instagram stories

Instagram Stories is a feature in the Instagram app and allows users to capture and upload images or videos in a slideshow format. The most important tools to implement in your IG stories include but are not limited to images, videos, polls, questions, and more. In addition, stories allow one to use edits, emoticons, drawings, and filters to boost your engagement. Most of the time, individuals who are running a business Instagram share content of their products and services, educational/informational information, and any other content to share daily updates about their business.

Need more customers? Instagram stories is a great tool to boost overall engagement with your regular customers and prospective ones. Stories give you a chance to think about what the consumers want. You want to be able to connect with them, and IG stories is a great tool that serves many purposes:

• A great tool that stories serve is that you can screenshot then save any valuable content you think is worthy of saving to your camera roll.
• Brand wallpapers
• Sharing lists: Nutrition professionals can share their grocery lists, routines, daily wellness practices, etc.
• The Instagram question sticker is a great way to carry two-way conversation with you and a potential customer to understand what content they are looking for, to solicit information about future products, and hopefully answer their questions in return. To do this, you first take a picture of either yourself in real time, of a product or one of your services, then use the question sticker to have your target audience ask a question pertaining to your Instagram business.
• Links: You need to have 10,000 followers to link a page to your Instagram story. For instance, if a food blogger has an Amazon page on their Instagram account, and links it to their story when talking about a product, the customer will be more enticed to click on it and then be directed to the Amazon page.
• For RDs, some popular questions to ask are “ask me anything, and “what do you guys want to see more of.”

Pro-tip: Instagram posts are recommended to be 1-2 daily, while you can share unlimited daily stories without overwhelming your readers.

Instagram highlights

After you share a story, it will disappear after 24 hours. One way to retain that content for followers to view at another time, is by saving it into a Highlight that appears below your Instagram profile. Story highlights allows individuals to showcase all the sides of their personalities. Utilize highlights as a way to market the services and information that you offer. If through your wellness business you offer meal plans, recipes, exercise tips, etc, you can easily organize them into highlights.

Pro-tip: to create a highlight cover image, many Instagram users use a free online design tool called Canva. There is a template called “Highlights” which you can use to create and download your highlight. Once you have your image, you must add it to your Instagram stories. To choose a cover image on your highlights, tap “edit cover” and you will see the option either to pick a highlighted story as your cover or upload an icon from your camera roll.

Going LIVE

70% of your actual Instagram posts aren’t even seen by your followers. Why? It’s just how Instagram works. This is why Instagram Live is a game changer. When you go live, your stream shows up in the exact place where your stories are on users Instagram pages, giving you a much better chance of actually getting views. You can highlight your Instagram Lives as well as push notifications. If enabled, your followers will get push notifications. This means each time you stream a Live, they will get an alert. This can increase your chance for my reach! In addition to this, there’s more. Regular stories can only be up to 60 seconds in length, yet Lives can be an entire hour. This gives you more leeway to choose more content.

Live content also creates a sense of urgency: users are following you because they love your content and they can’t get enough of it. During lives, you and your viewers are experiencing everything in real time. This draws them in because there is newly created suspense. In addition to this, they don’t want to turn it off because they might miss something important!

For instance, food bloggers go live when sharing a new how-to recipe. You have a family and you want to make this for them. You don’t want to miss any important material, it’s only Live for 24 hours!

Sliding into DMs

Instagram stories tend to create large quantities of engagement because it sparks conversation. Followers want to get more information about a service or product you are sharing. This is where Instagram DMs come into handy. These allow you to send private messages and pictures to any user on Instagram, whether they are following you or not. Because communication can get confusing over social media, this is the perfect method in reaching your clients successfully. They’ll “slide into your DMs” in doing so. Instagram direct messaging has become a more utilized resource for individuals or companies trying to build their business. This is the next step in growing your wellness business — selling your product, service, or idea. Because it prompts connectivity between you and your customers. You’re facilitating relationships between you and a client or potential client and even more presents an opportunity for networking. With Healthie, this relationship can continue by checking in with clients through convenient client messaging or by setting up food, lifestyle, or activity journaling.

If you’re a wellness professional who wants to reach out to large quantities of prospective customers, act professionally, but also friendly. One of the more important features of DMing is the personalization. A personalized Instagram message can go a long way because it portrays that you care to put in the time and effort with these individuals.

Show off your aesthetics

67% of consumers consider detailed images to be more valuable toward making their purchase than the product information or even ratings from other customers. One important trick is to brighten your pictures on your stories. For wellness professionals, especially when sharing food photos, natural lighting is key. Remember, aesthetically pleasing pictures will drive the amount of followers you have up. When shooting, take into consideration the environment. The backdrop is also important! Move your “set” around to the perfect light.

6. Know how to measure your success

Leveraging the insights tools that a business account offers, can give you valuable data on your content, account activity, and audience. You’ll also be able to assess the performance of your promotions (paid boosted posts). By periodically assessing this data, you can tailor when and what you post, to drive growth and success.

To view these stats, simply navigate to…

1. Go to your profile
2. Tap .
3. Tap insights
4. Select specific posts, stories or promotions you’d like to view insights on. In addition to this, you can also learn more about your audience.

Interpreting insights:

• An impression is the number you see that demonstrates the total number of times your content could have been seen. This can be easily confused with one’s reach. However, if your impressions are higher than your reach, this means that one audience member can be viewing your content multiple times rather than just once.
• Reach, which is the number of users that saw your post or story on any day, is most important when you want to broaden the amount of followers you have. This gives you a good indication of how well your content is doing.
• Website click rate is a percentage that represents the specific number of visits divided by the total number of profile views during a selected time period.
• Profile visits are kept track my Instagram, just like other social media sites. This allows you to see who viewed your Instagram profile.
• Followers: With the total impressions, reach, profile views, and website clicks, you can come to an easy conclusion of who your followers are. With other apps, such as the basic apps to see who follows you, unfollows, and blocks you through Instagram, you can track this as well.

More and more wellness professionals have been using Instagram as a social media outlet to grow their wellness business, in the hopes of obtaining more clients. The real secret into being successful doesn’t just stop at making the business account, you need to have a clear and creative marketing strategy for your account. Once you have your marketing strategy down, sharing valuable information that differentiates yourself will help to retain existing clients and to attract new followers. Every new lead provides an opportunity to build a connection, and convert that follower into a paying client.