Hello, if you’re here, you probably know what prospecting is. But just in case you don’t know, I’ll try to explain in a few sentences below, before we start talking about the main topic of the article which is Instagram prospecting.
So it’s very simple to explain, but a lot harder to implement. Prospecting is the process to identify potential buyers for your products or services and then moving them along your sales pipeline until they become your clients. Of course, you’re going to lose a lot of potential clients even on the first steps, when you select your targeting. They key in prospecting is to find these clients that really need your product and will convert easier down the road. In this case, like any other case the 80/20 rule applies. Which in this case means that 80% of your clients will come from 20% of your efforts. This is good news, but the bad news: 20% of your clients, will come from 80% of your efforts. By prospecting, we’re trying to eliminate the 20% of clients that will take 80% of our efforts.
Now that we’re done with explanation, let’s move into the main subject:
Finding leads from Instagram – IG lead generation
Below is the first step that will help you learn how to prospect on Instagram:
First we have to find our leads, and then eliminate some of them that don’t match our criteria. For example if you want to promote your makeup products, you wouldn’t want to message an account about dogs. Or accounts with low amount of followers or accounts too big either, this depends a lot on what you’re trying to target.
Now let’s see the 2 ways to find these potential clients information, one is manual and time consuming, the other is automating using our web app.
The manual way
So the first way is by going and searching on Instagram by hashtag, from a list of someone followers or following or by location, depending on your need this may be more than enough. For all the method mentioned, you can use the IG search, as shown in the screenshot on the right.
Please note that for this feature to work properly you must have an active Instagram account. For hashtags you can scrape without that until a certain number of posts. But we won’t get into that, because if you’re reading this I’m sure you already have an account.
For followers/following, just click on the number and you should see the list open, on both desktop and mobile clients of the Instagram app.
If you want to do a lot then of it, then I recommend the method listed below.
Automate the process
Using our web app, you can extract emails from Instagram from different sources, here are the main ones:
- Scrape leads from followers – This is a good way to find accounts interested in something. For example if you follow an account talking about cars, then you must be interested in cars. In my opinion this is the best way to find leads, manually or automatically.
- Scrape leads from following – This is good if you’re looking for big accounts and don’t care that much about the target. As big accounts usually follow other big accounts
- Scrape leads from hashtags – This is good if you want to find influencers from a specific niche. If I use the hashtag #travel, than I must be interested in travel/post travel content. And my followers are also interested in traveling.
When I say leads, I mean both email and also phone number extraction. Depending on your ideal client, for some you may want to do cold calling, for some cold emailing and for others you may want to do a direct message on the IG app.
You don’t have to use just one method, you could combine them, for example first getting people that posted for a specific hashtag. So you know they are from the same niche, and than scraping their followers, because you know they’re interested in that niche/hashtag. Of course you could do it manually the same way too, but it would take so much time. I don’t think it’s worth anyone time. Automating a part of the process is a good way to save some time.
So to get started using our web app to extract leads you can go to our home page and register.
How to do Instagram prospecting
Now that you have the leads, it’s time to filter them first, base on what you need. So if you do it manually, you should probably filter as you scrape the data, and save the info in a Google Sheet or something similar.
If you used our web app, you should have these info about most users(if it was available), all in a Google sheet shared with you, at no extra charge
| pk | username | full_name | follower_count | following_count | account_type | is_private | biography | is_business | category | contact_phone_number | address_street | public_email | zip | city_name | usertags_count | media_count | is_verified | external_url | latitude | longitude | is_potential_business |
Make sure to scroll right, as there is more data visible. For filtering I would recommend follower_count, word from biography and the category, these are the 3 main one. If you want you can also use city_name, zip, depending on what you’re trying to target.
For filtering, you can do it directly from Google Sheets, as shown in the screenshot below:
If you want to make permanent changes, I recommend to make a copy of this file in your Google drive, it’s very easy to do, just go to File -> Make a copy. Then you will be able to create permanent filter views.
So after filtering is time to do the Instagram prospecting. There are 3 ways to do it, depending on your business.
Cold emailing
This is the easiest way, if you already have the data in a google sheet, include their email. You can use tools like Gmass or Mail Meteor to automate the cold emailing process.
Cold calling
This is more niche specific, if you know that your clients love being called, and they shared their phone number on Instagram. You could try calling them, but this cannot be automated as easily as cold emailing, so you may need to hire a few people for that.
Direct messages
The last way, is using of Instagram prospecting direct message on the Instagram app. This is also time consuming, and can’t be done by multiple people at the same time, as you have to use the main account for that. And if you do it a lot, Instagram may block you and won’t be able to respond, so this is pretty risky in my opinion if you overdo it.
Conclusion about how to prospect on Instagram
So depending on your time, you could do the process manually, automate some of it, or using 2 tools you could automate most of the instagram prospecting. Except for the filtering, I think that should be done mostly manually as it will take only a couple of minutes once you get good at it. After that you just need to use the Google sheet to send the emailing. But if you got a lot of time on your hand, doing it manually is fine too.