Just like we gave you seven steps to starting a side hustle, we have put together five best practices for launching your Instagram side hustle. This post will serve as a step-by-step guide for you to kick-start your side Instagram business and maintain it over time while keeping up with your 9-5.
How to start your Instagram side hustle using five simple Steps
Step1: The Kick-Off; Discover Your Products and Services
Step2: Define Your Targeted Persona
Step3: The Big Plan; Plan Your Instagram Strategy
Step 4: The Launch; Create your Instagram Side Hustle Page
Step 5: Growth Phase; Monitor and Measure your Performance Using Instagram Analytics
Step 1: The Kick-off; discover your products and services:
Before you launch your Instagram side hustle, it is essential to define your product or service offerings. You must have clarity on what product you intend to sell or the service you intend to offer.
Since your product offerings are the heart of your business, here are the best practices for discovering your products:
Identify your product and service type.
Outline the problems your product will solve.
What makes your product fascinating?
Determine the amount of time that you will require to make this product.
How much will this product be worth?
Are you an expert at this product?
Check out existing products and see how you can improve yours.
Identify your Brand Name.
Pro Tip: You can look up your favorite product on the web or something that interests you and draw inspiration from them.
Step 2: Define your targeted persona: What is a business without customers? Absolutely nothing! You must understand who you want to sell to to launch a business, so defining your targeted audience is crucial.
Your targeted audience is a specified group of persons you intend to sell your products and services. A good example is a company that sells back2school items specifically for kids between ages 2-4.
Essentially, it would be best to create a fictional profile for your ideal customers, including what they need, what they like and do, and every element of their demographics such as their interests, profession, age, and location.
Having a clear idea of your targeted customers informs your overall Instagram strategy, including sales, branding, and content strategy.
Step 3: The Big Plan; Plan your Instagram strategy: At this stage, you have decided on what you want to sell and who you want to sell to; therefore, it is time to map out how you want to sell to them and how you want to reach your targeted audience. In doing this, it is imperative to map out your Instagram strategy.
Your Instagram strategy will enable you to position your side hustle so that your targeted audience will find you. Hence, your Instagram plan must contain the following:
Visual display strategy: This includes your brand colour (which should not be more than 1 to 5 color), brand logo, brand tone of voice, brand fonts ( 1 to 2 fonts at most), and images.
Unique selling point: Identifying your unique selling point means you should determine why people should choose your brand over others. A unique selling point could be that your brand offers free shipping charges or that it is less at your store.
Hashtag strategy: One way people can easily locate your store is through hashtags; hashtags are labels or matadats that is prefaced by the hash sign. (#) You can select 20 major captions that would be assigned to your brand and ensure to follow trends too. Ensure to always mix up your hashtags so you do not appear as a bot as it can lead to being shadow-banned; this means, users won’t find you when searching for such hashtags.
Caption strategy: Your caption should always contain three things, the needs of your your customers, how your product and services can fulfil those needs and a call to action.
Content Marketing Strategy: These are useful and memorable marketing contents that keep your Instagram side hustle at a the top of customers' minds. Some best content strategy ideas include User-generated content, Inspiration, DIYs, behind-the-scenes, daily motivations, how-to posts, video marketing, and case studies. Ensure you are consistent with the content strategy you intend to use.
Publishing strategy: Determine your posting times and stick with them. Creating a consistent posting timeline is essential to scheduling your posts in advance.
Pro Tip: Create your posts and use an Instagram planning tool to schedule posts in advance. A good tool for planning your posts is the Instagram Meta business suite tool.
Step 4: The Launch; Create your Instagram Side Hustle Page: After you have decided on your business idea, who you want to sell to, and how you want to sell, it is now time to create that Instagram page.
Here's how to create and optimize your IG business page:
Create your IG Handle
Insert your profile photo
Create an actionable bio that includes what you do, problems you solve, a holistic hashtag, a call-to-action, contact details, and addrest thes
Make your IG shoppable.
Having done this, you can proceed to share your business with your community, friends, and family.
Pro Tip: share your brand with anyone you know within your intended audience.
After sharing your side hustle page with your community, you can then:
Build brand awareness
Build your following
Publish contents
Stay consistent
Put a face to your brand
Engage with other brands
Step 5: Growth Phase; Monitor and Measure your Performance Using Instagram Analytics: To grow a successful side hustle on Instagram, you must measure your performance and see what works and what isn't working; this will enable you to develop a successful Instagram side business. Instagram has an analytics tool on its platform and the Meta business tool. These tools will tell you the best posts that people are engaging with, where your Instagram customers and followers reside, their age and gender, and help you understand what to do better.
It is crucial to analyse your Instagram marketing efforts to measure your side business goals- this means analysis will enable you to determine if you are meeting and exceeding your goals.
Analytics helps you do the following:
Identify your winning content; you can post more of them once you identify your winning content; this improves your content strategy
It helps Identify the best time to post
You will understand your audience better
You can also measure key business metrics in your Instagram side business, such as engagement, reach, shares, growth, views, reel engagement, and sales.
So, there you have it, your Instagram Side hustle is here to stay.
Launching a side hustle on Instagram might seem daunting, but this 5 step strategy would enable you to start easily and quickly. All you have to do is pick up a pen and paper and implement these five simple steps to launch your Instagram business and watch it become a success.