how to gain instagram followers 2020 | Increase instagram followers for business

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Askavya Show. Today we're going to talk about how to use Instagram to monetize your hotel.

Me two times six years, six gear master till I get there Philadelphia state of mind until I get my head clear? DMV stand up Baltimore and what the politics of everything suck so just man don't know what to stand for? At least I'm still upright? Even those on the down? Not me, I'm me? Balls in my hand when I'm spitting? Cause my potency's stronger than any man's? And I'm never laying down? Feet are not in the sand? Only vacations we get are at the bottom of a glass? Knock me off again Popping vodka for a 10? This like a time machine A weekend in Japan Line by line my rhyme's revealing what's inside of me? Nothing to be proud of but at least I get it out of me. How did he kick the doctor out of a lobotomy? Whatever. He's got to probably be put inside a bottle.

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Your restaurant, your spa, your banquet, whatever you have, Instagram is the most visual tool for marketing your hospitality products on the Internet. Let's get started. Number one, Instagram is. Because we all know that it's a visual medium. So a lot of people are migrating and using more of Instagram than they were using Facebook on. So that's been a. That's been a huge shift. Which means your guests before checking into your hotel, before coming into your restaurant, while staying at your restaurant, while they're eating there, and after checking out of your hotel or after checking out of your restaurant are on Instagram. If not, their influencers are on Instagram, which means their children who decide where the mother and father go for dinner, or other influencers who decide where the family goes for a vacation. They are all on Instagram. Instagram, you and I know, have been bought by, has been bought by Facebook. So the marketing and the targeting is absolutely phenomenal. And here is how you should use Instagram. Number one, understand that you need a content pillar strategy for Instagram. You're going to do 30. If you want to plan it out for 30 days, I would suggest start with three posts a day. Today in this video, I'm going to tell you about what needs to be done to get results in 90 days flat, you need to start monetizing. You are a hotelier or somebody from the hospitality field. We are selling as if you're selling hotel rooms. You're selling a perishable commodity, which means every day you want to make revenue. So these videos are for the impatient entrepreneur or the impatient hotelier or the impatient restauranter who wants to make money right away. So ideally you should be putting three posts a day. So you need to make a content strategy, you need to make your content calendars. What are you going to post on Monday? What are you going to post on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday? So let me give you an example of a restaurant. If you're running a restaurant, you know most restaurants with bar licenses, liquor licenses with a pub are doing well on the weekends. So they start giving offers to get more people during the weekdays. Happy hour offers buy two, get one free. Get a friend along. Ladies night, which used to be on a Friday night when I was growing up, has now shifted to Tuesday and Wednesday in most places. So all these offers are available on can be marketed very well on Instagram. Now how do you market these offers? Like I said, first you make a content strategy, a content pillar. What you're going to post on which day day. Then go back to those that 30 day calendar and see which days have extra traffic volumes. For example the 15th of August, it's a long weekend or there is another festival or it's Christmas or it's Holi or it's Diwali. Or depending on whichever country you're watching this video in, you will have some peaks and valleys and you want to plan in advance for those peaks and valleys. So if you know that your business is going to dip, I would give a special discount for those days for people to check into my hotel or come and eat at my restaurant and vice versa for when I have more demand and I know how to space it out. Now Instagram putting three posts. Number one strategy. Show the behind the scenes look of what is happening in your hotel or your restaurant. Show how the general manager starts the day. Show your morning meetings, show how your housekeeping guy gets ready during the morning. Show them serving a new coffee bean that you have. Show them making a cappuccino. Show them checking in a guest. Show them checking out a guest. Show them with your wheelchair access. Show them behind the scenes what's happening every single day. That's one strategy. Strategy number two is to do everyday short form videos. Instagram allows you short videos. So you can do short videos and they don't necessarily need to be selfie videos. They can be videos in and around your hotel showing what is happening. So it's like a reality TV version. According to me, the best Thing that is happening in this part of the world at least is Big Boss. I don't really like Big Boss, but I still watch it because it is a reality TV version of somebody of so many people's lives. We want to know what happened. It may be scripted, but it looks, it is a lot of fun. So that's what you want to think about. How can I have Instagram? What kind of videos will I have? So people are following my story, following my journey. Now you might ask, should it be one general manager, front office manager, housekeeping staff, one person whose journey they should be following or everybody else's? Now that's an interesting question. If you have a project manager who's managing your Instagram and or you have any one person who's dedicated as a part time project manager, that person can document everybody's life, different days of the week. But if not, if there's only one person who's taking owners for Instagram and that person wears a nice black badge, you are representing your logo and he's talking about how to do this every day. And while editing, Karan will show you some samples of how this is done. The third strategy is Instagram Stories. Now, Instagram stories has just gone through the roof. Everybody is making short snippets, short few second stories and tagging them and hashtagging them and allowing people to see short videos, short episode. Now, what this does psychologically is it keeps you asking for more. You want to know more. Strategy number four is a lot of people, what they're doing is that they're taking snapshots and posting that snapshot in their Instagram story because a lot of Instagram stories is getting a lot of popularity. And so that people see launch of a new restaurant, click here. So they see that ad over there in the Instagram story and they go and check it out on the website or in the Instagram feed. So you're getting people to come to your Instagram feed through your Instagram stories. So these are four ways that I said you get started with point number one, which is how to make your calendar, what to do on an everyday basis, what to do on a weekly basis. Now, what else can you do with Instagram direct messaging? Oh my God. In 2017 I can reach DJ Khalid. In 2017 I can speak to Madonna. I have spoken to Gary Venay, Chad, I have spoken to Pat Fraser. I have been lucky enough to speak to all these people. And the opportunity to speak to anybody for a business alliance or anything is so easy. By picking this up by going to search Instagram and then looking at the keywords that you want and finding the influencers who are under these keywords. For example, if you're going to London and you want to know about London people in London who are running digital marketing agencies like Internet moguls here. So I will go to Instagram, so search toward Instagram, go for digital agencies in London or London digital agencies and see who are the highest people who posted under those hashtags. And I might find a lot of interesting agency people and I can start DMing them. Once I start DMing means direct messaging. I can start direct messaging. But please keep in mind you will never, almost never get a reply from somebody if you send these crappy automated messages. I hate robotization and I hope it fails because I love human beings and I think human beings should be here to stay and robots should not take over our work. Yes, things should get more efficient. So some redundant tasks should go to robots, but not everything else. I think I'm getting sidetracked. Let me get back to how DM should work. So if I'm trying to reach Karan, I will say, hey Karan, really like the last post you put about your House of Commons story. I really liked it. I am a filmmaker myself. I think we can do some business together. Here's the link. Thanks buddy. I look forward to hearing from you. Or you go to somebody and say, you know what Abhijit, I am a fan. I've been following your post and I like that post you wrote about how to monetize your hotels using the different Facebook strategies available. I really liked your YouTube video and I like the way you do it. I am a filmmaker and I'd love to do some work with you. Are there any synergies? May I meet you for a coffee for five minutes? Now somebody has given me a compliment, taken the time to look at my work. Appreciate it. He's made an effort to make a connection. So I know it's a real human being and I know it's somebody who cares and I know somebody wants to go that extra mile. Then most probably Karan will reply to me and I will reply to that person. So these are the things. It's, you know what, social media is just a channel. It's just, it's just a different platform where human beings still have to be human beings. A lot of youngsters, including my 11 year old daughter and a lot of other people say, oh, social media is new and this is how we're reacting and people are Talking about social media etiquettes and all of that. Well, if you're a good human being, if you're a respectful human being, you will be respectful on social media as well. You in the olden times, and I like it how we call it olden times, you never walked into anybody's office or house and said, this is what I want from you. You always connected, you paid them a compliment, you understood what they did, you appreciated their business and then asked. So you gave, gave, gave and then asked. Right? So this is what today's social media is all about as well. So DMing, I would like I said again, number one, search for the hashtags under which I feel my audience lies or the people I want to connect with, number one. Number two, once I find those people, I will DM them personalized messages. Yes, there is a possibility that Instagram bans you for sending so many messages. But space it out. Send a few messages every day, make those connection. As you make connections with those people, then you ask them, you know what? I think there's an influencer opportunity, maybe there's a trade off. And I want to talk to you about promoting my hotel so you can get in touch with large influencers and make personalized messages for them. Give them a treat at your hotel, give them a nice stay at your hotel, let them experience your hotel and then go ahead and promote it on Instagram. So if you're working with an agency or if you're working on your own, this should be one strategy that you do. Dm, dm, dm, dm. But don't overdo it. So I would say start with 30 to 60 or 70 people that you want to get in touch with, which means you need at least a list of 4, 500 people and then DM 60, 70 of them. See how many people come and start your influence strategy. Now point number three, what else can you do as a part of influencer strategy on Instagram? So there are a lot of influencers, lot of bloggers. Now who are these influencers? Today everybody says I'm an influencer and it's correct because everybody is making an impact on the other person's life through our posts and what we do every day. I like to think that I make an impact on people's lives by talking to about digital marketing. Karan wants to think that he is making an impact on people lives by talking about the kind of cinema that he's promoting through his post. We're all making an impact on five people, 5,000 people or 50,000 people or 5 million people. Now, influencers are traditionally defined as people who will be able to influence somebody's decision in your favor. So buy this phone. So if Karan has got a million followers, I will say, karan, can you talk about my phone? And Karan says, you know what, I love to make my video on Avi's phone, on the Internet mogul's phone. And people will start following him. Casey Neistat does it. I think everybody's doing it. Gary Vee is doing it with K Swiss. But for the hospitality industry, I understand guys, we don't have millions of dollars. So the easiest way to do is to look at micro influencer. You know who micro influencer is? The other day I was talking to a restaurant guy and I said, your micro influencer is the real estate guy who comes to your office, comes to your restaurant a couple of times every month. And he comes with his friends or he comes with his four clients. And whenever he goes, once a week he comes with his wife. He's an influencer. Go and check his profile. Even if he's got 600 people, all those 600 people want to know about what he's doing. They're following him. And he would, he would love to talk about your restaurant because he's obviously, he's already patronizing it. So offer him something. Make a special offer for him. Give him something that he would like to share as well. Make him an influencer. Make him. Similarly, you'll have a lot of bloggers who are coming, a lot of people who are coming to your hotel who may be from different communities or they might be from a BNI network or they might be from a camera lovers club, or they might be from cinema or they might be cinema goers or sports lovers. So you can tap into the micro audience in your database of people who are already checking out and looking out for those 50, 60 people and start dming them and making them now. You know what? Whenever you're going to launch in hotel or you launch a new room type or launch a new rate category or launch a new restaurant or a new dish in a restaurant, anything you do with the hotel, these micro influencers, 40, 50 of them will be your army of people. It'll be like your own personal team of journalists and PR people who will disseminate information out there. Very easy to find these local influencers who already following you or following your competitors pages and then asking them to do this for you. Another way of doing this is by actually looking at what your competitors are doing and which influencers are following your competitors pages and then making a list of those people. You can get a list of those people as well. Instagram. Okay, so I made some notes. What all should I use Instagram for? Well, you can use Instagram for creating brand awareness. Demonstrate your company culture behind the scenes. Look, like I said, you can showcase your team and recruit new talent, increase customer engagement. You can enhance and complement event and experiences, incentivize consumer engagement with your brand, share company news, grow your community, connect with influencers, drive sales through third party apps. And I'm reading it from Sprout Social because this is the message they sent on influencer marketing and I've been following their guide for a while. So these are the things that you can do on on Instagram. But now I want to get to the paid part because I love paid and I feel four years back or this organic search died. It's been four years that we've been celebrating the life of organic search. Had a beautiful life, but I'm afraid organic search doesn't exist anymore. So let's not romanticize about what's dead and rest start talking about what is current right now. The current landscape of digital talks about paid, paid, paid, paid, paid. But guess what, how much are you paying any of you people watching? If you're a new marketer or an old marketer, all of you know that even now if you try to get a newspaper ad in any publication, you don't know who's which kind of audience is coming to you. And it is so expensive. So if when they hear paid every, you know, we get scared. Oh, it's paid. But my God, these are the most targeted paid ad network in the world in the history of business. My tagline, which I use all the time, is social media. And Karan is going to put it right here. Social media is the biggest opportunity in the history of business. And these kind of channels allow you to target like a snapper at less than a couple of dollars a day. I would start by spending a couple. If you're getting into business or if you're a marketer, if you're running a hotel or a restaurant. Come on guys. That one thing I tell all of you to do, and I've been saying this for now, nine years now, is that you need to experiment. You need to experiment. That's what marketers like us do. People who are producing these kind of YouTube shows, we're experimenting with so many mediums and saying this works and this doesn't. But Something might work better for you. So you need to experiment with paid ads, because paid ads are now, it's a given now they work and they ROI positive. Instagram has one amazing feature. You know what it sounds like? These are toys. These are new age toys. And people are having so much fun with it. One of the features is that it allows you to tell a story and you can't tell a story sometimes in just one picture. So what they did is they said you can have three, four pictures coming together so you can flip and tell a story. My restaurant is opening. This is what I'm serving. This is the price. My hotel has a special offer. These kind of rooms I have, and it's limited for this season only. So these are the kind of carousel ads that you can have on Instagram as well. Now I'm coming to the most asked question on the show. How do I define Avi? How do I define an Instagram strategy? And people have various versions of this. I'll tell you what has worked to get hundreds and thousands of followers for our clients all over the world. And this is time tested. That's what I like to see. We have Internet moguls, we're almost 155 people at Internet moguls who are running an agency in different parts of the world, working with clients all over the world and so testing all these ads on an everyday basis, testing millions of dollars of advertising budget every year and then seeing what works and then condensing all of that information and getting it through the show. So this is real practitionership of mine and my entire teams that we sort of bundle into this show. So here's what you should, you can do with hashtags. Now, what are hashtags? So hashtags. The sign. The hashtag sign with a keyword. So if I have a hotel Ramada in India in New Delhi. So I would. So right now there are now about 30 odd keyword hashtags. So you will have ideally they say, have a few branded own the hashtags, have some branded hashtag. So Ramada Hotel, Ramada Gurgaon. This hotel, one hotel is called Ramada Gurgaon Central. So Ramada, Ramada India. Ramada Gurgaon Central, Ramadan New Delhi. So you're owning your hashtag Ramada and then you have a restaurant in the Ramada Hotel. So Ramada Hotel, restaurant, Ramada Hotel with restaurant. Those kind of have 6, 7, 8 of your branded your own hashtags in and around your hotel. Same thing for your restaurant. So for example if you have a restaurant, restaurant which says, I don't know, pizza grill or whatever or current pizza grill. So you say current hashtag currants, pizza grill, hashtag currants, grill, pizza, hashtag current grilled pizza New Delhi, hashtag current grill, pizza hot, you know, oven flame or oven cooked or whatever. So whatever your specialties also you have seven, eight of them like that. Then you have, you can have them in and around your city. Talk about the city. I like to focus on eating. So you would say places to eat. Hashtag places to eat New Delhi or fast food. Places to eat New Delhi or midnight fast food New Delhi. And so similarly you create a list of 30 keywords for your restaurant, 30 keywords for your different brands and post every time. Post every time. So if you're Talking about pizza, YouTube you have more pizza keywords. If you're talking about, if you're selling kebabs, you have kebab keywords and then put in a location. I have read amazing statistics which We've seen almost 65% more engagement with the post, which has more, which has location so on top anytime current for you. Also whenever you're posting on your Instagram, if you post with a location you get more engagement because people around the area will be able to see that. So you can, you know, because diametrically or it's a Facebook owned company so you can local geo target and therefore geotargeting allows people to see you in your vicinity. What also happens is people like I mentioned in the beginning of this video, you can do search restaurants or search New Delhi or search filmmakers on Instagram. When you search you find this list of keywords and under those keywords you find the relevant people who put those posts. So your reach amongst these people in this hashtag universe increases. So you must see it as a web, you know, it's all interconnected. So your keywords about your Ramada Gurgaon keyword about Ravada Gurgaon Delhi, Ramada International. And then you're talking about your food, what kind of food, where is it in the city? What do you have at night you have delivery service. So when you put in all those keywords and I like to go in for branded keywords and then keywords which have a huge volume and then sometimes I like to go for micro influence instance. Then I also like to tag, I like for my hashtags, when I do my hashtags I also like to tag people. So for example, if I want to tag filmmakers and I want more filmmakers to come to My restaurant and I'm doing an ad with Karan. Then I will hashtag Karan because Karan will know more filmmakers and they will see what Karan is doing. That Karan came to my restaurant to eat, so his whole circle will have access to my post. Similarly, if I am trying to reach an Internet marketer and I want to reach the Internet marketers for two fraternity, I will tag. My people can tag me. And they know that more people on the Internet Moguls team and other communities can be targeted as well. So based on they have to dig deeper and you have to see, like I said earlier on going back to the fact that you can see which hashtags have what posts from which all influencers and then you can tag those influencers, inviting them, talking about, you know, their art or, you know or what or what they stand for. And the best part about restaurant and who hotels is that every day you have so many great human beings coming into your establishments. You can ask them, you can take pictures with them and tag them. Some hotels in India do a fantastic job of having a camera person on site or training their teams to take good pictures. And they're taking pictures of guests from morning to evening tagging, hashtagging, morning to evening tagging, hashtagging. And over the years they've got followings of hundreds of thousands. And once you reach that stage, it takes about two years time to reach that critical mass. Unless you have an overnight, you know, some overnight success successes which are very far and few in between. But after that two years, you are a brand who can launch anything you want to launch a new restaurant, a new pastry shop, a new type of room category, anything that you want, you can do it. Instagram is that powerful. But let me put a caveat. I have repeated this in the past as well. If you are not looking at paid strategy, if you're not looking at business strategy, if you're not putting in money behind your post, they are deliberately, the whole algorithm doesn't allow it to go beyond the point. So if I want faster results, I will use this hashtag. I do this tag here, do everything that we spoke about. But I will make sure that they go, they reach the reach, you know, further. So I will have to spend money on that. There is no limit to the amount of money you can spend. I would say start with 10 to $15 a day minimum. A lot of people say, why? Because I'm like the 12 hours in a day. And you, you know, you want people to see your post and repost and all of that. So $15 a day mixed, you know, with the kind of audience demographic you have should be the minimum you spend. And so it's about four. I understand it's $450 a month and it's only for one channel. But try it for a week, see the results and try it for another week. And once you start getting in queries or you start getting in calls, which you can confirm. Once you said I booked four dinners because of spending $15 for 10 days, $150 I spent and I booked dinners worth 450. Once you for yourself are able to see the positive roi, then my role is done. My role was to tell you this works, there is a science behind it. And I told you, what are the different outlets. You try it for yourself, spend money, try it for yourself. You will get the results. Once you do that, then you can basically keep on testing the ROI, but instead of 15, then you can spend 1500 a day because you know that you've tested ROI. So keep testing the ROI, 15 to 150, 150, 250 and solely to whatever, wherever you get a ceiling, there will be plateau, there will be ceilings, new strategies will come in. I will continue to be making videos throughout on whatever's changing in the hospitality landscape with digital. We coined this digital hospital. So whatever is happening in the hospitality field with digital, I will keep on studying it and keep bringing on new videos to you. Till then, thank you very much for watching the Askavi Arya show on how to monetize your hotel and hospitality business, restaurant, spa, whatever you have through Instagram and various Instagram strategies. I hope you enjoyed this show. Please subscribe to this YouTube channel and please, please, please comment and let me know how I can help you further. I'm waiting to hear from you and help you drive your strategy further. Once again, thank you very much.