Hello! There’s one important lesson I want to share with you if you’ve been around Instagram for a while. The real secret of your success isn’t about just creating a pretty Instagram grid and using the right hashtags. Instead, even after you’ve got those details down, real success comes from building meaningful relationships with your audience. Especially when people are increasingly fighting to get their attention, it’s the people who provide real ongoing value who are the ones who actually stand out. So, how can you build a value-first Instagram strategy and actually differentiate yourself in this increasingly crowded platform? Let me give you a deep dive on how to use ManyChat to build a value-first, human Instagram strategy.
Why Value-First Strategies Are Essential for Instagram Growth
Likes, comments and followers are important, but these are means to an end. That end is value. Value-first means ‘give before you’ask’—you deliver value to your followers by giving them solutions, insights and experiences that improve their lives. Through ManyChat’s suite of tools, you don’t just help them in certain contexts by answering their questions manually or referring them to a support page. You help them whenever they’re open to it—when they’re in bed, on the train to work, or helping their kids with homework.
Building Trust Through Consistent Value Delivery
Trust is built through repetition, not ritualization. This means that your Facebook group—a landscape controlled by a particular brand—will look very different from one where the brand name is absent or whose messages and posts are not consistent—where you publish advice once every few months or only produce content when promotions need to be pushed out (trust is lost faster than it’s gained, after all). Indeed, again, ManyChat can automate these messages, such as welcome messages for individuals who follow your profile (which can include a guide to using it) or sending messages at a cadence that you choose, which can then be packed full of insights.
Shifting From Sales to Service
A value-first approach is the opposite of hard selling: you offer value before you ask for anything in return. Let ManyChat do the selling for you. Build an automated, value-first sequence that delivers mini-lessons to the market on a topic relevant to your audience—for example, Instagram growth tips. You don’t ask for anything in return at first.
Setting Up ManyChat for Your Instagram Value Strategy
It’s very easy to get started with ManyChat, and when you do, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. Here is how ManyChat can be worked into your Instagram strategy.
Linking Your Instagram Account to ManyChat
Connect your Instagram to ManyChat, which lets you start automating your DMs, comments, and more. Go to the ManyChat dashboard, go to Instagram, and then follow the prompts to link it. This is a crucial step because this is the key that gets all of the ManyChat magic moving.
Crafting Your First Welcome Message
A good welcome is worth its weight in gold. When someone first starts to follow your account, that’s the very first interaction they’ll have with you. Take that opportunity to make a good impression. Your ManyChat flow starts when someone follows your account. Maybe it is just a ‘thank you’, telling people about your brand; maybe it is a more elaborate ‘freebie’, offering people a guide or checklist. The point is that you are establishing goodwill by providing value right out the gate.
Leveraging ManyChat to Automate Value Delivery
This doesn’t mean that you have to take the personal touch out of it. In fact, being able to reach the right people with the right message at the right time helps you be more personal than ever, especially when you’re delivering value consistently.
Using Automated DMs for Instant Engagement
For example, you could have somebody share a post of yours, but rather than going each time and manually answering a query, ManyChat will automatically answer them in a private message by detecting keywords in their comments. This not only gives you all of the benefits of having things to talk about, but also makes it so nothing slips through the cracks. ManyChat will detect keywords and help you communicate more consistently.
Creating Drip Campaigns That Educate and Engage
Obviously, drip campaigns aren’t just for email marketing—Instagram is another great place for them! ManyChat allows you to create automated sequences of highly valuable content, say three to five messages delivered at an even pace over a span of time, for instance, a 5-day series on daily workout tips for your active Instagram followers (or potential followers) if you’re a fitness coach.
Personalization at Scale: How ManyChat Segments Your Audience
The one-size-fits-all approach is leaving us behind. With segmentation features from ManyChat, you build a personalised relationship at scale.
Audience Segmentation Based on Interests and Behavior
ManyChat has a tag feature to specify when a follower has indeed done just that and can then send the relevant message to just those who’ve experienced their difficulties. Say you’ve built up your following base by providing helpful tips on Instagram growth. You’ll undoubtedly get followers who’ve dealt with the fatigue, frustration and despair during the early days of running an Instagram account—people desperate for tips on their business. If you develop a new set of tips or a course, you can tag the followers as being follower things—that is, they’ve tagged themselves as followers of you. The next time you have something to promote, you can engage with just those who have tagged themselves following growth strategies, making your marketing feel relevant to the individual.
Dynamic Content Delivery for a Personalized Experience
With dynamic content in ManyChat, you can serve up a different message based on the user’s previous actions. If a follower has completed one of your quizzes on content creation, ManyChat will automatically send them the corresponding content creation guide. This type of automated content delivery is an excellent way to personalize the user experience and keep your audience hooked.
Enhancing Engagement with Interactive Features on ManyChat
Automation doesn’t have to be boring, though, especially with ManyChat’s interactive features. I’ve made customised bits for customers that delight fans or make people feel seen and valued.
Using Quizzes and Polls to Spark Interaction
If interactive content such as quizzes and polls will keep your audience engaged, you might as well add those to your chatbot as well. With ManyChat, it is easy to get started by creating quizzes and polls that create a fun experience for your followers and, at the same time, get insights about them or gauge their interest in your content.
Hosting Giveaways and Contests with Automated Follow-Ups
Contests and giveaways are awesome for building your audience, but manually handling the entries and follow-up is a nightmare. You can run the whole thing through ManyChat, with confirmations to your giveaway participants and follow-ups sending the reward or entry to your service. You can set up a flow that takes care of the whole process, from entry to picking winners, keeping everyone in suspense while you do other business.
Analyzing Performance: Using ManyChat’s Analytics for Continuous Improvement
This is a data-driven strategy for the long term. ManyChat’s analytics give you detailed insights into the tried-and-tested habits of your audience, so you know which path to continue refining.
Tracking Engagement Metrics for Better Decision-Making
The analytics dashboard in ManyChat tells you what message open rates, click-through rates and actual conversions are, so you can correctly measure what works and what you need to tweak. For example, if you have a certain message flow that has a high number of people dropping off after the first few messages, you can change your messaging to keep the audience engaged.
A/B Testing Different Flows for Maximum Impact
The great thing about A/B testing is that you can test completely different versions of your automated flows to see which one performs better—message copy, open-time delivery, etc.—until you have served the right strategy to the right person at the right time. In ManyChat, testing is easy. And testing is important because we are always looking for ways to be more and more value-first.
Maximizing ROI with ManyChat’s Lead Generation Tools
If you want to convert your Instagram community into a profitable business, then lead generation is essential. And there are so many powerful lead generation features of ManyChat that help you to capture and nurture your leads.
Capturing Leads Directly from Instagram Interactions
Copy this offer to your stories, and ManyChat will capture all the leads from comments and DMs coming your way. In other words, you will engage those bystanders with automated messages that will turn them into qualified leads. Of course, you will still need the copywriting skills to craft the offer and the creative flair to create the visuals. Once you’ve taken care of that, ManyChat takes over. Anyone who comments or DMs will have their contact info captured, dropped into your CRM, and sent off to the first nurturing sequence of your choosing. This is one of the most powerful ways to convert browsers into buyers: no sweat on your end, instant work on theirs.
Nurturing Leads with Personalized Follow-Up Sequences
After you’ve snagged a lead, your follow-up sequence plays a large role in converting them into a sales opportunity because the sequences that ManyChat can create on behalf of your business are based on the lead’s unique interaction information, which helps make each subsequent message feel bespoke to them. You can use sequences to send a client limited-time offers, exclusive content or reminders about an offer you’re running.
Conclusion
So, this isn’t automation for automation’s sake. There’s something really important happening when you use ManyChat to create a value-first Instagram strategy. You get to connect with people at scale on a meaningful and intimate level. And that accumulates value. The branded account is infusing substance and reliability into Instagram interactions. That changes the way followers feel about it. They’re more likely to see it as a trusted resource. If you want to take your Instagram strategy to the next level, then have at it, kid. Dive into ManyChat and grow your audience.
FAQs
Whether or not ManyChat is a good fit for small Instagram accounts or only for large brands? ManyChat scales up, and that’s why it works for accounts of all sizes. Whether you’re in the beginning stages of building your business or already have a following in the tens or hundreds of thousands of members, ManyChat’s automation tools can help you expedite your communication with your list and give more value to your audience.
How do I ensure my ManyChat messages don’t come off as robotic? Make it personal. Target your messages to specific customer actions and interests by leveraging ManyChat’s features while adding natural language and some intermittent manual touches.
Can ManyChat really help with lead generation on Instagram? Yes, absolutely! With ManyChat’s automation features, you can add new Instagram leads to your CRM on the fly and even follow up with automated greetings and campaigns to turn followers into high-quality leads.