From scratch to the first clients from Instagram for a cosmetologist. Where to begin?

Evgenia Karpich , project director of the YuConcept agency

This article was inspired by a conversation with my friend, a cosmetologist and esthetician, and I think will resonate with many of you. The background is as follows. The clinic where my friend worked closed and the regular clients left. I had to rent a small office and look for new clients, while money for rent and the purchase of consumables (not to mention advertising) was, as you understand, tight. And after all these events, we are sitting over a cup of coffee and she asks the question: “Zhenya, what should I do to attract clients on Instagram?” “For starters, start an Instagram,” I answered.

And from this moment begins my article about how to reach your first clients from an Instagram account from scratch, what is needed for this and whether it is possible to do this alone without large investments.

Looking ahead, I’ll say – it’s possible! And that's where we started.

We wrote down on paper the concept of the blog, its idea and strategy. We determined what expertise consists of, what benefits can be transmitted through a blog, what personal qualities may be interesting, after which:

• created a new account on Instagram, filled out the profile header;

• from all the photos and videos that my friend had at that time, we made a layout for publications (we made a content plan for publications in advance);

• filled out current stories with sections: procedures (picked up videos and photos from the archives), before/after (personal archives), important (several facts about home care, procedures), reviews (posted screenshots from Whatsapp). Later they created a highlight with quick, healthy recipes;

• created a simple multi-link on taplink: listed the prices for services, added an active link to Whatsapp, address and placed a promotional offer at the beginning: “Cleaning + peeling = 2500 rubles.”

After we posted nine posts, the first part of the preparation was completed. The profile looked like this:

The frequency of publications was as follows: stories (preferably every day), posts – once every two days. In stories, they tagged the account of the old clinic, made reposts to attract subscribers to that page, plus they reposted it to a personal account with a mark of the working page. Thus, we gained 90-100 first subscribers.

“Not bad, but still not enough for active traffic,” we thought and invited a local mommy blogger to a free procedure in exchange for a mention in stories. This, by the way, worked: a couple of dozen subscribers came from her and even one sign up for the procedure.

The next step is a joint live broadcast with a hair stylist. Why a hair master? Because it’s a related (local!) audience. They made an announcement and broadcast it. By that time, the page had about 160 subscribers - and we launched targeting.

Preparing for targeted advertising via Facebook:

1. Regular posting of posts and stories has been established (don’t forget that the content should be interesting and engaging! We talk about this in detail during our training).

2. We created one simple advertising video layout (its screenshot is below).

3. We pinned the same video in current stories on the page in the “Promotion” section.

4. IMPORTANT! We have specifically limited the duration of the promotion to further encourage people to sign up now and not put it off until later.

The promotion lasted one week, from May 15 to May 22. We set up an advertising campaign on Facebook for 1000 rubles (remembering the super-limited budget) - and wait for a miracle. Well, while we’re waiting for it, don’t forget to post interesting content all week and stir up the interest of the audience.

The result is as follows: 4 entries per procedure for the promotion, which, with simple calculations, amounts to 10,000 rubles. This means that we recouped the money invested in advertising 10 times, acquired four loyal clients and several dozen new subscribers. And here are the first reviews from satisfied customers:

And this is what the profile statistics look like now:

Now we are preparing the profile for new advertising and more traffic, and we are also planning to increase the advertising budget.

The conclusion is simple: you can start attracting patients from Instagram on your own and without huge financial investments TODAY! Don't know where to start? We invite you to a consultation and analysis of your profile. Write to our agency @yuconcept in direct message - and together we will build for you a step-by-step algorithm for increasing the flow of clients from Instagram (even if it doesn’t exist yet????).