10 key reasons most marketers fail on Instagram. It's easy to get excited about Instagram's reach, user consumption patterns, and overall traffic volume. It's very easy to get pumped up when it comes to those facts. But the problem is, most people who try marketing on Instagram fail to get the results they are looking for. Here are just 10 of the most common reasons. I'm not going to pretend that this is the most comprehensive list you will ever come across. Instead, this list sums up the most common ways people slip up on Instagram. There are other ways, but chances are, if you don't know what you're doing, you have screwed up because of one of the following. Reason number one, one time big time paid marketing campaign. A lot of people who have access to marketing budgets are very impatient to promote their online store on Instagram. They just jump in with both feet. They're clueless as to what they're doing. All they know is that they have a lot of money to spend, so they pump out ad after ad after ad. After all the money has been burned through, they have very little to show for it. The reason for this is because they believe they can just throw money at the problem. Well, the bottom line here is return on investment. Sure, you're more than welcome to spend a tremendous amount of cash on a massive Instagram ad marketing campaign, but it's anybody's guess whether you will be able to meet ROI targets. You can't just rely on the fact that you have a lot of money to spend. Believe it or not, even if you have a very modest or even small budget, you can still walk away with better results than a better financed marketing campaign. The difference, it all boils down to how systematic and methodically you are in running your Instagram ad campaign. Reason number two, promoting direct conversion links. A lot of people think that Instagram is just a traffic source. You can tell from their marketing campaigns because they would create a profile with a homepage link that doesn't go to their homepage. It goes directly to a sales page or an email recruitment page or a squeeze page. What do you think happens? That's right. A whole lot of nothing. It doesn't really matter how engaging your content is. If you are not qualifying people or helping them overcome some serious structural questions regarding whatever it is you're trying to promote, you're probably not going to achieve much with the traffic. I'm not disputing the fact that people do pull a lot of traffic from Instagram, but anybody who has ever tried online marketing knows that just because you get traffic, it doesn't mean you get conversions. Traffic, click through, and conversions are totally different things. By promoting directly to your conversion page, which is your sales page or squeeze page, you may not have qualified the traffic well enough for you to convert those people into paying customers. Your ROI tanks and you end up wasting a tremendous amount of time, effort, and money on your Instagram campaign. Reason number three, unreasonable suspicion of influencers. Influence marketing is really big on Instagram. Basically, you find people who are already influential in your niche and you pay them to mention your product or give shout outs to your profile. Whatever method you use, you leverage their existing popularity and credibility with their community. The problem is there are many fake influencers out there. I'm not going to deny this. Nobody can. There are lots of accounts on Instagram that are flat out fake. Not only are there accounts fake, but the people following them are fake too. It's all a software illusion. It is no surprise that a lot of marketers have gotten burned by these influencers. Maybe they are charging $20 a shout out or maybe they are charging $5 per product mentioned. But regardless of how cheap the influencer rates may be, it's wasted money because they don't really have any influence. They just have high follower numbers. These followers are not real. Not surprisingly, a lot of people have been turned off by influencers. They don't even want to deal with influencers at all. This is a serious mistake. It's one thing to be suspicious of fake influencers. It's another to completely close your mind to working out a mutually advantageous deal with real influencers. There is a difference. Believe it or not, reaching out and closing deals with the right influencers can mean the difference between your online store making tens of thousands of dollars a month or your company continuing to struggle. Reason number four, choosing to be anti-social. There's a reason why social media is called social media. It's supposed to allow people to be social. It's supposed to enable outreach, engagement, sharing of ideas, and forming genuine communities regarding certain interests and topics. Unfortunately, a lot of marketers just create pages and blast out content. They don't care if people react to their materials. They don't care if people even see their materials. They're just going through the motions. Well, let me tell you, if that's how you run your Instagram campaign, you are being anti-social. You're not reaching out to influencers, nor are you engaging with the fans of your content. This leads you to failing to create a community around your content. Believe it or not, it is your community that will add dollars to your bank account. That's how it works. By choosing to be anti-social, you kill your online community before it even forms. Reason number five, relying on substandard photos or videos. This should be self-explanatory. Instagram is primarily a photo platform. Accordingly, accounts that feature the highest quality photos tend to get a lot more followers. Keep it at that level. Post only high quality photos. Post videos with high production quality. This way, you would stand out from your competitors. Reason number six, build it, and they will come content strategy. Have you ever had an amazing idea regarding a hot photo that people in your niche simply cannot refuse? Chances are, you've had such ideas. Well, what would happen if you spend your precious cash on such content ideas? Let me tell you, nine times out of ten, you probably will fall flat on your face. You did not do any consumer intelligence. You did not do any research work ahead of time, establishing that your audience would actually be interested in whatever content you were putting up. You can't just build this content and expect people to show up and come out of the woodwork. It doesn't work that way. A lot of businesses fail because of this. Your content must be based on existing demand and existing interest, not based on what you think is hot. Reason number seven, failure to repost others niche specific content. Believe it or not, you can build a tremendous amount of credibility on social media by simply reposting somebody's tried and proven content. In other words, if somebody posted content that got a lot of likes, engagement, comments, and what have you, you can repost that and recreate some sort of that engagement on your account. This is perfectly okay because you end up promoting that third party account. You create a win-win situation. You build up your own credibility within your niche and you drive attention to that brand. Everybody wins. If you fail to do this because you are how bent on promoting only your own stuff, your Instagram account is probably not going to grow all that quickly. You need to leverage other people's successful content. Focus on the win-win. Don't just focus on monopolizing the traffic results of your efforts. Reason number eight, failing to call Instagram feed viewers to action. Once you've developed a following, you have to make sure that those people interested in your content actually do something for you. Obviously, you're not engaging in Instagram marketing because you have nothing else better to do. You're not doing this for your health. You're doing this because you want to make money. There's no shame in that game. Step up and actually call people to action. If you post pictures of nice t-shirts, tell people, if you like this shirt, click on my profile and click on the link to get a 50% discount. Regardless of how you do it, call people to action. Otherwise, they're just going to view your account as a place where they can check out cool new things without much obligation or commitment on their part. You end up training your community members to be passive. That kind of audience is worthless to you. If you want to make money from your account, call people to action. Reason number nine, failure to use hashtags or using the wrong ones. Hashtags establish the niche of your content. People who are interested in a certain type of content would use a certain type of hashtag. Use this habitually. It may seem like people aren't using the hashtags that you use, but eventually you will get the hang of it. Eventually, you will identify the hashtags that pull in the most traffic. Regardless, you need to make it a habit from day one. Reason number 10, posting off niche content. I know you're excited about having an Instagram account, but don't let that excitement spill over into you just posting random personal introsposts. Your account, if you're using it for business purposes, is not about you. Instead, it's about your target audience members. Understand that they have a narrow range of interests. Stick within that narrow range. Otherwise, you won't be training your community to put money in your pockets because they will view your account as essentially entertainment. They won't find it credible as far as niche specific products. They just think you're fun to follow, but you really don't have much pull with them because you post about everything. If you focus only on one thing and one thing alone, like for example, luxury watches. You can bet that a lot of the people following you will think that you're some sort of expert and they are more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt when you start calling them to action to buy stuff from you. That's how it works. Stick to your target niche. Focus on the big picture. Understand that you're doing this for a reason. You're not just doing this to screw around.