If you are using Instagram for your marketing, you will know that for personal and business accounts you have one active link in your bio. As you are not able to add a live link into the description of the post, many people put a comment in their post to say that there is a link in the bio.
Over the last few years we have seen a number of tools launch that help people capture leads from Instagram, in addition to the the options we now have thanks to Instagram enabling shopping on Instagram – check out how to set this up in this guide. I have covered tutorials on other tools in this article.
I recently revisited a tool that I had initially discovered back in 2017 called Campsite. You can learn in the tutorial below how you can customise the platform for lead generation from Instagram (or in fact any other social media platform) you are using in your campaigns.
Having a hub for your links is especially helpful if you do not direct people back to the same location for every post on Instagram, for example always directing people to your blog or website. If you are also trying to drive traffic to your YouTube channel, to a specific episode of our podcast or one of your social media accounts, you need a way to curate those links.
Some premium level Instagram management tools provide this as a feature, but if you are just getting started with your Instagram campaigns, perhaps for employer branding, recruitment, for marketing or communications, you may want to use a free or even low cost tool to enhance your Instagram marketing.
How To Use Campsite For Instagram Marketing
In this tutorial I will cover how to use the free version of Campsite – the paid features are detailed at the end of the article.
When you create your free account you will have the option in Site Settings to:
1 – add your profile picture, which for your brand would be your logo
2 – add your business name
3 – and add a short introduction to your account which will appear of your Campsite profile.
What I am particularly impressed by is the amount of customisation you can do with your free Campsite account compared to other free services I have explored. For example, you can make your Campsite profile reflect your visual identity and brand colours by changing the theme.
You can completely customise your theme or use one of the standard themes available.
When customising your theme, you can change the font that you use, the background colour, the colour of your text and you can choose to include or exclude borders at the top of your account and around your profile image.
The customisation does not end there.
The key feature of Campsite and other link hub tools is the ability to add buttons with live links to the sites and web pages you want to direct people to from your Campsite profile.
Unlike with many similar tools with Campsite you can add unlimited links.
You can change the colour that will appear when people hover over the button for the links you are promoting in your account, change the border width and curve of thebuttons and even the font that is used in the call to action.
See the an example of how this looks for my account in the image below.
You can add up to four social accounts or you could inlude a link to your website, a landing page, a video on YouTube or even your news letter registration. The options are endless!
And again you can change the colour of the button when someone hovers over the link.
Once you have customised the visual look of your Campsite account, you can now add links by navigating to the Links feature at the top of your dashboard.
Follow these six steps to set up your links in Campsite:
1 – Click the button to add a new link
2 – Add a compelling call to action
3 – Add the url that you want people to visit (this could even be a customised link if you want to track leads from your Campsite profile)
4 – You can then turn the visibility of the link on or off which is immensely helpful if you have a campaign that you want to turn disable for a period of time. This is a feature I have not seen in any other free accounts that offer a similar link hub to Campsite
5 – You can choose to delete a link if you decide you do not want to have it in your link hub
6 – You can re-order your links easily so that you can bring the links that are most important to the top of your profile.
You will also be able to track the number of clicks on links in your dashboard.
Campsite allso enables you to add emoji to your link buttons – just click the emoji icon next to your link and a dashboard will appear where you can add a key word to search for a relevant emoji to add to your call to action. How brilliant is that compared to having to cut and paste emjoji from other tools.
Within your dashboard on Campsite, you can see the updates you are making to your account in real time. This makes it really easy to adapt your links (another feature not often seen in similar link hub tools).
Another unique feature for Campsite compared to similar free services is that you can enable images to appear with your links.
On the free account this means that you will need to authorise Campsite to have access to your Instagram account. You will then be able to select the image you want to use with your call to action button.
What is really helpful is that even if you post mainly video content to Instagram as I do, it will be able to select an image for you to use.
When you add your links to your Campsite account you will also see a calendar icon. This is a terrific feature that you need to enable the Pro version of Campsute to be able to use (there is a 10 day free trial).
It means that you can add a link for an upcoming post.
You might have seen the new update to the Instagram API this month that means that we can now auto-post content (both images and video) directly to Instagram. I have covered this update and a number of social media platforms that have introduced this new feature in this post on Instagram.
This means you can pre-schedule your link being added to your Campsite hub as part of your workflow to be the same as your scheduled post to Instagram.
Once you have finalised your link curation, you can then update your link in your Instagram bio to your Campsite url.
As an example of what your curation will look like with and without images, see the screen shot below of my Campsite page.
Pro Tip: You could even create a branded or short link for your Campsite url as I have done in the example below.
If you do not have a domain, check out my personal favourite domain name service company as I love their easy to use dashboard and they have great offers and promotions.
Note: If you use this service you will get a discount of £5 off your domain purchase as this is an affiliate link and I get a small reward for referring you to their service.
Premium Paid Campite Features For Instagram Marketing
I would highly encourage you to checkout Campsite to help you in directing people to your relevant resources from your Instagram account – or even your other social media profiles. It is definitely my preferred link hub tool of choice for my clients especially if they are looking for a free service (at the time of writing this review).
Checkout the Instagram account for Campsite as they post examples of people using their premium account that will inspire you.
Some of the features you can access when using the pro account that is currently only US$7 a month are:
- The ability to use a custom domain
- Control your Campsite meta data with a custom image, title, and description
- Schedule your links (as mentioned above)
- Hide the Campsite branding (this appears at the bottom of your Campsite page for free accounts)
- Upload custom images for your links (as mentioned above, the free account only allows images for your links to be selected from your Instagram account)
- Access thousands of photos from Unsplash to add to your links if you do not have images you can use for your link buttons
- See a day-by-day breakdown of your link clicks
- Add your Facebook pixel for ad re-targeting
- Get a detailed view of your traffic with their Google Analytics integration
- Set a custom background gradient or background image for your Campsite account
- Grow your email list with their MailChimp and Google Sheets Integration.
(It’s actually more fully featured and more cost effective than the regular price I saw another link hub tool I saw promoted on Appsumo recently!)
And remember if you want to learn about other link hub tools to compare them to Campsite I have reviewed and some ideas for how you can use them for your Instagram marketing read my article here about how to create a link hub.
There are lots of actions you can take to optimise your Instagram marketing, but using a link hub tool such as Campsite is one that help you increase leads and conversions in a simple non-technical way.
Let me know how you plan to put Campsite or another link hub to work for your digital and social media marketing campaigns this year and if you have any questions about integrating visual marketing into your communications plans, you can schedule a free consultation with me here.
