If your business is visual — a café, a hair salon, a maker, a retailer, a photographer, a landscaper — there’s a good chance Instagram is doing a lot of your marketing already. And fair enough. It’s free, it’s where a lot of your customers spend their evenings, and a good photo of your work does most of the talking. But “I’ve got an Instagram” and “I’ve got a website” aren’t the same job, and it’s worth understanding why.
What Instagram is genuinely good at
Instagram is a shop window. It’s built for showing, not telling. If what you sell looks good — food, flowers, hair, furniture, a finished deck, a beautiful room — it’s one of the best free tools going.
- Discovery. Reels, hashtags, location tags and the Explore page can put you in front of people in the Nelson region who’ve never heard of you. That’s real reach you don’t get from a website on its own.
- Personality. People buy from people. Stories and behind-the-scenes posts build a relationship in a way a static web page can’t.
- Speed. A photo, a caption, done. No logging into anything clever.
For a lot of small visual businesses, Instagram is the first place a new customer meets you. That’s valuable, and nothing below is an argument for dropping it.
Where Instagram runs out of road
The catch is the same one that applies to any platform you don’t own: you’re renting the space, and the landlord makes the rules.
One link, and that’s it. Instagram gives you a single link in your bio. Someone wants your menu, your price list, your booking page, your opening hours and your address — and you get one link to send them to all of it. That link needs to go somewhere, and a good website is that somewhere.
You’re invisible on Google. When someone in Motueka searches “wedding photographer Nelson” or “best brunch Nelson” at 9pm, they’re on Google, not scrolling Instagram. An Instagram profile barely shows up in those searches. If that’s where people look for what you do, not being there costs you jobs you never even hear about.
Posts disappear. The lovely post you made last Tuesday is gone down the feed by Thursday. Instagram is a river, not a filing cabinet. There’s no tidy, permanent place for “here’s exactly what we do, what it costs, and how to book.”
Enquiries live in your DMs. That works until you’re busy. There’s no proper contact form, no automatic booking, no way for someone to sort things out at 11pm without you personally replying.
You don’t own the audience. Followers aren’t a mailing list. If Instagram changes the algorithm, has an outage, or locks your account, your entire connection to your customers can vanish overnight. It happens more than people think.
What a website does that Instagram can’t
A website is the shop, not the window. It’s the place you fully control, that Google can find, and that doesn’t disappear.
- It shows up in search — so you catch the people actively looking for you right now.
- It’s the destination for that one bio link — menu, prices, gallery, bookings, contact, all in one place.
- It works while you sleep — bookings, enquiry forms and answers to the obvious questions, no DM required.
- It’s yours — no algorithm deciding who sees it.
None of this needs to be a big, expensive build. For most visual businesses, a clean handful of pages — home, what you do, gallery, and contact or booking — is plenty.
The honest answer: both, and they feed each other
This isn’t Instagram versus a website. The two do different jobs, and they’re better together.
Instagram is the top of the funnel — it’s how people discover you and get a feel for your work. Your website is the bottom — it’s where they go to actually decide and book. Instagram earns the attention; the website converts it. That link in your bio should point at a site that closes the deal.
So if you’ve only got the budget or energy for one right now, start with whichever matches how your customers actually find you. Discovered mostly through referrals and search? A website first. Winning people over with photos and personality? Keep the Instagram humming — but get a website behind it, so all that attention has somewhere solid to land.
The businesses that do best aren’t the ones choosing between the two. They’re the ones using Instagram to get noticed and a website to get booked.