Instagram has been an essential part of many brand’s marketing strategies since its rapid rise in popularity in 2010. For the past 10 years, Instagram has grown into a huge platform of around 1 billion active monthly users and if your business is not on the platform, it’s not too late to get started!
Is not just a personal social media account anymore, but Instagram has become a global platform where brands are able to showcase their products or services, reach a huge audience and engage with their audience.
Find 0ut why you should start using Instagram for your business here.
Here are 10 tips and strategies to get you started and ahead in the Instagram game.
1. Get a business profile
Before you start planning your Instagram marketing strategy, you have to start by having an Instagram Business Account.
You can start by creating a new account for your business and once your account is created, head to your profile and tap the menu icon at the top right.
Tap on Settings, then Account, and then Switch to Professional account.
That’s it! Your business profile is all set to go.
By having a business account, it gives you access to features that you cannot use with a personal one such as:
- Contact information and a Call-to-Action button on your profile
- Instagram Insights
- Instagram Ads
- Instagram Shopping
These features help you to start tracking metrics and understanding your audience.
Through Instagram Insights, you’ll be able to view statistics like impressions, engagement data, and a breakdown of the demographics of your followers. It also provides insights for each post, or story that you have done for the week and lets you see how many impressions that you have gotten, which were your top-performing posts.
These free features allow you to understand how your audience is engaging with your content and allow you to adjust your content to increase engagement.
2. Optimise your profile photo and bio description
You have to choose the right profile photo. Typically, most brands will use their logo to provide authenticity and allow people to find their profiles at first glance.
Make sure that your image is sized to 110 by 110 pixels so that is shown nicely in a circle.
Capture the attention of your audience in your bio description! Your Instagram bio needs to make a strong first impression that shows your brand personality, what your business is about and why they should follow your account.
Make full use of the 150 characters and fill in the other fields on your Instagram profile so that people will be able to find and engage with you.
3. Create visually compelling content
Since Instagram as a platform is a visual medium, your profile posts have to look visually compelling. Though you may not need professional photography, the photos should be sharp, in focus and well-lit so that your profile looks coherent.
The type of content that you make should be in line with your brand’s look and personality. Having a style guide that contains all the details for a piece of content is helpful in establishing your brand look. Details such as the composition, colour scheme, fonts, captions, filters, layout and hashtags are things to consider.
Creating an Instagram aesthetic and colour, all contributes to buying decisions as well as brand recognition. Your Instagram look and feel should be consistent across all your posts so that your followers can easily recognise your content in their feeds.
4. Write interesting captions
The content shows off your brand’s look and personality, but the captions shows your brand’s voice. Your brand voice is important, and you can use the captions to capture the attention of your followers since people tend to scan captions than reading them thoroughly.
Instagram captions can be up to 2,200 characters long though only the first two lines of text appear in the news feed. Make sure that your caption is interesting, entertaining, relevant or informative and that the tone is consistent as your other social media platforms.
5. Making use of hashtags
Hashtags are a way to categorise content on many social media platforms. They allow people to discover content and new accounts on topics that they are interested in.
Choosing the right hashtags for your content comes with research to see which hashtags your target audience are using and which are relevant and active.
Be careful of hashtag stuffing as adding too many hashtags in a post can be spammy which followers can choose not to see.
6. Engage with your audience
By posting quality content is not enough to drive engagement, you have to engage with your audience directly as well. Respond to comments on your feed and interact with other popular profiles in your niche area to boost your visibility.
Look for opportunities to engage and check out the post if someone tags you in it. You could reshare their post onto your feed on in your story.
7. Use Instagram Stories
Instagram Stories are a great way to generate leads and many businesses are using Stories to garner great results.
Instagram Stories are live for only 24 hours and they are displayed at the top of your followers’ timelines where users look through daily.
You can use stories to capture behind-the-scenes moments that may not be as high quality as regular posts but followers enjoy watching them as it feels more real and raw.
They provide a great way to stay connected with your followers and you can add a call-to-action to your Stories for followers to engage with by adding a simple ‘swipe up’ link or including a product tag.
8. Try Instagram Shopping
Instagram Shopping is a feature that is not available for personal accounts, and it allows businesses to sell products directly from Instagram posts and stories.
Set up Instagram shopping and add your products into your posts.
9. Use Sponsored Instagram Ads
To expose your content to a wider range of audience, you can run an Instagram ad.
You can display just one sponsored ad or multiple ads with the carousel feature. This allows your brand to promote their posts to their target audience.
There are many different forms of sponsored Instagram ads that you can post:
- Photo
- Video
- Carousel Ads
- Stories
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High-performing posts can also be promoted as sponsored ads to your potential customers.
10. Consider an Influencer Partnership
Working with an influencer can help your brand to build credibility while exposing your brand to a new audience.
Influencers have built their own follower base and people are buying products or services based on what they see from their feed and from the influencers they follow. Followers trust these influencers and are more likely to purchase something that an influencer has endorsed.
Partner with the right influencer that is relevant to your niche and get your brand out to a large potential audience.
If you build a relationship with an influencer, you’ll be able to build brand awareness and influence other people to buy your products.
Conclusion
Instagram Marketing is definitely one of the biggest marketing strategies to do today. As you develop your Instagram Marketing strategy, take note of trends and make adjustments to your marketing plan accordingly.
Make use of the free analytics tools in your Insights to analyse the data and refine your strategy to see what works.
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