Instagram can be a potent tool for marketing your business if you use it right. Instagram is a platform with around 800 million active monthly users, out of which at least 25 million are business accounts. However, even with its current popularity, the businesses on Instagram have not fully maximized the potential that Instagram holds to engage customers to your business.
We have compiled a few tips on how to market on Instagram from the pros to help with business accounts.
1- Look At Your Competitors
On Instagram, your competitors can be the best source for you to gain inspiration and ideas from what you can do next with your brand. You must always keep a check on what your competitors are doing and what their daily Instagram activity is like so that you can stay in the loop and even produce even better content. Being a visual platform, you need to engage your clients through the visuals you put up on your page, so make sure to add a compelling description to know exactly what you are trying to show them. It is essential to research your core ideas and concepts and compare them with your competitors to make sure you stay on top of your game.
2- Make Good Use of Instagram Stories
Instagram stories are one of the most inquisitive features that businesses can use as an excellent tool that can help strike interest in your business by giving customers a sneak peek at new products and sales so that your clients can stay engaged in your content even when they don’t visit your page. Through these promotions in stories, you can tap a wider audience and benefit from it the most. By doing this, you will also lead your customers back to your page or your website by including a call-to-action or a website link, which will definitely increase your clientele.
3- Partner with Influencers
Instagram is an amazing platform for influencers, and it is widely filled with influencers that span through every type of business. You can use influencer marketing as part of your digital marketing strategy for Instagram, and it gets the most engagement for your business as a lot of people look up to these influencers. Through a process of analysis, you can choose influencers with popular accounts who meet your business criteria. Then you can create an outline of what you would expect out of your collaboration with the influencers.
4- Advertise with Videos
It is also important to regularly create marketing videos around key holidays and milestones so that your page can engage clients with relatable content at the right time. Through multiple layouts, fonts, and filters, you can make these videos even more engaging and make it a lot more fun for your clients to visit your page.
5- Ask Yourself if You Would Be Interested in Your Feed
Self-analysis is always crucial in making the best out of your Instagram page, and therefore, you need to put in a lot of work to make the most out of it. To analyze whether your page is doing well, you must consider yourself to be the client and see if you yourself would be interested in visiting your feed. Through this, you will be able to fix all the nooks and move your feed towards perfection.
6- Get Crafty with Your Hashtags
With Instagram, you can use as many as 30 hashtags per post. Therefore, you can always get crafty with hashtags and engage your clients through these. You can even start trends and competitions through hashtags, which will further engage more audiences towards your Instagram feed. This can also be a potential way of increasing your web traffic, visibility, and clientele.
7- Use Paid Ads
Instagram has the highest engagement. Therefore, this is probably the best Instagram marketing platform to publish Paid Ads, which will gain the highest outcome compared to other platforms. This is a new weapon for brands to target their audience and make the best out of their paid marketing strategies. You can also customize your reach and target according to your business requirements and marketing strategies.
8- Skip the Automation Tools
Another tip is always to skip the automation tools, as it is important to grow your followers based on interaction rather than just increasing numbers. Dedicate your time in reaching out to the users that might be attracted to your business and might convert into potential clients; therefore, quality followers must always be prioritized over quantity.
9- Focus On Engagement-Based Content
It is always important to stay focused on engagement-based content rather than just promotional content. Promotional content can usually cause customers to turn away from your page. A great way to market your brand while increasing your engagement is to incorporate your branding into engagement-based content so that your viewers can actually have fun while visiting your posts and stories rather than just skimming through them.
10- Add Personal Passion to Your Instagram Posts
Personalizing your content is a great way to engage clients as it makes your content more relatable rather than a mere platform for your business promotions. People often enjoy relatable and personalized content more and tend to engage more with it. Moreover, your brand needs to exude humanity, and if you create a human and emotional connection with your audience, it makes your brand much more likable. It will create stronger brand loyalty and a kinder brand image.
11- Use Instagram DM but don’t Over-use it.
Instagram DMs can be the perfect platform for you to create and maintain Direct Message relationships with your clients and potential customers; however, you must not overuse them by spamming them. Therefore, you must have a well-laid strategy for your Instagram DMs so that you can positively entertain and engage clients through it rather than making them block you. Through Instagram DMs, you can also maintain relationships by thanking your customers for their orders and reviews and engaging them in post-sales services. This strategy will definitely stand out as it is something that automated marketing or bots won’t do and will definitely make your brand stand out!
12- Engage Online and Build Relationships Offline
Engage on the platform, and if you are a growing brand, you must engage online for at least one hour every day, and consistency is the key! Engage with handles that have more followers than yourself by commenting, liking, and following people. Then once you are actively engaging your audience, you can then reach out to larger influencers and get them to talk about you. This will not only allow your brand to reach a much wider audience, but this online engagement can also soon turn into offline relationships of meet-ups, collaborations. Exhibitions and much more so that your brand becomes the new talk of the town!
13- Choose Your Own Sharing Time
Each company has a different target audience and a different marketing strategy; therefore, you must base your sharing time on your targets to make the most out of it. Each audience has a different time of being online, and therefore, you must be mindful of these statistics when planning out your engagement or posting times. Post frequency is also crucial to your strategy, and you must strategically take time and space out your posts so that you don’t overwhelm your clients.
14- Create a Special Instagram Link
Using Instagram for marketing can be tough because you only have one link, but you can optimize that link to directly take your customer to the required webpage instead of just leading them to your website’s homepage. Making the process more efficient and quick for your customers to find what they are looking for will increase sales and engagement, and potential clientele.
15- Shout Out to Other Businesses
In your caption, you must try to tag as many businesses in your industry that can be related to your post as possible. If they like it, you may earn a repost and increase your exposure to their audiences. This will help you build inter-industry relationships and help you can a larger audience through potential collaboration.
16- Monitor Your Metrics
Once you start to work on your Instagram feed, the dashboard must be your best friend and the only page that you can analyze perfectly to the core. You must consistently analyze your metrics and figure out ways to make them better, as your reach and your visibility will depend on it every day. It is also important for you to compare your results with your competitors to configure out what might work better and how you can mold a different strategy into your own and make the most out of it.
17- Use Raw Photos
To maximize your presence on Instagram, only use raw photos with catchy captions or hashtags so that your content is exclusive to you and will tie up to your presence on Instagram rather than any other photo editing tool or application. This is one of the simplest and easiest ways to maximize your presence on Instagram
18- Come Up with Varied Content
For success is Instagram, you need to have good content, and even that needs to be varied. You must make sure that your content is unique, clear, and speaks to your audience and your brand so that it all comes together and makes your brand image stronger while making your feed a lot more engaging and interesting. If you make sure to follow this strategy with each post consistently, you will eventually target a much larger audience almost effortlessly.
19- Don’t Let Perfect Be the Enemy of Good
If you run after perfection for every post, you might not be able to produce a lot on your feed; therefore, candid and in-the-moment content is fine too, but your photos should be high-quality and visually appealing. If you are starting your brand, it is also ok to start small and slowly build up as you learn along the way, but the most difficult yet the most important step is to start as soon as you can. Try to make the most of it at every post but stay consistent with it!
20- Focus On Gaining Real Followers
In the long run, real followers matter more than bought or millions of followers; therefore, you must always aim to build a stronger and varied clientele rather than build a larger audience, which will eventually do you no good!
21- Leverage User-Generated Content (UGC)
Sharing other people’s content is one of the best ways to start building a real Instagram presence. If that content is a review by one of your customers, it makes it even better and establishes a more promising brand image. When a small business builds up its initial audience, then sharing user-generated content should be a priority. Reposting or Regramming can become one of your main strategies through which you can engage and attract others.
22- Do a Chain Campaign
To create a chain campaign, you can create a partnership with 5-6 large accounts and have each of them share an image of the campaign, which usually involves a winner of some contest. The channel not only links different pages or businesses together, but it also leads to an exchange of followers between them, benefiting everyone!
23- Create Themed Content
Another interesting idea is to create themed Instagram content. This content can be framed according to the upcoming events festivities or specific to the months of the years or even seasons. In this way, your clients will engage and find interest in your work as it will be the most related to them during that time of the year! Having a concept or a theme will not only allow you to make more content and generate new ideas, but it will also open more avenues that you can explore.
24- Make Use of Free Instagram Tools
Instagram business profiles have access to free marketing tools while the personal accounts don’t, so if you are using the business account, there are a few tools that you can benefit from. These include gaining access to key features such as contact option, analytics, and an option to analyze impressions and engagement on your feed, which you can use to divide strategies and create content.
25- Include A Clear Call-To-Action
Instagram is the only platform with the highest user engagement and marketing strategies; therefore, to make the best out of it, you must include a clear call-to-action in your ads so that the process is efficient and quick for your customers when they want to reach you. We often measure our return on investment based on the number of impressions we receive, and an engaging call-to-action is the best way to do that.
Conclusion
To make your business stay on top of its marketing game, you must make your posts stand out from the endless feeds to the right audience by using these tips and build the connections that your business needs to succeed in the competitive yet fun Instagram world!
