Instagram Marketing:
Instagram – As of today’s most popular sales platforms in the world. The platform offers a wide range of ways for users to utilize its benefits. Instagram marketing is effective social media marketing to promote your brand and business.
If you are looking at various ways to use Instagram for marketing, you can divide the activity into two categories. This include:
- Paid strategies such as Influencer marketing and advertising.
- Organic strategies such as creating posts, stories, reels as well as engaging with other users’ content.
Basically, most business goals might include
- Getting more followers and engagement
- Building relationship with potential customers and other brands
- Selling your products and services directly through Instagram stories
- Boosting a brand reputation and drive traffic to your website
However, Instagram is more competitive due to the large user base. So, it would help if you put more effort into standing out a brand to a huge audience. Here, we cover 13+ top Instagram strategies that will enhance your marketing.
Let’s begin.
1. Create Instagram Business Profile
The first and foremost marketing strategy on Instagram is to have a proper business profile. You don’t use just a regular personal profile.
If you use an Instagram business profile, you can get additional features like ads and Instagram insights. Even a business profile is more valuable in the eyes of your audience.
Now, let’s take a short look at how to set up your Instagram business profile:
- On your mobile device, log in to Instagram for your business handle.
- Go to your Instagram profile and tap the settings icon at the bottom right corner.
- Scroll down the settings page and tap switch to the business profile option.
Now, Instagram will ask you to connect the account to your Facebook page. Then you can edit your public contact info, and this will give you a chance anyone can visit your page.
2. Make An Eye-Catchy Profile
If you optimize your Instagram profile, it’s important to stay consistent with your brand. This means you should add the same fonts, colors, and images that you have on your website and other social accounts. It makes an easy way for your customers to identify your profile in all the places.
There are two crucial elements for your profile:
- Profile Photo – Use your brand logo as your profile photo.
- Bio – Instagram offers 150 characters to make an awesome bio. You can add few things that grab attention, such as,
- Clickable Links: Bio is the only place to take the audience directly to your website.
- Hashtags: With branded hashtags, you can ask users to share their posts with your hashtag.
- Emojis: Emojis are a quick visual way to reach your point to a massive audience.
3. Post Organic Contents
Organic content refers to the free content such as posts, stories, photos, videos, and memes. It is one of the effective marketing strategies on Instagram, which can help to keep your audience interests and get more engagement organically.
For example, on organic stories, you can create questions and polls for your audience. And you can also add a swipe up call to action that takes the audience to your website or profile page.
When it comes to organic growth, here are some tactics you can use:
- Follow consistency and post at the best time.
- Post user generated content.
- Use Instagram stories to engage your audience.
- Add effective hashtags for each post.
4. Use Instagram Live
Instagram live is an effective feature that allows you to broadcast video to your followers in real time. According to the research, Instagram live stream usage has increased 70% over the last year.
The advantage of Instagram live is that your story will show up first in your follower’s story feed. Also, they will get a notification when they open the app. This notification will help for exposing your stream to more of your followers.
Moreover, you can post Q & A stickers into your live Instagram stories before you host. Once you go to live, tap on the question mark button at the bottom of your screen and get started to provide answers.
5. Use InstagramTV
IGTV is the newest addition to the Instagram family, and it was made especially for creating long form videos. You can upload between 10 minutes to one hour videos like YouTube.
InstagramTV is a useful feature for content creators to enhance their video content. Like Instagram stories, you can add swipe up call to action in your videos. Its vertical format has a positive impact on video makers to give creative videos.
If you’re a media company that decides to promote long videos, IGTV is a useful tool for getting your message across. It is also a great way to engage your audience within a short time.
6. Utilize Instagram Stories
Instagram story is a vertical photo and video sharing feature, and it disappears after 24 hours. It helps users to capture everything in between and create richer stories than individual posts.
If you want to get more real views on Instagram stories, you should create and publish different content with engaging stickers. Also, here are few ideas you can use Instagram stories:
- Show behind the scenes content to give your audience what and how to do for you.
- Poll your audience on a popular topic or ask for feedback about your company.
- Host contests and giveaways in which you ask users to create posts with branded hashtags.
7. Post Other Users Content
If you’re looking to gain a massive following, you can share other users’ content for your Instagram profile. It is a useful and organic way to get more exposure for your business growth.
When you tag another brand in your post and promote their content, they are engaging to reciprocate. In this way, you will get a chance they’ll follow you back and promote your account to their account.
Moreover, their followers are likely to notice your profile and back to follow you. Hence, reposting makes an opportunity for you to learn different ideas that can attract audience attention.
8. Use Hashtags To Maximize Your Reach
Organic search is one of the most amazing strategies on Instagram. It allows up to 30 hashtags per post. Most of the best Instagram campaigns use branded hashtags. The more people you want to encourage, you can use custom branded hashtags. It reaches high engagement within a short time.
Nowadays, hashtags are the pillars of social media reach, and it virtually connects a huge audience to your profile. Most users look for their content based on hashtags.
So, if your posts are related to a trending topic, make sure to include hashtags that are associated with your content. It can help you to show your content in front of a wider audience.
9. Partner With Instagram Influencers
Influencer marketing is one of the most effective ways of social marketing. The ultimate goal of this strategy is to gain followers on Instagram. These people already know the secrets of success on Instagram.
When you find the right influencers that match your brand, it can give you effective results such as boosting followers, sales, and brand reputation. Here are few ideas to find potential influencers:
- Using your smartphone or desktop and search for influencer based hashtags inside of Instagram.
- You can see the top posts in that hashtag.
- Once you find a person, check out their account simply tap their profile.
- Analyze their profile page, followers count, content types, and you can reach out to them via a direct message.
10. Run Contests And Giveaways
Contests and giveaways can get you the opportunity to find more followers in a single post. Instagram marketing contests help to encourage participants to post different pictures related to your brand with content hashtags.
Here are some ideas on how to do an effective giveaway on Instagram:
- Choose the prize for your giveaway.
- Define the entry criteria for your contests.
- Determine your specific goal for your Instagram contests.
- Make a brand partnership.
- Create unique and compelling hashtags.
- Putting a time limit on your contests.
- Launch and promote your contests.
11. Use Instagram Ads
Instagram advertising is a payment method to post sponsored content. If you’re looking to get more followers and generate sales, Instagram ads are an effective way to get a direct approach. There are several types of ads you can run. Here are some ads types:
- Images Ads – Image ads allow users to show products and services through engaging images. Image ads allow the call to action buttons that encourage your audience to take a specific action.
- Carousel Ads – It is a series of images and videos with a call to action button. It can connect your audience directly to your website.
- Story Ads – It is a vertical, dull screen ads format that appears in between your follower’s stories. It looks like a normal post but is always displayed with a sponsored tag at the top.
12. Encourage Your Fans With UGC
UGC stands for user generated content, and it includes any text, videos, images, reviews, etc., created by the people. Instagram is the primary platform for user generated content for many brands.
If you post engaging user generated content, you will get a chance to create and publish their creations to their audience. It is one of the effective strategies which helps tp to establish your brands and products to a wider audience.
A report shows that user generated content gains 50% of higher engagement than normal posts. So, it is more effective to build brand awareness and increase engagement.
13. Track Right Metrics
Instagram metrics are one of the essential parts to know the success of your profile. Instagram provides free inbuilt tools to access your metrics. It gives you a valuable metrics of your account such as,
- How much attention your posts get.
- Which posts get more engagement.
- Demographics of your followers.
- The total number of reach, impressions, and views.
- Total post likes, comments, clicks, and shares.
But you can access your Instagram analytics if you have a business account on Instagram. So, make sure to set up your business profile when you want to access the success of your account.
Conclusion:
Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Instagram is much easier to get more success!.
You can use these 13 strategies to enhance your Instagram marketing.
Author Bio: Caterina Taylor is an experienced social media marketer and writer who works at PlanYourGram.com. She loves to work on content creation for social media blogs and has the potential to deliver engaging content on various platforms and networks.
Tags: instagram marketing, marketing, Social Media, social media marketing