Instagram has advanced from a photo-sharing app to a vital marketing platform that businesses use to target their prospective customers.
When it was first launched in 2010, it was a social media platform for sharing photographs (remember Pinterest?). But now it has grown as a necessary social media advertising and marketing platform crawling with influencers, brands, and marketers.
So, let’s take look at what makes it so beneficial as an advertising platform and how you can use it to improve your business.
Why Instagram Marketing?
Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms with a huge user base. As of December 2019, Instagram had over 1.5 billion lively month-to-month users. So, the platform’s user base is too high for any company or marketer to ignore.
If that’s not an adequate reason for you to start advertising on Instagram, check out these Instagram data that will convince you.
- Instagram has about 2.1 million month-to-month advertisers and over 26 million commercial enterprise accounts
- 45% of Instagram’s lively users use the platform for researching and discovering brands
- 54% of Instagram users follow their preferred manufacturers on the platform
- Over 95 million posts are created on Instagram each day
Now that you know the importance of Instagram as an advertising and marketing platform, let’s take a closer look at the ways to do it well.
We have organized an in-depth information on Instagram advertising and have blanketed everything that you need to recognize to be triumphant at it.
Set Up an Instagram Business Account
The first and most essential factor that you want to do earlier than you begin advertising and marketing on Instagram is to set up a business account.
Instagram offers you the choice to either create a private account or a business account. If you prefer to market on Instagram and set up your presence as a business, then the latter is the way to go. Moreover, it comes with its own set of advantages.
Optimize Your Instagram Profile
Your Instagram profile is a possibility to make a first impression on your profile viewers and convert them into customers. When an individual views your profile, you have a very brief time to interact with them and convert them into customer. This is why it is necessary to have an optimized Instagram profile.
Here are some things that you can do to optimize your Instagram profile:
- Select a profile name that precisely represents your brand
- Write an enticing bio to tell your story and showcase your company to potential customers
- Add a link to your website in your bio, ideally a shortened URL that appears neat and is trackable
- You can also promote your branded hashtag in your bio
- Select an appropriate, super profile image that represents your brand
- Select a color palette or company aesthetic for your posts and use it consistently
Leverage All Types of Instagram Content Formats
In addition to simple posts, Instagram provides a variety of other content material formats, each with its special advantages and uses. You no longer have to limit yourself to solely general posts and should experiment with all of these exciting and enticing content formats.
Instagram Stories
Instagram
Stories are an enticing and enjoyable way for brands to join with their
audiences and market themselves. The short, brief structure requires you to
create fun, attention-grabbing content to have interaction with your audience.
When Should You Post Instagram Stories?
Unlike Instagram posts that get prioritized through the cutting-edge algorithm and need to be published when humans are most active, Stories can be posted anytime. These are seen at the top of the feed for 24 hours. So they can be accessed with the aid of your target market for the duration of that period.
Here are some of the numerous methods in which you can leverage Instagram Stories:
Promote a giveaway or contest
This is a handy and high-quality way to grab your audience’s attention, expand your followers, and pressure audience engagement all at the identical time.
Ask a question
This is a simple, yet the first-rate way to have interaction with your target market and start conversation with them. But, you need to understand your target market well to begin profitable conversations with them.
Create quiz and polls
Quiz and polls are some of the attractive types of content. The moment any person sees a quiz, they get tempted to answer to find out if they can answer correctly. Similarly, polls feed on the human who want to relate to others and that’s why people want to be aware of if their opinions are healthy with those of the majority or not.
To create polls, you can use Instagram Stories stickers. For special quizzes, you can share the hyperlink or promote the quiz via Stories. This will direct viewers to your website to take the actual quiz.
Showcase your achievements
If you’ve currently received any awards or executed a vital milestone, then you can share that with your target market through Stories. While this may additionally now not at once drive conversions, it will surely beautify your brand photo and motivate people to strive for your products.
Post Instagram Stories Ads with purchasable links
Instagram Stories ads are another fabulous way to utilize the Stories format. Your Instagram Stories will be handy solely to human beings who comply with you, but advertisements can be focused to a much broader audience. The format remains the same, just the reach increases.
Here are some fine practices that you have to follow to get the quality out of your Instagram Stories ads:
- Always add a call-to-action, alongside with a purchase link to drive conversions from your ads
- Use fantastic product pics that exhibit the product being promoted. It additionally helps to point out the rate of a product, specifically if there’s a discount, as that encourages people to click on the ad to check out the product page.
Highlights
Instagram Highlights are simply Instagram Stories that you figure out to keep completely displayed at the pinnacle of your feed. The format, essentially, is equal as Stories but the position is different. Instead of displaying in your followers’ feed, highlights are displayed on your own Instagram profile.
So, you can use Highlights as a section of your Instagram profile and use these to showcase content material that you prefer to draw interest to.
Here are some of the approaches in which you can use Instagram Highlights:
To Announce New Product Launches
A lot of brands use Instagram Highlights to announce their new product launches. This will be of high-quality because Highlights are displayed properly at the apex of your profile. And Highlights grabs interests without delay and consequently it is a good way to carry interest to the new product launches.
To Showcase Product Collections/Categories
You can additionally use Highlights to categorize and display exceptional product categories or collections. And, you can add your respective website links to drive users from your Instagram to your website.
For FAQs
You can additionally use Highlights to reply to customer queries and commonly-asked questions. FAQs assist your prospective clients to get to the bottom of any worries or queries about your manufacturer or products. This, in turn, helps them to make informed purchase decisions.
To Display Tutorials, Hacks, Recipes, and Tips
This is another way to use Instagram Highlights as you get a chance to instruct your potential customers on how to use your products. Showing your products in use is not solely informative for consumers but frequently encourages them to buy them and attempt out the hack or tutorial themselves.
To Showcase Pictures and Videos from Brand Events
Showing pictures from a special company or enterprise event is another high-quality way to use Highlights to interact with your audience.
Use Hashtags to Boost Your Campaigns
Using hashtags with your Instagram content can give a considerable raise to your advertising efforts. Hashtags permit you to reach a specific target market and also expand your content’s reach. Moreover, the use of hashtags on your posts additionally has a fantastic correlation with your engagement rates.
According to a current study, the use of up to 9 hashtags per post increases the engagement charges per post. However, don’t go overboard and use greater than 10 hashtags since it might have the opposite effect.
Create a Brand or Campaign Hashtag
Another way to leverage hashtags to market your company or campaigns is to create a company or campaign-specific hashtag. The advantage of doing this is you can use one hashtag to promote all sorts of content material throughout Instagram. And, it also lets you to test the performance of your content material from one place.
Use the following best practices to create and use your own hashtag:
- Make it quick and handy to remember
- Keep it relevant to a precise marketing campaign or special to your brand
- Use the hashtag for all your Instagram content associated with that precise campaign (if it’s a campaign-specific hashtag)
- Ask your target audience to use that hashtag when reposting or sharing any of your content material or participating in your contest
Create Content That Stands Out
Instagram has no dearth of brands, marketers, and influencers all attempting to seize the attention of the equal people. In such an intensely competitive environment, it is essential that you create content that stands out and is fed on by way of your audience.
Here are some expert recommendations and hints to create Instagram content that stands out:
- Maintain excessive picture that are exceptional for all of your picture and video posts
- Post content that is useful and relevant to your audience
- Post at the proper times, ideally in the day time on weekdays, to get most engagement and views
Leverage User-Generated Content
Creating attractive and relevant content consistently is tough. And with new Instagram algorithm, it has grown to be even greater that it is necessary to maintain the high relevance and frequency of your posts.
Here are some methods in which you can leverage user-generated content to your advantage:
- Ask your target market to tag your brand or use your hashtag to get a chance to be featured on your Instagram feed
- Reward your current customers via providing their images of themselves with the usage of your product on your Instagram feed
- Repost user-generated content applicable to your company and supply credit to the unique creators of the posts
Measure Your Performance and Improvise
After you have carried out your marketing initiatives and run your campaigns, you need to evaluate how they have performed. This will help you understand what works for you and what doesn’t. These insights, in turn, can motivate your advertising and marketing approach and assist you to improve it for the future.
Instagram Insights
All the enterprise debts on Instagram have a built-in insights characteristic that provides records on overall performance metrics. You can take a look at your posts’ engagement. You can also get insights into your standard Instagram account’s performance. And, you can additionally view your target market demographics.
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