As of January 2020, there are nearly 1 billion monthly active users on Instagram. In fact, 500 million users log in to Instagram on a daily basis. Needless to say, it is one of the best places for brand marketing and creating awareness about your products and services. But what most people do not understand is that Successful Instagram Marketing is more than just posting images on your account.
Yes. Instagram is the platform where you put your photos and short videos for you to get more free Instagram followers. However, if you want to boost your brand awareness, you need to adopt a systematic approach. In this blog, I will describe 8 major steps to successful Instagram marketing. These steps will not only increase your reach but also boost your web traffic and sales.
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Table of Contents
1. Determine why you need Successful Instagram Marketing for your business:
It is unfortunate that a lot of businesses choose to market their brand on Instagram just because others are doing it. That’s not why you should invest in Instagram marketing. Before you decide to do anything about marketing your business on this particular social media platform, you need to figure out why you need Instagram.
Instagram is a great platform for businesses to engage with their target audience. Since Instagram lets you post visual content such as high-quality images, short videos, and stories, you can use those forms of content to influence the purchase decisions of the users. In fact, Instagram does with absolute ease without using hard sales pitch strategies.
2. Prepare a strategy for Instagram marketing:
Once you have a good understanding of why your brand needs to be on Instagram, you need to start developing a strategy. This strategy will help you reach the right audience with the right message at the right time. However, you should have at least one major goal for your strategy. Having a clear goal will allow you to remain focused on achieving them.
Some brands prefer to present their products and services, while others aim to build their own community, boost brand awareness, or advertise to their target audience. You need to set goals for your Instagram marketing and then prepare a strategy around it. You can present your company culture and values to your audience, and take measures to increase customer loyalty.
3. Create your Instagram profile:
You need to make sure your Instagram profile has a good bio, a unique profile picture, and a link to your website. Your Instagram profile is basically the landing page of your brand on the platform. So, you need to provide significant details about your brand on the profile page.
The bio is the basic description of your brand. You can find creative ways to describe your brand in this section. The profile picture should have the logo of your brand. Or you can put the image of your mascot on the profile picture. Take any popular brand, for example. They all have either their logo or their mascot in the profile picture.
Since Instagram does not allow you to add links to every post, you need to use the most important link of your business in the profile. Here is a free plagiarism checker tool in the market to use for free writing grammar checker before posting. Generally, it is ideal for adding the link to your landing page in the profile. However, if you have launched a new product/service, you can put the link to the product/service instead of the link to the landing page.
4. Have a content strategy for Instagram:
As mentioned before, you need to prepare a strategy for Instagram marketing. While the marketing strategy determines your overall activities on Instagram, the content strategy focuses entirely on the posts your share. Considering the fact that more than 95 million photos and videos are shared on Instagram on a daily basis, you need to be very careful about your choice of content if you want to stand out.
You should develop your content strategy around your marketing goals. If boosting sales of your products and services is your goal – you should share more posts about those things. If building a community is your goal, you need to build your content strategy that way. Whatever your goal may be, you need to make sure that the quality of the content remains top-notch. It is also recommended to create content that resonates with the people.
Hashtags are also quite helpful in boosting the reach of your content. You can even leverage the particular hashtag to tell your brand stories. Moreover, you can choose from a variety of content, including product demos, educational content, customer testimonials, user-generated content, and more.
5. Focus on the quality of the individual post:
In this step, you need to pay close attention to the content you publish on your Instagram profile. You need to hire people who are good with aesthetics and cannot expect to gain popularity by posting poorly photographed images. also need to work on the composition of the content by properly placing and arranging visual elements in it.
We need to consider the use of solid color background, additional space at the top, and other major parts of the composition before posting a picture. It should select the right color palette to keep your feeds consistent. Not to forget, the fonts you use in your images need to be consistent as they are now associated with the brand image.
6. Engage with the audience:
Besides posting images and videos, you should also use the other features on Instagram to engage with the audience. The stories section of the social media platform allows you to do a lot of things. You can create a poll, host an “ask me anything” session or simply ask people to swipe up a story to check out new products, services, or new offers.
According to Instagram, people post nearly 1 billion stories every day, and nearly 62% of those people say they have become more interested in a brand after discovering it in their stories. While the aforementioned features are great for engaging with the audience, the live feature on the platform helps the brands build a stronger impact on the followers.
7. Find the right time to post:
Being consistent is the key to social media marketing. And if you want to boost your brand awareness among your target audience, you need to post on your Instagram profile quite frequently. However, you need to define how frequently you will be publishing content on your profile so that the audience will know when to expect new updates from you.
If you post your content in a specific time slot every day, you are more likely to get more engagement as your audience will be expecting your posts. Also, statistics suggest that most brands share an average of 1.5 posts per day on Instagram. So, you also need to determine at what time you want to share those posts.
8. Use Instagram takeovers:
Once you have established a brand and have gained a significant amount of followers on Instagram, you should consider venturing into influencer marketing. Now, Instagram takeovers are in the trend. In this strategy, brands let a celebrity or an industry leader to take over their Instagram accounts and engage with the users.
This is beneficial to both the influencer and the brand. By allowing an influencer to take charge of your profile, you are actually getting a portion of his/her followers on your profile, and on the other hand, the influencer is also getting more exposure by using your profile. However, it is important that you choose the right influencer and measure the results of the campaign.
In conclusion,
These were the key steps to successful Instagram marketing. While the steps remain the same for almost every business that wants to market their brand on Instagram, the strategies need to be different. At the end of the day, you need to convince your audience to like you. So, it is always wiser to stay relevant.