There are over 1.16 billion active users on Instagram. The potential for brands’ reach on this site is huge. Almost 90% of users on Instagram follow at least one business page. B2B decision-makers and marketers go through Instagram to research new products and services.
Instagram marketing has become one of the most crucial strategies for brands out there. How to make sure that your brand does not remain in the shadow?
Here are the top 10 Instagram Marketing Tips for your brand
1. Get yourself a business profile - It's Free
Before you make notes of all the Instagram marketing techniques, get yourself a business account. If you do not have a business account, Go to settings and tap on “switch to business account”. Yes, it’s easy and free.
A business Account is essential for you to establish yourself as a brand on Instagram. It helps you to create ads without any help from Facebook tools. An Instagram business account also enables you to use its analytics tool known as Insights. It shows statistics about the reach, impressions, shares, etc of your posts.
It also comes with some CTAs like the contact button or email button, through which your followers or audience can reach directly to you.
An Instagram business account will help you know your audience.
2. Dig Deeper into Instagram Free Tools
Instagram Business account is quite efficient when it comes to stats and analytics. With the help of Instagram Insights, you can check engagement, impressions, reach, etc
It even provides information regarding the demographics of your audience. These demographics include their age, location, active hours, gender, etc.
Instagram insights provide a general analytical overview of your business page and insights on your posts, individually too.
These insights are highly efficient for knowing your audience and how they interact with your content.
3. Instagram Stories
Instagram stories are the real deal when it comes to brands. First of all, the stories appear on the top of your Instagram app. It is the page that users see every day.
Stories are a great medium for posting those low-quality content that you cannot share as posts. You do not even have to worry about the consistency of your Instagram page layout while posting the stories. These stories appear for just 24 hours and then vanish. They are saved in your Instagram story archives.
There is a good number of features in Instagram stories. From rewind video to boomerang, you can experiment by creating different types of videos through these features.
People and brands often use Instagram stories as teasers to their posts. In case if anyone has missed your posts on their feed, they can reach those posts through your stories.
4. Influencer Marketing
Influencer Marketing is a type of social media marketing where influencers, who have already established an army of followers on their page, give endorsements and do product placements of other brands.
People have developed the tendency to buy what they see on their feed. When a public figure promotes any product or service on Instagram, people get influenced and buy the same.
There are many different types of influencers on Instagram. These influencers could be posting fashion, health, lifestyle, or awareness-related posts. Very often, the influencers are more than happy to collaborate with the brands.
For your Instagram marketing, you should choose an influencer whose work is relevant to your product or service. In this way, you get to advertise your brand in front of thousands of followers that the influencers already have.
5. Be Creative with your Hashtags
Hashtags are the game-changer in Instagram marketing strategies. They are the way to instant engagement.
There are a few popular social media hashtag campaigns by some brands on Instagram, including #NationalFriedChickenDay by KFC and #ShareACoke by Coca-Cola. These hashtags have done wonders for these brands and have been one of the leading Instagram strategies for their marketing campaigns.
Hashtags are powerful. They hold a lot of value in driving traffic and brand awareness.
Apart from that, hashtags by brands can be used by the customers while posting user-generated content. Instagram has this feature of searching and following hashtags. It means that the audience can reach your brand page directly through hashtags.
You can use the tagline of your brand as a hashtag. Redbull did the same with its tagline – #givesyouwings.
6. Watch the post timing
Always post at the right time and don’t overdo it. You might have seen meme pages posting very frequently in a day. It works for them because people enjoy that. But as a brand, you should be aware of posting only a few posts in a day. You don’t want to bore your followers with your brand’s marketing posts.
You should post consistently so that your brand could be seen on your followers’ feeds daily and they don’t get frustrated by seeing your brand all over their feed.
Posting on only the peak times when your followers are active would be your best bet.
According to SimplyMeasured, Mondays and Thursdays are the best days to post, while Wednesdays and Sundays are the worst days to post.
If you’re looking for the right time to post, according to CoSchedule, it’s between 8:00 AM and 9:00 AM, and 2:00 AM.
Alternatively, you can check when your followers are the most active through Instagram insights.
7. Use user-generated content
There is a simple way of creating engaging content for your Instagram page. That is user-generated content.
You can leverage your followers to create useful content for your brand. User-generated content is often appreciated by followers as those are authentic and unpredictable.
Brands like MAC uses user-generated content very often. These brands use posts posted by their audience to display their products.
But how to get your audience to create posts for your brand? It’s quite simple. Tell them that you would post their content and that you would tag them. Your audience probably wants to increase their followers too. So, they would be more than happy to create content for your product. It is a win-win strategy for both you and your followers.
8. Post product teasers
Advertisement on social media can be a risky game. Sometimes you can scare off your followers with too much advertisement. So, what is a possible solution?
Instead of advertising your brand directly, you can post pictures and videos that don’t look like advertisement banners but casual and laid-back posts.
Product teasers in the form of creative posts, assisted by the marketing-oriented caption, will do the job of marketing for you without annoying your followers.
With your business account, you can add a CTA button on your post like “Install the app” or “shop now”.
One of the popular brands using this marketing strategy is Starbucks. They tease their audience by posting aesthetic Starbucks posts while announcing their offers.
9. Create Ads on Instagram
The best thing about creating sponsored ads on Instagram is that you get to pick your budget for advertising. You can create one sponsored ad or multiple sponsored ads with the help of the carousel feature on Instagram.
It helps brands in picking up the right target audience for their products and services. Instagram allows you to advertise your brand to your followers and everyone else who comes under your target audience.
For sponsored ads, create engaging ads that would cater to your target audience. You can also choose your high-performing posts and use them as sponsored ads for your potential customers.
10. Keep a track of your Instagram Metrics
If you want to improve your performance on Instagram, you need to understand your metrics right. Only after understanding how your posts and overall content are performing can you optimize your content accordingly.
The most obvious step here is to check your followers’ growth rate. If you see your followers growing, it means that your content is doing well so far.
Next, check your engagement rates. That is likes and comments. You need to check the engagement rate of your followers as well as the engagement rate of each post to see how your page is performing. Matter of fact, Pages with smaller followings have higher engagement rates.
Lastly, check your URL click-through rate. If your Instagram marketing strategies are on track, your CTR would be more. If not, you’ll need to rethink your Instagram marketing techniques.