1. Set Up Your Business Account
Marketers can hardly experience the full potential of Instagram and benefit from its free tools unless they have a business account. It is therefore advisable to follow the prescribed step-by-step process to set up a business account of your own on the social media platform. It is only by doing so you can get to benefit maximally from the social platform’s most powerful features reserved for business users only.
2. Enhance your Business Profile
To enhance your business profile on Instagram, just follow the rules. Be sure your profile is brief enough and packed with sufficient aesthetics to be eye-catching. That is what helps to arrest the attention of users even if they are scrolling by very fast. Be sure the info you supply is within to the required limits and give the correct info only in the spaces provided. That is what helps to enhance your promo activities.
3. Use Eye-Catching Profile Photo
If you want to market successfully on Instagram, your branding efforts matter a lot. Consistent branding is vital to building credibility and earning the trust and loyalty of prospects and customers. Be sure your profile photo and or logo have the right aesthetics, sizes and are sharp enough to be attractive and appreciated by your users.
4. Create an Aesthetic Theme
A good aesthetic theme helps your branding and business credibility. You never know who will come around to view our profile. Whosoever they may be, your duty is to ensure they like what they see when they get to your profile. If you establish and follow an aesthetic theme, it creates coherency and somehow communicates a sense of professionalism for your business. In addition, an aesthetic theme helps users to quickly and confidently recognize your brand’s posts in their feed. That is good for branding. Your aesthetic theme doesn’t necessarily have to be too loud. What you need is simply a subtle visual thread that connects your posts well enough to boost the all-important brand awareness and recognition for your business.
5. Clearly Identify your Goals
It is not advisable to kick-start your Instagram marketing efforts without a very clear objective/goal. Using Instagram to market your business without clearly defined goals is like driving in an unfamiliar and uncharted territory without a map. Be sure to have a clear goal and a good strategy in place to achieve the goal(s). Build your goals around growing an audience, brand awareness, getting leads, making sales and growing your business.
6. Understand your Audience
You can better market to your audience if you know them well enough to be able to segment them for marketing purposes. The demographics to target include age, educational background, location, gender and such other important info that will enable you to package a marketing message for the right audience. The type of product or service you are marketing will also depend on what you know about the demographics of your audience. Not only do your target audience’s demographics define your content strategy, but they also play a major role in your sponsored advertising approach.
7. Know your Competitors Well
Experienced marketers like to advise other marketers to always keep an eye on their competitors. Be sure to follow what they do and how they do it. If you do a detailed competitive analysis, you can get to find out how other successful marketers in your niche benefit from Instagram and how they use it to their maximum advantage. The main aim of a competitive analysis however is not to just replicate what other marketers are doing, but to uncover what resonates with your own target audience and to recognize any untapped opportunities you can tap into for the benefit of your business.
8. Market with the Right Hashtags
The use of hashtags on Instagram helps boost business visibility. The platform may allow you to use up 30 hashtags per post but what you really need is fewer than 10 hashtags per post (depending on the length) if you don’t want the content to appear spammy. Be sure to use only hashtags that relate to your post. Avoid hashtags that are outside your niche or overly baiting. It is best to create and use your own campaign-specific hashtag. That is usually a more effective way to increase engagement, reach new audiences, and boost your follower count on Instagram.
9. Engage With Your Followers
Always remember that Instagram is a social media platform. If you want people to engage with your content, you must engage with theirs, too. Do not ignore user comments, questions, enquiries, likes and so on. Just keep the conversations going. That is what matters most in social media interaction. How you engage with other users contributes to your brand’s voice and relevance. Be consistent and appropriate in your engagements. If things escalate as they are most likely to do once in a while, do not cut the discussions. Explore the possibility of continuing the discussions privately maybe through direct messages or via email. Whatever the situation becomes, just be sure to keep the discussions going with the other parties in a civil manner.
10. Emphasize Visuals
Instagram is largely a visual social media platform. This means you must market to please the eye by using visual elements to attract, engage, and inform your target audience. Make sure you are real and the photos you post are real, authentic and visually attractive. People generally like to connect with people and you can connect better with Instagram users when they perceive you as real, natural and authentic. For this reason, the photos you post must be well focused and eye-catching. Your videos must be sharply focused, with closed captions, well lit and clear in audio. Your graphics must be crisp and easy to load.
11. Generously Share User-Generated Content
It is usually too tasking for a marketer to create and publish high-impact Instagram posts daily. There is a credible strategy you can use to get around that and still be able to have access to excellent and authentic content. That strategy is by deliberately sharing user-generated content. That is one great way to directly involve your customers to build a great community of active and interactive participants on Instagram. This relationship is mutually beneficial to all parties. If any of your customers publishes a high-quality image relevant to your brand, you can re-share this image to your business’s profile with a clear credit to the original poster by tagging their username in your own caption.
12. Convert Followers to Customers
Your first major assignment on Instagram is to build a credible following. Once established, you can strategically begin to convert them into loyal customers. This you can do by baiting them with promo deals and discounts, new products, running contests and special marketing treatments and so on.
13. Plan your Strategy with Marketing Insights
Marketers always have access to in-house Instagram insights. From these insights, they get to know the key performance metrics of their business. These key performance metrics include, engagement, post reach, follower demographics, impressions, and the number of views your Stories get. These are the key metrics marketers rely on to formulate marketing strategies and to refine existing ones. As a marketer, the more you know about your followers and what resonates with them, the more you can fine-tune your content to meet their needs and expectations. The insights from past marketing activities are thus very vital for marketers to plan for and work for the future.
14. Write Compelling Captions
Because Instagram is largely a visual medium, it is very important to write good captions for your marketing business. Just as is expected of the images you are using, your captions must be bold and compelling enough to reflect your brand’s personality and maintain consistency across posts. Keep an eye on the characters you use and the length of your captions. Typically between 100-150 characters is recommended. The shorter the better but it must be sufficiently informative since only the first two lines of your text appear in the feed. After these two lines, users who are interested in the rest of your text must click “more” to read the rest.
15. Take Advantage of Free Instagram Tools
The power of Instagram lies in the tools it makes available free for business owners. Many of these tools are tools created by third-party companies to enhance Instagram for business users. If you want to create high-quality and high-impact images, you can use Canva. You can use Caption Writer to format your business captions for maximum impact. You also have access to free photo editing tools and others.
16. Market with Paid Ads
Instagram ads are hugely effective because they can be targeted to specific demographics and they appear in both users’ feeds and Stories. Depending on the size of your marketing budget, you can also pay for and sponsor ads on Instagram. Sponsored ads can be highly engaging, appeal to your target audience better and can include CTA, Call-to-Action. That is what makes them to be highly effective. When you advertise on Instagram, do not forget that the visual is key to the effectiveness of your ads. When you sponsor ads, be sure that your caption is strong enough to compel your audience to take action. That is complimented with great images/graphics that can make your audience to stop scrolling and spare a bit of attention to what you are offering.
17. Be Consistent
From experience, it appears consistency is readily one of the most important ingredients for effective Instagram marketing. If your audience knows you make posts regularly, you earn valuable credibility. Consistency in making valuable and informative posts helps to enhance your engagement with your followers, run ads and build your following. Growth may be slow in coming but persistence ensures that it comes.
18. Open an Instagram Shop
If you have your own products to market, Instagram allows you to set up an online shop to directly market your products. However, you can only do so if you have successfully set up a business profile on the platform. In addition, you can tag products in your posts so that users can have the opportunity to instantly purchase any products that catches their fancy since they access your shop via your profile, their feed, or Stories.
19. Publish Content at the Right Time
Depending on the demographics you are targeting and the part of the world you are marketing to, timing your posts on Instagram tends to get very good results. Timing of posts aims to target the best times for driving engagement depending on the product, niche and need requirements.
20. Market with Influencers
There is credible evidence that many Instagram users make their buy decisions based on influencer recommendations. It is smart marketing on Instagram therefore to market with influencers. But first, the decision must be taken on who you want to target and market to. That is what helps you with the kind of influencer you need to approach. Generally, the size of followers an influencer has is a foremost consideration in deciding which to work with. An Influencer with say 5000 followers is not in the same league with the one that has 5 million followers. This directly affects marketing campaign costs because the more followers an influencer has, the more your marketing campaign will cost. Next is to determine what kind of influencer the audience you want to market to trusts. Influencers’ charges are based mainly on two parameters. They can charge for sponsored posts to their audiences, and if they directly recommend or endorse your products to their audiences. If influencer marketing is properly set up on Instagram, it can generate very good returns on investment.
