If you want to make the best out of the Instagram platform, you will need to remain most active on the platform. With more than 500 million business accounts on this platform as off now, this is the only thing that will help you to be visible and at the same time reach out to more and more to your potential customers living in all parts of the world.
Instagram, in fact, is the most popular social network that provides all businesses a greater opportunity and a far more effective launchpad for their product and brand promotion. However, you will not be able to achieve it by doing nothing as the platform will not do anything on its own. You will, in fact, have to make it work for your business benefits.
Instagram marketing strategy
In order to improve your Instagram marketing strategy, you will need to:
- Increase the number of your followers for Instagram
- Make sure that this number remains steady and consistent
- See to it that more and more people come in contact with you and your brand
- Follow your customers and make sure that they too follow you on Instagram
- Know the ways in which you can reach to a larger section of the audience more easily and effectively
- Find out and analyze the different metrics that will help you to see whether your marketing efforts are paying or any amendments therein are required.
In short, you will need to be alert, agile and active in order to make the best of the platform and potentially reach to a larger audience every time you post.
Use Instagram tools
There are specific ways in which you can do this and help your business to grow and make your brand and product promotion more successful, for free.
One such way is to take advantage of free Instagram tools. These are the specific and useful tools that Instagram has rolled out especially for the business profiles. These tools resemble much to the business profiles of Facebook and are include a call to action. This helps the users in many ways such as:
They can click on it and visit the official site of the business
- Make a purchase
- Make a call and
- Send an email or text the business.
In addition to this contact option, the business profiles also have easy access to a lot of analytical tools that will help them to assess and remedy their marketing strategies, if required.
These analytics are called Insights and these give the businesses access to different types of data such as:
- Impression rate
- Engagement data
- Bounce rate and others.
It in only when you know about the actions performed, the preferences and behavior of your user more, you will be able to know how they are interacting with your content. If you find anything lacking, you can make the necessary alterations as soon as it is detected before things go out of your control. This will ensure that you have a steady flow and engagement of your followers.
Therefore, if you want to take advantage of all these tools firsthand, you will first need to change your personal Instagram account into a business profile, if you do not have already.
Focus on cross-promotion
In this modern and fast-paced business world, you will not get the desired results if you rely only on one specific social media channel. If you really want to make a better promotion and online presence, you will need to focus on cross-promoting your Instagram posts. This is because:
- Your posts will not reach out to everyone on social media who are connected to your brand. There will be a few who will move away from a few specific social media platforms.
- It is also due to the reason that there will be a few users who will be less or not active on one particular platform but maybe excessively active on another social media network.
If you want to get them all on the same page, you will have to ensure that you reach out to all of your social media followers and connect with them in the best ways possible. This will ensure that you increase the reach of each of your post. This will help you in lots of ways such as:
- It will help you to easily add new Instagram followers to your account
- People will come to know and love your brand more and
- You will have another useful way to get connected to them and also provide them with another way to get connected socially to your brand at the same time
Therefore, you should put some effort to post your content across all of your other social media profiles in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others. This will provide these social followers with an open invitation to follow your Instagram profile. This they will readily do because they are already following you on social media and will surely want to know more about your offers.
Shift the Focus to Your Audience
Ever heard of user-generated content or UGC?
User-generated content includes photos, videos, posts, and reviews that are created by users, customers, or clients. Many marketers use UGC to put the focus on their audience or customers and promote their product without creating their own content. And it works well.
That’s because customers trust other people and other people’s posts more than they trust marketers. They believe that UGC shows them an unfiltered, noncurated look of the product.
UGC is used by many businesses on social media platforms, especially Instagram. So how do you encourage customers to create content about your product or service? Here are a few ways:
- Use Instagram-worthy customizable packaging tape and boxes for your products.
- Organize online giveaways and contests.
- Use a hashtag for your brand, products, or events.
- Organize internet challenges.
- Start a customer poll or survey.
- Conduct expert interviews.
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Delve into your customers’ personal stories related to your business.
Ninety-two percent of customers believe recommendations coming from fellow customers over those made by marketers. User-generated content is authentic and realistic, which makes it believable and trustworthy.
Post enough but do not overwhelm
At no point of time, you should overwhelm your audience or annoy them with posts that are either boring or very pushy to make a sale.
However, you will certainly need to post often to keep your content looking fresh, interesting and relevant. The best way of approach is to maintain a posting schedule and calendar so that you post the right thing at the right time. This will reduce, if not eliminate the chances of any follower or followers unfollowing you.
Therefore, in order to make sure that you are not in their face constantly, you will need to test your audience and find out how they respond to your posts. You may post twice daily at alternating times of the day, experiment with more and fewer posts in a day and pay real attention to the engagement metrics. Post frequency optimization is ideally a never-ending process.
This way you will find the sweet spot and improve your Instagram marketing efforts significantly to increase your following.
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