In this digital era, it is absolutely crucial for your business to have a strong online presence. Having a strong online presence maximizes your audience reach, increases your customer base, and ultimately builds your brand.
Social media marketing is one of the best ways to enhance your business on digital landscape. The primary reason for this lies behind the fact that social media has become an integral part of everyone’s life. In fact, most of the social media users don’t even realise how they tend to see ads so frequently in their newsfeed.
Certainly, social media marketing is a powerful way of bringing remarkable success to your business. Today, there are many social media platforms available. Many of them are extremely popular and have massive audience! One of the most popular and amazing social media platforms is “Instagram”.
Instagram is considered to be the best social media marketing platform to boost engagement rate. Wondering why?
Since its launch in 2010, Instagram has been growing. It has morphed from being a trendy photo-sharing app to the most influential social media platform that businesses use to target their potential customers.
Instagram is the sweetheart of social media marketers!
More than one billion users are active on this popular social media platform, and over 95 million posts (photos and videos) are shared by Instagram users per day.
In fact, businesses have started using this growing platform to promote their products, and improve their brand image. Today, Instagram has more than 25 million business profiles and two million advertisers.
Undoubtedly, it is a powerful marketing tool that helps businesses to expand their online presence and boost the visibility of their products.
If you haven’t joined the bandwagon yet, then it’s high time to leverage the power of this impeccable social media platform and take your business to new heights of success.
Today, most of the brands are incorporating Instagram marketing into their business strategy. However, in this highly competitive business world, it’s not easy to win the game of Instagram marketing.
Well, it’s competitive, but not impossible!
8 Powerful Instagram Marketing Tips
Following are the fascinating Instagram marketing tips that help you shine your business in the digital era:
Tip #1: Switch to A Business Account
Before stepping into the journey of Instagram marketing, make sure you have a business account. A business account has several features that help you to improve your Instagram marketing efforts. It gives you access to insights, ads, shopping, and allows you to add contact information with a call-to-action (CTA) button on your profile.
Having a business account not only helps you plan your feeds, but also enables you to publish your posts during the most active hours to get more engagement.
So, if you want to establish your brand presence on Instagram, then you should create a business account first.
Tip #2: Understand Your Audience
No matter how strong your marketing techniques be, but if they do not appeal to your potential customers then it’s waste of time.
So, it’s important to understand your targeted audience. Take time to determine your targeted audience and create content that attracts them. You can even try Instagram insights!
Well, Instagram insights are an analytics tool that helps you understand your followers and other people interacting with your business.
This analytics tool provides you some amazing insights such as impressions, website clicks, followers’ activity, video views, reaches, saved content, age, gender, and more.
All these insights are sufficient to understand your audience. Understanding your audience can improve your Instagram marketing efforts and help you get better results. The more you know about your audience, the higher your chance of success will be.
Tip #3: Use Relevant Hashtags in Your Instagram Posts
If you are a social media marketer, then you must know the value of hashtags on Instagram.
Hashtags are one of the most important aspects of Instagram marketing. It makes your content searchable and helps you get more and relevant engagements.
There are two types of hashtags – General & Branded.
General hashtags are the hashtags that anyone can use according to the type of the post. Some the popular hashtags are #photooftheday, #instagood, #nofilter, #tbt, #nature, #igers, #love, #picoftheday and more. You can use them to drive the audience to your post.
On the other hand, branded hashtags are the specific hashtags that you create especially for your brand. Such hashtags can be your brand name, your product’s name, or anything unique. In fact, you can use general and branded hashtags together to get better results.
Well, Instagram allows you to add 30 hashtags in a post but, this doesn’t mean that you should overload your posts with lots of hashtags.
In order to get the desired Instagram marketing results, you need to use them strategically. Using hashtags strategically improves your reach, and connects your brand with the relevant audience.
Tip #4: Work with Influencers
Influencers prefer Instagram the most!
Therefore, influencer marketing on Instagram is an amazing and effective way to expand your reach, promote your products, and improve your brand image. It is the fastest way to reach out to your prospective customers and outshine your business among your competitors, in the entire digital world.
Instagram influencers have millions of loyal followers who trust their recommendations. Partnering with the right influencer allows you to present your brand or offerings in front of those millions of followers. Isn’t it great?
However, in order to get the desired results, you need to choose the right influencer. Choose an Instagram influencer whose profile matches with your business industry, and has a relevant audience. Many big brands like Nike, Samsung, Adidas, Amazon, and Myntra use influencer marketing to enhance their visibility and boost sales.
Haven’t you worked with any social media influencer yet? This is the high time to give it a try!
Tip #5: Cross-Promote On Other Social Media Platforms
This is one of the best ways to win the game of Instagram marketing. In this tech-savvy world, most of the people use at least three social media platforms. You may also have your business page on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc with many fans and followers.
Then, why not invite them all to follow you on Instagram as well?
With the help of cross-promoting, you can get more exposure to the content of your Instagram page, improve your brand image, and reduce the cost of creating new content for different social media channels. If performed correctly, this technique will help you amplify your online presence, and increase your customer base.
Tip #6: Take A Sneak Peek into Your Competitors’ Accounts
New to Instagram? Have no idea where to start?
The best thing is to see what your competitors are doing!
Observe them and get ideas! Check the type of content they post, posting frequency, the hashtags they use, their style of writing captions, and so on. Also, take a note of the number of followers they have, and the engagement they get on their posts.
This will help you understand their working techniques and give you proven ideas that you can include in your own Instagram marketing strategy.
Tip #7: Post Instagram Stories
Instagram stories mean ephemeral content, that disappears after 24 hours.
Initially, this may sound you like a terrible idea but it’s not. In fact, people love to engage with ephemeral content. Actually, ephemeral content works on FOMO – Fear of Missing Out, and drives more engagement.
Creating and sharing Instagram stories is a great way to improve your brand awareness and increase engagement rate. These stories keep your followers engaged and drive better results than regular Instagram posts. In fact, Instagram stories are easier to create than the normal posts.
You can also add filters, stickers, and emojis to make your stories attractive. So, if you want to attract more people on Instagram then you should start posting appealing Instagram stories.
Tip #8: Include Video in Your Instagram Marketing Strategy
Instagram is not just for posting pictures, you can post videos too! In fact, posting engaging videos, drives more engagement than photos. There are several ways of posting videos on Instagram.
You can share up to one-minute clips on you feed, 15-second clips on stories and up to 10-minute video on IGTV. Sharing videos boosts interaction rate, and helps you stand out among competitors.
In The Nutshell!
Gone are the days when Instagram was just a photo-sharing app! Things have changed now. Today, Instagram is the most interactive social media platform. Now, you can use stories, reels, IGTV, and even run ads to boost your business on Instagram.
It’s no secret that Instagram marketing is extremely competitive, but with the right strategy, you can win this game. Also, don’t rely on a single Instagram marketing strategy, update it according to the results.
Always keep in mind that consistency is the key to the successful social media marketing. You have to be consistent with your efforts. The moment you stop, you will lose!!
So, be creative and consistent to propel your business to new heights.
About the Author!
Sachin Agrawal is an Enterprise Architect and heads up Business & Technology at Tarika Technologies. He carries expertise and a flair for writing on Management Consulting, Software & Analytics and Digital Media. Apart from distilling his technical ideas into creating innovative solutions, he is a practitioner of Haidong Gumdo and at his leisure, taps the Cajon and strums his Guitar!
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