Instagram marketing is competitive.
More than 25 million companies use the platform to capture attention, incite interest, create desire, and compel action.
With so many competitors, a thoughtful, proven strategy is important for success.
The following tips will allow you to shape that strategy.
But first, you have to set up an Instagram for business account. Ok, here are 9 Instagram Marketing tips to fuel your strategy
1. Optimize your bio
Aside from your enterprise name, username, and website URL, your Instagram profile gives 150 characters for writing a bio.
Your bio is a chance to make a first impression, to articulate what your business provides and why people should care. Your bio needs to explain who you’re and what you do while conveying your brand’s identity.
That is difficult once you only have 150 characters at your disposal, so it’s essential to maintain your copy:
- CLEAR: Use short, easy words and separate your text with line breaks.
- CONCISE: Use emojis to rapidly create a sense of brand personality in a few characters.
- COMPELLING: Use a CTA, or call-to-action, to tell visitors what they need to do next.
That mentioned if your tagline communicates everything people need to know without emojis and in less than 150 characters, use it, like GQ:
2. Choose the right profile picture
Before visitors ever read your Instagram bio, they’ll see your profile image. It’s your first impression.
Therefore, the suitable profile picture for a Business Instagram account is normally your logo.
Your logo needs to be clear and uncut by Instagram’s trademark circle. In case your logo is a square, for instance, just zoom out, like Home Depot:
3. Establish your brand’s “look” on Instagram
Establishing your brand’s look on Instagram means making a sense of visual consistency on the platform.
Visual consistency is essential because it makes your brand’s photos instantly recognizable in a sea of other content. This increases the opportunity that people will engage (e.g., like or comment) with your posts.
“Since your purpose is to get Instagram customers to stop scrolling once they see your picture,” explains Sarah Dawley, Senior Copywriter at Hootsuite, “the more instantly recognizable your pictures are, the better.
This could be achieved by utilizing the same filter on every picture, no exceptions. For instance, notice how 33 Acres Brewing Firm uses the same, white-color pallet filter across every post:
“Scrolling via their feed, the style rapidly becomes familiar,” explains Dawley, “and you begin to associate photos that meet these characteristics with the brewery.”
4. Create compelling content
Compelling content drives action. It makes people want to share, comment, and click on.
However before you could make somebody take action, you have to first get their attention, a finite commodity. That mentioned, there are several proven content formats that make people stop scrolling and focus. This embrace:
Behind-the-scenes shots
Use this kind of content to introduce and showcase the people behind your enterprise.
Behind-the-scenes photos and videos humanize your brand, reminding followers that your enterprise is the product of community and collaboration, people working together to create something greater than themselves.
You could create posts that profile executives, showcase your office, or function employees hard at work (or not!). Anything that provides outsiders and inside look, like this:
Quotes and text-based photos
People love reading quotes they understand and could relate to, which makes this an easy yet effective strategy to boost engagement.
You could create text-based content that leverages:
- Quotes from influential people in your area
- Industry-specific facts or statistics
- Reviews from happy customers
Anything that’s valuable and simple to consume, like this:
Daily hashtags
It is a great method to focus your content, making a theme that offers your audience something they instantly recognize and even look forward to. It’ll additionally help you generate ideas in a pinch.
You could create classic hashtags, like #tbt (Throwback Thursday), which most people know. Or you could create something new, something unique to your enterprise.
Anything that’s entertaining or inspiring, and provides people a theme to latch onto, like this:
5. Master the little-known features and hacks
Do you know you can:
- Change the color of individual letters or words to create your text stand out?
- Cover your Story from particular users to make segmented messaging?
- Add line breaks in your bio to make it simpler to read?
Instagram is a deep, feature-rich platform that anybody can use to create unique content. Mastering these little-known options and hacks will make sure that you’re utilizing Instagram to its full potential, creating content for somebody rather than just anybody.
6. Partner with relevant influencers
A paid partnership with a relevant influencer (i.e., a popular account that shares your audience and/or industry) is a proven method to drive attention to your enterprise.
However, not all influencer partnerships are made equal.
According to Lee Vosburgh, who created the blog Style Bee and the Instagram account @LeeVosburgh, there are several questions you need to ask yourself as you consider the right influencer to work with, including:
- “Does this influencer’s brand align with mine in terms of values, aesthetics, and personality?”
- “Is their pictures of the style and caliber you want your merchandise associated with?”
- “Are the brands and merchandise they have previously worked with similar to mine?”
You also need to plan to pay for your partnership.
“The bottom line,” writes Vosburgh, “is that free product won’t pay the rest and the work is value real if it’s going to generate sales for a brand.”
7. Select hashtags wisely
In the battle for attention, hashtags are a potent tool.
Used well, a hashtag can drive hoards of net-new guests to your post, profile, and brand. But when the hashtag is misleading—if it’s overused or irrelevant to the content altogether—it could be extremely counterproductive.
Why? Because when a user follows a hashtag and sees something they don’t like, they could choose the “Don’t Show for This Hashtag choice:
“This function is designed to show the Instagram algorithm what content a specific user likes,” explains Hootsuite editor, Michael Aynsley. “No, there’s no such thing because of the Instagram ‘shadowban.’ But when too many of your posts are flagged, it’s reasonable to assume your content could be shown less often (or not at all).”
When creating hashtags:
- Be relevant (i.e., stuffing hashtags is considered spammy)
- Be particular (i.e., target niche audiences with tags they’ll recognize)
- Be careful (i.e., ensure the hashtag means what you think it means)
- Be concise (i.e., short hashtags are simple to keep in mind)
8. Get on the Explore tab
The quickest method to increase your brand’s visibility is to get onto the Explore tab.
The Explore tab is the place users discover curated content based on their previous actions and engagement patterns. In other words, Instagram watches what you do on the platform (e.g., the posts you like, share, and comment on), then populates your Explore tab with related content.
Instagram additionally sources content with high engagement as well as content from accounts similar to these the user already follows.
It’s all about data and pattern recognition, which begs the question: How do you get your content on the Explore tab?
While there’s no hard-and-fast way, there are several things you could do to increase your chances:
Know your audience:
Who’s your target buyer? What interests her? Who does she already follow on Instagram?
Reverse engineer, your audience to truly understand what moves them to engagement.
Use hashtags:
Hashtags are the best method to make your content discoverable, to get it in front of net-new eyeballs. Hashtags enable people to search out your content, which is why every marketer have t use them.
When you study the do’s and don’ts of using hashtags, your content will enjoy more engagement— and that can land you on the Explore tab quicker than you think.
Which brings me to my next point…
Encourage engagement:
The more likes and shares and comments an Instagram post gets, the more likely it’s to appear on your target audience’s explore tab.
Encourage engagement by geotagging your posts and mentioning other relevant accounts in your captions. The more relevant you make your post to other people and brands, the more action you stand to compel.
9. Target the right viewers with adverts
When you’re in a competitive area, you may consider using Instagram adverts to market your brand.
Instagram provides 5 advert formats: movies, carousels, images, canvas Story adverts, and Story adverts. Each format is incorporated into your target audience’s Feed or Story, creating it hard to miss.
After all, you possibly can develop your Instagram presence organically, with out spending a cent. However this may take time. Should you don’t have time, adverts will allow you to get the place you’re going quicker.
That will help you with this, we’ve put collectively an Instagram advertising guide for marketers.