Instagram is becoming one of the most popular social media platforms, with millions of active users and with such a large number of people using the app, companies are quickly realizing the potential it has to market their products or services to potential customers and help them build brand awareness. Using Instagram, you can increase your online visibility and generate more business, more leads, and more money. According to the Instagram business website, 80% of accounts follow businesses on Instagram. Hence, Instagram is a platform drive with huge marketing potential.
In this blog post, we’ll take an in-depth look at Instagram marketing, helping you to optimize your strategy once you’ve decided to move forward with it.
What are some of the Instagram marketing tips to grow your business?
Use Instagram Business Account
Creating an Instagram Business account is essential for Instagram marketing because there are some features in the business account which are not available in a personal account. These features present in a business account enable tracking the audience insights, creating Instagram ads, accessing Instagram analytics tools, adding contact information and call to action button on the profile, and much more.
Set up goals
To effectively achieve the results, it’s very important to plan properly and be clear with what outcome you want to achieve with Instagram marketing. Your goals must be closely connected with the business needs or requirements. Most commonly set goals in Instagram marketing are increasing brand awareness, driving leads, selling through the app, building a community, reputation management, and so on.
Define your audience
This is an essential tip in Instagram marketing as without this you’ll not be able to achieve your business goals. You can define your target audience by creating a buyer’s persona and most importantly by closely looking at the demographics in Instagram insights like the age, gender, number of people interacting with your profile. Another way is to search for hashtags relevant to your business and posts related to those hashtags will be displayed. Thus, you can find the audience profiles who react with such posts by commenting, liking, etc.
Conduct Competitor Analysis
Researching about your competitors on Instagram, about what they are posting, who is their target audience, hashtags used by them, etc. gives you an idea of marketing accordingly in Instagram by implementing some positive factors. In addition to implementing some positive factors, it is also very important to point out the mistakes made by them so that you don’t follow them and thereby improve the presence of your profile.
Optimize your Profile
The Instagram profile includes various fields which need to be set up for the audience to recognize your business, to gain the first impression, and convey your brand to the audience. Only when the profile is created optimally considering all the fields in the Instagram profile the audience can differentiate your brand from others. The fields in the Instagram profile include Name, Username, Profile Photo, Website URL, Business Category, Contact information, and Call-to-Action Buttons.
Use Hashtags
This is similar to the keywords which when added to your Instagram posts helps to increase visibility and will be easily discoverable by the audience. Hashtags you use must be specific and relevant to your business and it’s always recommended to use up to 9 hashtags. This is because if you pile up the post with hashtags then your audience might not be able to find your profile.
How to analyse content performance on Instagram?
One of the biggest advantages of creating a business account on Instagram is that it gives access to analytics for free if you want to understand how your account is performing and how you can improve it. You need to check your analytics regularly as it is full of extremely useful information.
When you land on the Insights tab you will come across three options as follows;
1. Activity
This option is further split into two sections namely interactions and discovery. Interactions will cover what action people have taken when they engage with your account such as profile visits, website clicks, emails, and calls. The discovery tab uses two indicators, reach and impressions which essentially measures how many people see your content and these are very useful numbers. For instance, if many people see your content but very few interact with it, it probably means you need to improve the quality of it.
2. Content
The content metric will give you insights on all the content you have posted on your feed and is split between posts, stories, and any promotional activity you may have run. This information allows you o understand what type of post works and what doesn’t and help you shape your content.
3. Audience
The audience metric will help you understand and gather information about your audience such as how many more followers you’ve gained, displays where your audience is located, and even at which time your followers are most active. This information will help you understand when the most strategic time is to publish your content to get maximum reach.
Advantages of marketing on Instagram
Increased conversions
According to research, more than one-third of the people using the app have used it to purchase products which mean by marketing your products on Instagram, you have a higher chance of a conversion.
Advanced targeting options
Thanks to Instagram’s parent company Meta (earlier known as Facebook), Instagram has access to just about all advertising features offered by Facebook Ad. With this, you can advertise to people based on their age, location, gender, interests, and much more.
Better brand-follower relationships
You can stimulate conversion with your followers and build a connection with them. Additionally, you will get a better understanding of what your followers like and dislike based on their engagement. This enables you to create content they enjoy more and increase the chance of converting a user to a consumer.
