Instagram Marketing : The Ultimate Guide
When devising your internet marketing strategy, it is too common to forget about including Instagram in the mix. Instagram was launched in 2010 by Kevin Systrom and hit the mark of 1 billion monthly active users in 2018. It is the fastest growing platform (5% growth per quarter) with the largest engagement rate (2-7%). This fact makes it extremely crucial to include Instagram in your marketing strategy and recruit the right kind of people to manage the same.
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Instagram like other social media platforms acts as a customer touchpoint. It is defined as any point of interaction between your brand and a potential buyer or prospect. This social media platform helps you talk directly to your customers, initiate conversations, build trust, and grow your network and sphere of influence.
With the growing user base and engagement ratios, this is the perfect time to start concentrating more on your Instagram strategies and get the best out of it.
Here are a few ways you can get free followers, likes, and grow your network organically:
- Optimize your profile for SEO and make it clear to understand-
The first and foremost step in your Instagram marketing strategy should be optimizing your profile. The first thing that users see when they arrive on your account is your profile picture, your username, and your bio. Making it easier to understand what you do through these three mediums can help make more users hit that follow button. Many famous brands, marketing specialists, and influencers specify what they do through their bio.
Proper biostructure can be-
Line 1: Who are you or What you do?
Line 2: What are you helping with? (increases the credibility factor)
Line 3: About your/brand’s achievements
Line 4: Call to action (ideally your website link)
Including your niche beside your name can also provide clarity to your audience and make your profile search-friendly on google, bing, yahoo, etc. Take for example a marketing consultant-Jack Stevenson. Keeping his name just as “Jack Stevenson” is right but not that useful as his profile won’t appear when someone searches for “marketing consultant”. Rather he should name his profile as “Jack Stevenson | Marketing consultant”.
2. Post consistently and plan your posts-
To use any platform, you need a clear plan. That is when content calendars come to recuse. You must have heard that “Content is king”. It is true but posting quality content CONSISTENTLY works wonders. And how do you make sure you are consistent with your posts? You plan in advance. Content calendars take into account all the major events, national holidays, and brand campaigns and help you curate content accordingly. Stating out what to post and when to post gives you a clear path and helps save time. This way, you have more time to boost the quality of your content and make sure it is well-detailed.
3. Get creative with content and profile theme-
No one likes to follow accounts with boring and sale-sy content. Yes, it is right if you promote your product through your Instagram page but overdoing anything has repercussions. Instagram is a space where creativity and artistry rules and any type of content that is engaging wins. Make sure you relate your brand with all the hot topics of discussions and participate. One clear cut winner in this regard is Zomato India. They make use of humor to get more engagement and ultimately this technique helps them gain free followers.
4. Use Instagram features properly and effectively-
Instagram is a platform that is full of fun-to-use features. Stories, Reels, IGTV videos, Live videos have a lot of potentials and a high consumption rate too. Stories and reels in particular are largely consumed throughout the day by people. Producing 15-second videos (reels), polls on stories, QnA rounds on stories, quizzes, etc. is a great option nowadays as the attention span of people has reduced drastically. This type of content has a high probability to gain more traffic than normal posts and the engagement rate is higher too.
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5. Ask relevant questions to engage the audience-
Instagram is a social media platform that has the highest number of engagements. But it becomes a bit tricky to engage your particular set of audience with every post. A simple technique to use when your account’s engagement rates drop is asking questions. What is better than getting customer feedback on a one-to-one basis for a brand? Nothing.
Adding a personalized touch to your questions can interest your followers and tempt them to respond with an answer. Asking for actions like: “Drop an emoji to describe your day”, “What is your favorite song?”, “What do you like about our brand?”, “What type of content is interesting according to you?” etc can help improve your engagement ratio and engaging content ultimately wins!
6. Maintain a give and take relationship-
Social media is not a one-way street. It is a give and take relationship. Just making sure someone follows you is not enough. You need to keep your audience busy too. Hosting small contests like “Photography competitions”, “Like, comment and tag 3 friends to win the giveaway”, “DM us to get a discount”, at regular intervals helps entertain your social circle and make your account worth following.
7. Use efficient call to actions-
Attracting the attention of your prospects using fancy graphics or videos is a waste of resources if they disappear. Most efficient marketing messages give the recipient a single, clear, and very short action to take. It can be anything- Sign up, Call now, Register here, Learn more…anything that prompts an action. Keeping your call to action informative and to the point can help increase the number of conversions or boost the effectiveness of your campaign.
8. Plan your hashtags-
Using industry-specific hashtags makes your posts more discoverable and performs better. The major catch while selecting your hashtags is to not go for those with millions of posts already but go for those with around thousands. Including very specific hashtags makes your post reach the right and more users at the same time. For example- If your post is about some business strategy, using #business or #entrepreneur won’t help you that much. But using #entrepreneurialinsights or #businessstrategies may be better.
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9. Analyze your account-
One of the most overlooked techniques when it comes to Instagram marketing is measuring and analyzing. Instagram has some free tools that efficiently tell you about your followers’ demographics, gender, age..etc. They also let you know about every post’s engagement rate and provide insights that can help you stay at the top of your game. The tools provide information in the form of detailed reports that help you know which post is performing well and which isn’t.
10. Revisit your top-performing posts and recreate them-
Once you analyze your account and get to know your top-performing posts, it’s time to recreate them. Yes, you heard it right. Recreating by no way means copying. It simply means if your followers like a particular pattern of content once, they would definitely like something similar in the future.
Photo by Nikita Kachanovsky on Unsplash
Instagram is all about finding beauty in the mundane. Even their official website encourages you to curate distinct and compelling content to make your brand stand out. It takes a bit of effort but once you get your core strategies right, you grow organically. Free followers and likes don’t come magically; they are earned through experimentation, teamwork, and creativity. By tapping the emotion behind your brand, you attract more people and thereby expand your community.
