If your business doesn’t have an Instagram handle in this era, you’re lagging behind. If you sell any type of physical product, if you own shops, or if you want others to recognize your business, it’s time to get an IG account. You cannot ignore the popularity of this social network (or the value of social media marketing in general). Since it’s a part of our daily lives, it’s vital for many businesses.
To be successful, there are a number of things you have to understand and have in place first. Let’s start by talking about your audience.
Understanding who you are marketing to on Instagram
The first and most critical step is to understand your audience, regardless of your marketing genre. Your Instagram content might be the most beautiful in the world, but if it doesn’t attract your target audience, it’s futile. Take some time out to know the people that make up your target audience. Since you’re using the platform for marketing, you need to ascertain if they are potential buyers or not, or if they can help in building your brand.
So, how do you go about developing an understanding of your audience? Here are a couple of tips to get you started.
Tools for uncovering insights into your Instagram audience
You can try IG insights. The advanced tool offers some fascinating insights into those following your account and interacting with you. These include
- Impressions
- Reach
- website clicks
- video views
- follower activity and saves.
Insights also entail demographic details, enabling you to know where your followers and fans come from. You can gain insight into both their gender and age.
Power of social media listening
A listening tool is also handy. Social listening unveils social media conversations. A good and strong listening tool tells you what others say about your industry or brand on IG.
Now that you understand your audience, it’s time to shift your focus to growing that audience and boosting your stats.
Boosting your Instagram presence
Instagram is much more than a mere photo and video sharing social platform. It provides an ideal opportunity for brands to show insights for their core business identity in an engaging, creative and visual manner. Hootsuite offers this capability, but there are a lot of others. This article offers some insight into 10 tools for conducting social media listening.
Let’s look at a few ways you can boost your number of followers and the level of engagement on IG.
Tending to the look of your Instagram profile
Choosing an Instagram aesthetic is the first step. Looks are paramount on IG. You need to imbibe a general business aesthetic for your account and retain it. It will help you draw the right audience and build relationships that create an active community. For instance, a lifestyle and food account might stick to detailed and brighter snaps, whereas a fashion account might contain sexy and sleek images.
You can use apps like Mextures and VSCO for consistency. Maintaining a consistent and compact look is also important. You need to limit your filter range to one or two.
You can then apply them to each photo. Having a particular set of filters can also be very handy in building a niche for your profile. It will also help you build business recognition.
Interact with your followers
Interacting with your followers through catchy captions is another safe method. Involve your viewers as much as you can in your pictures and captions. It will make them feel like your story’s integral part.
Go beyond photos and add video
Adding videos to your account is also crucial. Pictures are great, but videos also help enhance your engagement rate. The video enhancement tools are effective in generating engagement.
Use tools and resources to simplify the process
There are tons of great resources available for managing your company’s Instagram pages.
One that I prefer is Jarvee, an automated Instagram bot that helps grow your audience. Paying isn’t for everyone, but I like this particular tool.
Incorporating hashtags to boost your presence
Your objective on Instagram is to draw and engage your audience daily, while also growing your follower count. Posting engaging, interesting, and new photos will gratify their primary requirement, but to grow your business, it’s critical to get into the right hashtagging zone.
But just how do you do this? Read on to find out.
Tips to maximize the use of hashtags on Instagram
So, which can be the best hashtags? Take a clue from Twitter and any other social media platform. Instagram users use specific hashtags over customary ones. If you use the popular ones within your pictures, you’ve a great chance to reach new audiences and let others discover you.
As of the time I wrote this article, the top 10 hashtags were:
- #love
- #instafood
- #photooftheday
- #fashion
- #beautiful
- #happy
- #like4like
- #cute
- #followme and #tbt.
That said, you can dig a bit deeper and search for trending hashtags specific to your business. For example, here’s a search involving the term beach that might apply to a company that sells beachwear.
Going more in depth for e-commerce
If you have an ecommerce business, for every product category or product, you need to do some research and find the most popular ones around those particular item categories. You need to use hashtags for brand keyword, product category, and location-specific keyword.
Timing is critical
Posting at the right time is very pivotal as well. In addition to adding the right or viable hashtags and implementing the best filters, you need to consider the timing of your content as well. A targeted and systematic approach is to evaluate things that have worked for you and those that have flopped.
Importance of being active
The unspoken (and oft written about) rule of any social media plan is to be more than a mere content publisher. You need to involve yourself more. On Instagram, your involvement means following other influencers, brands and people, engaging in your post’s comment section and also in other’s. You have to publish gripping content for prospective clients and mention them with an @.
Here are a few tools for engaging your audience and maintaining an active presence.
Word of mouth is great publicity
Using testimonials is another viable method. If you are the only one publishing info about your company, it can come off a bit biased. Testimonials can be a great away to get away from the biased content you publish about how great your brand is and let your customers do the talking for you.
The power of one peer making a recommendation to another is what defines the power of testimonials. Testimonials are a potent element of all types of marketing program or funnel.
Be consistent with your branding
Sticking to a single branded theme is another crucial step. Branding is a crucial part of content creation. Do remember that users are more comfortable with your business only if they perceive or recognize it. With better and more seamless brand recognition, you can grow more quickly.
Be trendy
It’s also important to incorporate trending and popular topics in your content. If you know what users already have in mind, you can get some serious tips to propel your social engagement.
Leverage the power of local
Build, strengthen and sustain and your Instagram community by crafting and reposting local stuff. Reposting local and regional content is a great way to enhance your brand’s reputation on the platform.
You can reign in your local folks by reposting material routinely. Check what local brands and local followers, or local celebrities are talking about. Not only will your post make that person feel great and important because you’ve featured their content in your business, others will notice it too. You can take it one step ahead by mentioning a “shout out” on their page.
It can help you tap their audience and even more individuals in your local community. In every way, it’s a win-win situation for you. It’s also crucial to maintain a proper brand identity.
Armed with the insights above presented throughout the article, you’re now set to boost your Instagram presence to help grow your business.
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