Starting as a platform for simply sharing the latest selfie and photos of favorite dishes, Instagram has grown into a supreme marketing stage where every business should make its appearance. Instagram marketing refers to all marketing activities that take place on the platform. Close to a third of marketers report achieving the highest ROI from Instagram, and almost three-quarters of U.S. companies use it as a marketing tool.
Have you started considering or leveraging this opportunity, too? Knowing how to use Instagram marketing will help you benefit from its potential. Your #1 priority is to understand how the Instagram algorithm works so that you can make sure your campaigns will make it to the right audience.
The truth is, the Instagram algorithm takes a great lot of criteria into consideration when deciding what content and in what order to show to each of its more than a billion users. Important factors are the user’s behavior and interests, their interactions with your brand, content relevance, type, timeliness, and more. Getting to know the nuts and bolts of the platform’s algorithm can be quite tedious and time-consuming.
That’s why we’ve set out to help you by providing tested and practical guidelines to make sure you reach your best audience. We’ll walk you through the whole process – from creating a marketing strategy to implementing it, to building a robust and thriving brand on Instagram.
First things first.
Why Use Instagram for Marketing?
Instagram is quickly becoming one of the most popular social media platforms for marketing your business. With the right strategy, Instagram can be an effective tool for building trust and credibility with your audience while increasing brand awareness and sales conversions. Here’s why you should consider Instagram for marketing:
Instagram Has a Large and Diverse Audience
With more than 1.4 billion users, the platform allows you to reach relevant audiences at scale, as well as build an authentic relationship with your customers. More than three-quarters of Instagram users are aged between 18 and 44 years old. This social media platform features high engagement rates making people spend a lot of time on their phones each day.
Users currently spend about 145 minutes every day on Instagram. This increases your chances to get enhanced exposure to audiences who are likely to be interested in your products or services.
Instagram’s Visual Nature Makes It an Excellent Platform for Showcasing Products
With its photo-centric culture, Instagram allows you to showcase your brand and your products in an authentic way that resonates with customers. What’s more, 54% of Instagram users are likely to make a purchase after seeing a product or service. The platform offers many features that make it easy for businesses to share their products and service-related content and boost brand awareness.
For example, if you own a hair salon or spa, Instagram is an ideal place to post before and after photos of hairstyles and facials. The potential clients can get a better idea of what they will look like after getting those services done. If you own a retail store, Instagram can be used to showcase your product line and show off your latest inventory additions. With that being said, Instagram is the key to B2C and eCommerce success.
How to Build an Instagram Marketing Strategy
If you want to get the most out of your Instagram marketing efforts, you need a plan for engaging with your customers and prospects. This means you should have a goal in mind for each post you create and an idea of how that post will help move the needle on your business goals.
So, how do you get started with your Instagram marketing strategy and why does it matter? There are several steps involved in building a successful Instagram marketing strategy, including:
Setting Your Instagram Marketing Goals and Objectives
This is an essential step you shouldn’t overlook as it will help give direction to your efforts. Making the expected outcomes clear will ensure that your time spent on social media is worthwhile. So, what do you want to achieve with your Instagram marketing activities?
There are two types of goals:
- Long-term goals, which are the final outcome you want to achieve. It’s what your company is striving to be and what you want to accomplish. The longer they are dated, the more flexibility you have in achieving them. An example of a long-term goal is growing a 50k following or increasing engagement in two years’ time.
- Short-term goals, which are smaller milestones that help drive towards larger ones. Short-term goals are usually related to sales targets, service levels, or other key performance indicators (KPIs). These can be reviewed on a monthly or quarterly basis, as well as annually as part of your budgeting process.
Here are a couple of the common Instagram marketing goals you can find relevant to your business.
Enhance Brand Awareness
This is the usual reason for launching a business on Instagram. You can establish a full-blooded presence on the platform letting your followers know more about your company values, life, and atmosphere. Instagram allows you to create and target a brand message that can make audiences see the people and the ideas behind your business.
Increase Your Following
Attracting new followers will increase your following base and will enable you to reach more potential customers.
Let Audiences Know About Your Products and Services
Instagram offers an additional channel where you can make your products and services seen by your existing and potential customers. You may aim at making your followers sense and want your product or service. With the right content, the platform allows you to create a vivid and appealing picture that can ultimately drive sales.
Sell Your Products/Services
Your Instagram marketing goal can also be to increase sales, which means that you’ll have to streamline your audience’s buyer experiences by providing them with the option to make the purchase directly within the platform. This is the goal of most of the B2C eCommerce brands on Instagram.
Increase Engagement
Instagram engagement is measured as the total number of audience interactions with a post. There are three main types of Instagram engagement: likes, comments, and shares. Shares are particularly valuable because they increase your post’s exposure and can attract new followers. When someone likes or comments on your post, it gains increased visibility in users’ feeds.
Having set your goals, go further by specifying the particular parameters associated with their accomplishment. For example, if you want to increase sales, set the specific numbers and amounts of sales you’re aiming at and the time allocated to achieving them. Clearly identifying your goals for Instagram will keep you focused and motivated when working on the platform.
Identifying Your Target Audience
It’s a critical step in developing an effective marketing strategy. It’s important to understand who you’re trying to reach and how they differ from other groups of people. Here are some questions that might help you define your target audience:
What Are Their Demographics?
Age, gender, race, income, and education level all play important roles in defining an audience. For example, selling luxury lady’s jewelry involves engaging with a completely different audience from the one you’ll have to attract if you sell cheap electronics.
What Are Their Interests?
Do they like reading or watching movies? Do they love cars or sports? What kind of music do they listen to? Answering these questions can help you create content that resonates with your audience. It can also give you ideas for additional products or services that cater to their interests.
Where Do They Live and Work?
What communities do they inhabit during their free time? The details will help you determine where your business should locate itself and how best to reach customers through advertising or public relations campaigns.
As an example, let’s say that you’ve invented a new type of shoe laces. It’s important to know who would be interested in buying these laces. You may think that everyone would want them, however, this isn’t true. You need to find potential customers who might need or want your product before going any further with development or marketing.
Create an Instagram Content Strategy and Calendar
An Instagram content strategy is a plan for creating a consistent and interesting stream of content.
To create an Instagram content strategy, start by identifying what type of posts you want to share on the platform. Let’s say you’re in the footwear industry. It may make sense for you to post photos of people wearing your products or offer tips on how to style shoes in different outfits. Then, think about what kind of photos/videos/comments people typically like on the platform and try to incorporate those into your posts as well.
Nike, for instance, offers a combination of product-related and lifestyle content, including useful tips on how to keep, dye, or glue your shoes.
Next, create a calendar. This will help you stay on track with your strategy and make sure you don’t miss any important deadlines.
Plan How to Establish a Consistent Brand Image on Instagram
Since the platform is so visual, it’s important that you have a consistent brand image both on Instagram and across all of your channels. This means that your Instagram profile should match the style of your website and other social media accounts. Also, use the same logo and color scheme in all of your photos. It’s often the first thing people will see when they search for your business.
What’s more, consistency helps viewers associate your brand with a certain style of photography or video production. Make sure that every post follows the same style. That way, people will know it’s from you when they see it pop up in their feed, even if there isn’t any text associated with it.
Identify Strategies for the Instagram Marketing to Grow Your Following
Once you’ve determined how to build a consistent brand on Instagram, it’s time to grow your Instagram following base.
Focus on the possible ways to build a social media following, such as engaging with audiences consistently, offering fun and useful content relevant to your customer profile, and using reels.
Choose the Right KPIs for Your Instagram Marketing Strategy
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the metrics that you use to analyze the success of your Instagram marketing efforts. There are some KPIs that work better for different types of businesses. It’s important to choose the right ones for your business and then track them consistently.
The most important thing to remember about KPIs is that they should be specific to the goals of your business. In other words, you can’t just choose any old KPI and expect it to help you become successful. You need to pick one that will help you measure how well your Instagram marketing campaign is doing at achieving the goals that are most important for your business.
Tips and Tricks to Level Up Your Instagram Marketing
Create Beautiful and Aesthetically Appealing Posts for Your Feed
Instagram is the best place to show off your brand’s visual identity. Remember that it’s overflowing with stunning photos and videos. How can you stand out and grab users’ attention? It’s important to make sure that you’re using high-resolution images.
Also, choose a specific theme for each post so your followers can easily recognize your posts. This can be anything from a specific color palette or style of photography to a certain type of photo styling.
Partner with an Influencer
Let’s say you own a restaurant and you want to promote it. You can hire an influencer who has a huge following in the food industry and get them to promote your restaurant. They might post a photo of their delicious meal at your restaurant with a caption that says something like, “Had the best dinner last night!” The more people who see that post, the more likely they are to visit your website or make a reservation at your restaurant.
You can also hire an influencer to post about how much they love your product or service. So if you sell high-quality cosmetics, ask an influential makeup artist if they would be interested in promoting your products on Instagram. Not only will this get your brand out there and spread awareness about what you sell, but it will also help establish trust among potential customers who follow these influencers.
Put Your Followers in the Spotlight
Your customers are your greatest asset. Focus on them by regularly sharing content delivered by them and expressing your gratitude for their purchases and participation in your marketing campaign and events. Posting on Instagram can be an easy way to show your customer appreciation.
Take advantage of Stories as they are one of the best ways to reach new audiences and engage with them in real time. Make sure your content is consistent with your brand image and voice as this is a primary factor for building a distinct business identity that stands out.
Engage with the Content of Users Relevant to Your Industry
Regularly check out the posts of people and organizations relevant to your industry and engage with them and their comments especially if they are industry thought-leaders.
In this way, you’ll gain visibility and you are likely to attract the attention of their followers who can easily visit your page and become your followers, too.
Schedule Your Instagram Posting for the Time When Your Audiences are Most Active
Scheduling your Instagram posts allows you to plan ahead of time what you’re going to post and when you’re going to post on Instagram. This can be extremely useful if you want your content to reach a specific audience at a specific time, without having to worry about posting manually when they might be online or offline.
For example, if you’re planning on posting three times per week, the best days are Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays between 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
This will help you get the attention your posts deserve.
How to Track Your Instagram Analytics
Instagram Analytics is a powerful tool that allows you to track important metrics about the performance of your account and the content you share. You can find out how many followers you have gained or lost over time, how many people have viewed and interacted with your content, and much more.
How to Use Instagram Insights to Track Your Audience
You can gain valuable insights into your audience, which will help you think of the most efficient strategies to engage with them. Here’s how Instagram helps you better understand your potential and current followers.
You Know Where Your Audience Lives
Instagram gives you a breakdown of where your followers are located. This is useful for local businesses looking to target customers in specific cities or towns.
You could potentially increase your sales by offering new products or services where people live. Tracking this information will also help you decide where to host events or hold webinars.
Instagram Allows You to See the Age Range and Gender of Your Followers
This useful feature helps you understand what kind of content will resonate with them. For example, if you have a lot of female followers, but they skew older than your ideal customer base (say, 30+), then you may want to consider targeting younger women in your marketing efforts.
What’s more, knowing the age of your audience can let you identify and focus on content topics that are likely to appeal more to them. This will enable you to target your ads more effectively and strengthen relationships with customers.
Gender is one of the basic demographics that can be tracked in Instagram Analytics. It gives you a good idea of how to market your products.
How to Use Instagram Insights to Track Your Content Performance
With Instagram Analytics, you can track which of your content is working, so you can make sure your time on the platform is well spent.
Go to your profile and tap Insights under your profile picture. This will take you to Instagram’s Insights dashboard. Now, under the Content You Shared section, you’ll find a lot of information about the effectiveness of your content, such as the number of viewers, interactions, etc. Let’s take a closer look at the metrics you can get for each type of content.
Posts
The following data will help you understand which posts are most successful:
- Impressions – The number of times your post has been viewed by other accounts on Instagram. It doesn’t include direct views from your own account (including the repetitive views from one and the same account).
- Reach – The number of unique accounts that have seen your content (excluding the repetitive views from one and the same account). Reach includes impressions and direct views from your own account.
- Engagement rate – This measures how well the Instagram users resonated with your posts by showing the number of likes, comments, shares, saves, website taps, call and email button taps, and other interactions. You only need to select the metric you need to track, and you’ll have the figures at your fingertips.
Stories
Instagram has unique metrics for the Story feature. There are:
- Taps Forward – This is the number of times a user has tapped the right side of their screen to view your next story.
- Taps Backward – This is the number of times a user has tapped the left side of their screen to view your previous story.
- Exited – It reveals how many viewers left your story before it ended.
- Next Story – It’s the number of times an Instagram user jumped to the story of the next Instagram user.
- Link Clicks – It tracks how many times an Instagram user has swiped up on an Instagram story to follow your link.
Reels
Instagram Reels collects data such as
- Plays – It’s the number of times when an Instagram user has played your Reel (including the repetitive views from one and the same account).
- Reach – It reveals how many unique Instagrammers viewed your Reel (excluding the repetitive views from one and the same account).
- Saves – This is the number of times when a user bookmarked your Reel
Besides the above-mentioned metrics, Reels also have Comments and Likes analytics.
Live Videos
With Instagram Analytics, you can track the performance of your videos:
- Peak Concurrent Viewers – It tells you the maximum number of Instagram users who watched your video live at any given time.
- Comments
- Reach
Empowered with all these valuable figures, you can know the effectiveness of all your Instagram marketing efforts and adjust them accordingly. As a result, you’ll be able to optimize your strategies. The insights you’ll gain are particularly useful when it comes to running paid ads as you can easily calculate their ROI and keep your spending under control.
Conclusion
Marketing on Instagram is an excellent way to build your brand, connect with customers, drive sales and achieve your goals.
While each strategy appears simple on the surface, they all require considerable thought to be effective.
Before you start your own Instagram marketing campaign, it’s critical that you understand who your target audience is. The more refined your messaging is, the better chance you have of standing out and capturing their attention. Done right, an Instagram marketing campaign can help your brand grow.
The takeaway? Do your research, be consistent, and use all the features Instagram offers. Remember that quality matters over quantity.
So, get out there and make Instagram marketing work for your brand.
