Sweep Your Audience With Instagram Marketing

Instagram is the go-to app for every marketer. The free app offers a lot, especially to small businesses. From feeds to Instagram stories, and from IGTV to Live, there are several ways for marketers to expand their horizons and delight their customers. Videos on Instagram have the highest engagement rate across all features of the app. It is about 38% higher than the image posts.

If you’re a graphic designer, a creative artist, or own an apparel brand, you need to be creative as hell to catch your audience’s engagement. In this guide, I’m enumerating a few tried and tested ideas to get your ball rolling and take your marketing arsenal to the next level.

1. Play around with stories

We all know the power of Instagram stories. Their short lividness adds spunk and makes them a hot favorite of every marketer. Stories can be used to portray behind the scenes content that you don’t need to add as a post.  Along with that, you can experiment with different content types such as text embedded photos, GIFs, boomerang, and time-lapse videos.

Not just that, if you think some story posts are essential to keep beyond 24 hours of duration, you can put them in story highlights. Stories become more discoverable when you add locations and hashtags. Instagram stories have picked up the pace, and almost every brand is leveraging it.

2. Use free Instagram tools

There are ample free Instagram tools that show everything you need to gain traction for your brand.  Right from scheduling posts to editing photos and from creating video slideshows to creating story ads, these tools will enable you to stand apart from the crowd. Growing your tribe on an image-centric platform is challenging. With the right tools in hand, creating quality content, engaging the audience, and boosting sales become a cakewalk.

3. Switch to a business account

If you haven’t yet switched to a business account, then what are you doing? There are so many pros of switching to a business account that I can’t even count on my fingers.

Listing a few of them—

• You can gather data about your followers, such as impressions, reach, website clicks for free. Additionally, you can see how your posts and stories are performing.
• You can add contact information like phone number, email address, and website on your profile to enable people to get in touch quickly. If you’re a local business, you can also add an address.
• When you have 10k plus followers, you can use swipe up feature in stories and can directly take your audience to your website or landing page.
• Ad creation becomes seamless with an Instagram business account as you can set up promotions from the app itself.

Switching to a business account is an absolute must for brands looking to sell directly from their feed.

4. Create sponsored Ads

One of the best features of Instagram is that it shares data with Facebook. As a result, Instagram, just like Facebook, helps you to use psychographics and geographic targeting to cater to your customers. If your audience belongs to a specific age and demographics, you can target them by using Facebook Ads Manager. The best part is you can control your ad spend by setting a budget. Lately, Instagram launched a carousel feature that enables you to run multiple ads and spices up the advertising experience in a different way altogether.

Before sponsored posts came into the picture, only those users who follow you could see your updates. Now, brands like you can pitch to anyone and increase your brand’s awareness.

So you must be thinking which content shall I use in my Ad campaign? Well, use content that invokes your audience to take action (click on the post, to say the least). You can also use your top-performing posts as sponsored ads. Run a mixture of photos, videos, dynamic ads/carousels to attain engagement.

5. Reach out to influencers

The fastest way of growing business through Instagram is through influencers. They’re regular people who have built a considerable following over the time by offering unbiased and valuable opinions about different products and services. These days, the majority of people buy products that are recommended by the influencers. They trust them.

Mostly influencers cater to a niche service or product, but these days they’re widening their horizons and offering help for an array of things. If you partner with the right influencer, you can sell your products in front of the audience that is loyal to the influencer. Hence, this way you can widen up your customer base.

To find out which influencer to partner with, pick 2-3 influencers that have a significant follower base on Instagram. Check whether they’re into the same niche as you and approach them for a paid partnership.

Joining hands with influencers goes a long way as they play a vital part in introducing your business to a new audience, eventually boosting your brand’s awareness. If you play your cards right, who knows you’ll become the next Coca Cola or Nike!

6. Collect user-submitted photos

User-generated content does wonders for a brand. Just imagine how good it will be if your customers become your brand advocates? No, I’m not kidding! User-generated content makes it possible. When people like your content, they repost in their stories and feed. This, in turn, boosts engagement. The best part? Such user-generated content entices more users to promote your brand because of its authenticity and credibility.

So basically, it is like a chain reaction— when a few people share your post, it irks a few more to share it, eventually giving you the desired reach.

Now you must be wondering, how can you persuade your audience to create content without being too pushy? One simple trick is to let them know that you’ll tag them if they repost your content. This way, you’ll have user-generated content regularly, and they’ll get a chance to grow their following. Hence, it’ll be a win-win situation for all.

Along with that, you can run contests, product giveaways, weekly meetups, and so on to engage your customers.

It is always advisable to try and test things before you put out whether on your feed or on the story. Keep a tab on your engagement metrics and follower count to gauge what works the best for you.

Over to you

Instagram has dominated the social media world. It has become the go-to place for gaining traction from image sharing, with over 800 million monthly users. If you haven’t yet leveraged this social media platform, there’s no better time to start.

So there you have it, six power-packed Instagram marketing tips you must have in your marketing arsenal. Do let me know which of these worked best for you.