How to Build Your Instagram Marketing Strategy: 5 Essential Steps
More than one billion people use Instagram regularly, and 90% of the users follow at least one business on the increasingly-popular social network.
With these types of numbers, it’s not surprising that Instagram marketing has become a top priority for businesses of all sizes. The accessibility and the wide range of opportunities that the platform offers are hard to match, and the growth of the Instagram user base will ensure that it stays that way in the future as well.
But when it comes to building an effective Instagram marketing strategy, things aren’t as simple as creating a few posts. You need to understand how to reach your target audience and get their attention in an often-crowded feed.
So, in this article, let’s explore the most critical aspects of developing an effective Instagram marketing strategy that you should know.
1. Set Up Your Instagram Account
While there are many steps that go into creating an effective Instagram marketing strategy, it all begins with setting up your account. While the process might seem straightforward, setting up an Instagram account for your business will require a bit more effort.
First, you’ll need to create a new account and fill in the necessary information, which is more or less similar to what you’d do for a personal account.
But when customizing your profile, you’ll need to consider how to ensure that it stays on brand and highlights what your company is all about. Think about the type of logo or profile image that you want to use, as well as the description text, as it will be one of the first things people will see.
It’s essential to use your Bio to encourage users to take action, such as visiting your website, following your social media profiles, or even checking out your hottest offers.
If you want to have more control over how you manage your account, you should consider using some of the best Instagram management tools. Using these tools, you can schedule posts, send push notifications, and keep track of your performance.
2. Determine Your Goals
When building an Instagram marketing strategy, it’s important to understand that it’s not an end-all solution, but rather a tool that can help you achieve your business goals.
Therefore, if you don’t want to get overwhelmed with the possibilities, it’s a good idea to clearly establish what you want to achieve and lay out a path that you can take to get there.
For most businesses, the primary reason for using Instagram is to showcase their products and make more sales. Whether it’s posting on your own account or using micro-influencers to generate more interest, visually-engaging posts have proven to be very effective at getting people interested in what you have to offer.
Instagram is also great for highlighting your products’ unique benefits, especially if they solve a specific problem or help people overcome an obstacle in their life.
Finally, many companies don’t even promote their products directly. Instead, they choose to use Instagram as yet another platform to raise brand awareness, blending their own posts with user-generated content, and keeping their brand in their audience’s minds.
3. Figure Out Who You’re Targeting
Your audience is the primary reason why you should join Instagram. So, it makes sense that you make decisions based on what your audience expects and wants as well.
And when you’re a brand, you probably already have a relationship with your audience on your website, other social media platforms, and email. Therefore, you should maintain consistency if you don’t want to confuse and overwhelm the people you want to turn into customers.
But while the demographics and key traits of your audience might be similar, you should also think about what kind of users they are likely to be on Instagram. If you can understand what they currently follow and what they like, you’ll have a much easier time reaching them and getting them to engage with your posts.
If you want to generate ideas, you can start by going through your competitors and looking at how they engage their audience. Make sure to not only analyze the posts but also look at the responses and how people interact with different brands.
You may be surprised to find new ideas on how you can separate yourself from others and provide a unique experience for your audience.
4. Build A Promotional Strategy
Having an Instagram account for your business is great, but it will only matter if you can get people to see your posts and engage with your brand. And to do that, you need to have a diverse and comprehensive marketing strategy that helps your page stand out from everyone else.
The good news is that there are many ways to promote your Instagram page, and using multiple strategies is the best way to maximize your chances of success.
One of the first things you should do when starting on Instagram is to be active and create traction early on. Creating frequent and high-quality posts is essential in the early stages because you need to populate your account with content before you can start actively inviting people to check out your page.
But it’s not just about posting anything. You need to carefully consider every post’s goals and think about how it reflects on your brand.
To gain traction early, you should also leverage the following you have on other platforms – invite people to check out your Instagram page and incentivize the clicks by producing exclusive Instagram content not available anywhere else.
Another critical aspect of growing your Instagram following is mastering hashtags. Each audience has its hashtag habits, so you need to figure out how to attract the right attention and maximize the reach of every post.
Finally, you should make an effort to engage people in your target audience as much as possible. You might even want to partner up with key influencers in your niche to spread your message further and reach people that wouldn’t otherwise see your messages.
5. Focus on Tangible Results
Success on Instagram is relatively easy to measure. Likes, comments, and followers are clear indicators of how well you’re doing, but as a business, you also need to think about how these social metrics translate into real growth.
Therefore, as your page starts gaining traction and getting more likes, make sure that you experiment with different ways of turning those followers into paying customers.
Sure, raising brand awareness is important, and Instagram can be very useful when working on that. But if you feature your products and experiment with different presentation methods, you may find that Instagram can become one of your most powerful tools for generating sales.
Whether you’re working with influencers or posting product-centric posts on your page, you should be continually monitoring your posts’ performance in terms of sales and trying to find the approach that generates the biggest returns.
Final Words
Instagram is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms in the world, so it’s not surprising that businesses are trying to increase their presence as much as possible.
And while the competition is becoming fiercer, if you follow a structured approach and identify your goals, Instagram can not only supplement your marketing efforts but might become the single biggest driving force of your business growth.
This article has been published in accordance with Socialnomics’s disclosure policy.
