No doubt that there is a boom in popularity of Instagram stories, which further puts forth a golden opportunity for the business advertisers to tap the Instagram potential in digital marketing.
To do this well, one needs to know how your business may get the most out of this platform. In this post, we will try to cover an end-to-end approach to educating the Instagram marketing aspirants to hit the bulls-eye.
Setting up an Instagram account
If you have not started with yet, it is best to download the Instagram app to your mobile phone for free by providing a master email solid password. Next, start with filling your profile by giving
- Add username and bio – If you aim at business promotions, then choose a name which best matches to your social media brand. Very importantly, you can add your website URL also into the profile, and this is the only one area where a link to bring in traffic to your account can appear, so be careful about it. Give a short description of your business also in the bio.
- Profile photo – IT can be your company logo ideally which is in sync with the other branding representations you have across the social media platforms.
Start to follow people
Once if you are set with the creation of an account, you can kick-start your presence on Instagram by getting a bunch of users. It can be best done by following other people as like industry influencers, customers, stakeholders, and other people who are essential for your business.
Instagram demographics may vary widely, so you need to be specific about whom you are targeting instead of beating around the bush. It is also ideal to add your Instagram to Hootsuite account with which you can create hashtag search streams, location search, and your own posts to better manage.
Set goals
For marketing, you need to route all your Instagram efforts based on logic to achieve strategic goals. Define what you are hoping to accomplish through Instagram. Write down your goals like.
- Increase sales of a particular product.
- Dive more traffic to your site/landing page.
- Perform brand promotions.
- Enhance customer satisfaction.
- Attract the top talent towards you.
- Identify influencers and establish relationships/networking.
No matter what you aim at, your Instagram strategy needs to be specific, accountable, realistic, and relevant.
Make a content strategy
As like any other social media campaign you run, Instagram too is content oriented to get real Instagram likes. As far as the top digital marketing saying goes “content is the king.” You need to have a well-set marketing plan for Instagram if you are planning to build a robust community around you over time and see some fair results. The critical elements of a good content strategy are:
1. Frequency of posting
You need to stick to a regular schedule for your posts, but don’t try to bombard their feeds and thereby frustrate your followers with a large number of posts. There is no set rule, but try to find out the smartest interval which works by doing a bit of trial and error on this.
2. Theme
Revolving around particular content themes will keep your followers in the loop. However, do not tediously present yourself to bore them soon.
3. Content styling
Are there any grammatical guidelines followed by your brand? Do you use emojis for your image captions? What hashtags do you use? What is the nature of images you post? Covering all these and more, you need to develop your own styling guidelines which will make your content distinct, elegant, and consistent.
4. Engagement
Engagement guidelines must cover how your business interacts with your counterparts in terms of liking, commenting, and replying to comments. Feel human, and do not automate your engagement if possible.
Building Instagram brand and hashtags
As you know, Instagram is all about visuals, so it becomes essential to create a visual brand identity which is easily recognizable. So, it is necessary to focus on visual consistency, choose appropriate subject matter every time to be in line.
In fact, there are not only visual elements, but the backbone of search-ability on Instagram is a practical use of text hashtags. There are many methods to identify the most popular and industry-relevant hashtags. Along with it, you need to try and develop your brand hashtags and also try promoting those.
Be genuine to audience
You cannot succeed on Instagram on merely mimicking the brand strategy of the winning ones. What works for Red Bull or McDonalds’ will not work the same way for you. So, it is essential to hone your audience and ensure that you cater them with exactly what they value the most. You can obviously look for what works the best for you on other social networking as what works the best for your competitors too on these platforms and set an Instagram content plan to succeed.
Nothing is complete without knowing the return on investment. You need to keep track of your Instagram activities and the yield from each to assess it in light of the actual goals set. It will further help you to fine tune your further campaigns and reap better results.
