With Instagram becoming an increasingly popular platform for businesses to promote, advertise and introduce their brand to new customers and target audiences, it is becoming increasingly more important that businesses learn to integrate it into their social media marketing approach; and for those who are new to the whole idea of using Instagram to promote a brand, Pizzazz Group put together an outline of the fundamentals of using it for marketing and how to best go about it.
Identify Your Social Media Marketing Goals
The first step is, of course, to know what your goals are. The aims of social media marketing are generally to:
- Increase brand awareness
- Create a community
- Promote products or services
- Generate brand engagement
- Advertise to new customers
- Boost website traffic
- Increase brand loyalty, and
- Drive new sales and leads
Marketing Strategies
Once you’re firm on your goals, you will need to make sure your profile and the content you’re sharing on it are marketable. These tips will give you an idea of the important points to keep in mind when creating and sharing on a brand account.
Profile
When creating your profile, make sure you:
- Choose a user-friendly handle
- Upload an easily recognizable profile photo
- Keep your bio write-up brief and relevant
- Add your website URL to your bio
- Connect your profile to your other accounts
- Link it to your other social channels, and
- Explore and utilize Instagram’s Insight features
Remember that 200 million+ Instagram users visit at least one Instagram business profile every day, so the details of your profile are important.
Content
This brings us to content – one of the most vital facets of marketing to get right. The goal is to deliver fresh, shareable content that will get you maximum user engagement on your posts. In terms of content, you should:
- Make use of the Stories and Live Video features
- Give your customers behind-the-scenes glimpses
- Experiment with showcasing products
- Have Instagram-exclusive campaigns and promotions
- Pay attention to the colour palette of your posts
- Run contests and giveaways, and
- Share user-generated content
Hashtags
Hashtags are one of the best ways to reach your target audience as well as thousands of other users. Choosing relevant hashtags is important, and Instagram allows you to add up to 30 on a single post.
When choosing hashtags, make sure you:
- Create branded hashtags
- Use trending and relevant hashtags
- Use local hashtags to promote community awareness
- Research and proofread your hashtags
- Use campaign-specific hashtags
- Use hashtags for large events, and
- Host an Instagram hashtag contest or giveaway
Engage
This is the final point and one that is extremely important to building your brand and marketing it on any social media platform – engage, engage, engage. This is how you build a loyal fan following. To engage with your followers, you should:
- Respond to the comments on your posts
- Collaborate with and @mention other accounts
- Build relationships with similar accounts
- Ask questions in your posts
- Curate user-generated content
- Create and run ads and sponsored posts, and
- Promote across other channels
In closing
Building and marketing a brand online takes time, but, if you think it through and do it right from the beginning, you can save yourself a lot of trouble and accelerate your brand’s growth, turning followers into paying customers as soon as you can.
