If your business aim is to get your products or services reach more people, increase your business following and boost your sales, then Instagram can work as a magic wand for you. Instagram lets you express your business visually as it is a community created on the power of visual storytelling. There are many who have questions regarding this social channel as they wonder how images and short videos can enhance customer experience. If used correctly, Instagram can be a highly specific, visual marketing channel for any brand. It has also been proved in several studies that Instagram contributes in marketing efforts with 25% more engagement as compared to other social platforms.
Like several other social platforms, there are right ways to use it, wrong ways to use it and smart ways to use Instagram for marketing purpose.
Create Business Strategy for Instagram
Before you craft your plan of marketing on Instagram, you should first perform research on the successful businesses on Instagram or other brands in your industry or your competitors. This will give you inspiration and help you understand what is successfully working on Instagram.
After that, create your business goals, which might include:
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Increase product sales
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Increase brand awareness
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Increase traffic to your website
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Increase branded hashtag mentions
As the power of network in Instagram is in visuals, so your strategy should involve a few decisions like:
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How frequent you will post?
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At what time of the day you will post?
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What will be your content calendar?
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What will be your content theme?
Build Your Brand Recognition on Instagram
Your aim is to use the visual concept to create a cohesive and recognizable brand identity. You need to choose the set of filters that will develop a particular style for your brand, making it more recognizable to your followers. The photos you will post must have suitable content like a restaurant will upload photos of its food, clothing company will shoot pictures of clothes, etc. Promoting your business through lifestyle content would prove beneficial as it will connect well with the Instagram audience.
Apart from images, there will be non-visual elements to your Instagram brand. The most common technique is using branded hashtag. This will represent your Instagram brand and encourage your followers to share pictures that fit particularly to your brand name using the hashtag.
Beginning With Instagram App
To get started, download an Instagram app from play store and sign up. You cannot create a business-specific account as there is no such option here. Both business and personal accounts work in the same way. You can connect your Facebook account with an Instagram account or sign up using separate email id and password. Add your business username, bio, profile picture and other details. Don’t forget to enable notifications from all those who like, comment, follow or add you on Instagram. These notifications are important to engagement and user-generated content campaigns you run.
Post Regulary and Keep Your Audiences Engaged
Once you are done with app installation and set up, then start posting relevant images according to the content calendar. As Instagram is a mobile-friendly platform, therefore you must be very selective in choosing images that can be perfectly viewed in mobile phones. In addition, you might need to increase your followers in order for your business to become popular. There may be various organic ways to increase your followers that can help you in the long run. If you want to gain followers quickly, though, you can look for ways to buy Instagram followers. A simple Google search on how to buy Instagram followers could prove helpful in this regard.
Once you’ve gained a decent number of followers, you need to keep your potential customers indulged into your pictures and content that you share on the regular basis. Once you start getting popular, make sure that you continuously stay in touch with your audience by replying their comments.