Do you want to learn some Instagram marketing tips?
Well, before I teach you, let me first give you an overview of Instagram.
Since its creation, it has become the ultimate platform for sharing photos, with over 1.318 billion active users worldwide on the app.
There’s also a large number of influencers on the site with massive followers; with the right plan, you can become an influential brand, too.
To succeed on Instagram, you need to post the right content to stay relevant to current followers while bringing in new ones.
However, knowing which kinds of posts work best for growing your audience can take a lot of work. With that in mind, I will teach you some of the best Instagram marketing tips around to help you thrive online.
What Is Instagram Marketing?
Instagram marketing refers to the process of brands harnessing the power of Instagram to reach their target audiences to generate brand awareness and share products. The platform offers marketers or businesses several avenues to connect with their desired audiences, including paid and non-paid options.
According to stats from Instagram, it’s the top platform for building relationships, and 70 percent of people surveyed by Instagram don’t mind viewing videos while they’re on the platform.
From those stats, it is easy to see how Instagram is an excellent place to be for marketers and business owners.
Why Should Marketers Care About Instagram?
While the platform hosts 31.5 percent of 25-to-34-year-olds, the photo-sharing app also hosts audiences of all ages, with 30.1 percent of 18-24-year-olds, 16.1 percent of 35-to-44-year-olds, and 8 percent of 45-to-54-year-olds actively using the Instagram platform.
These figures reveal that, despite incorrect audience perception, there is a large likelihood that your target audience is logging onto Instagram, and you need to be greeting them with content when they do.
In addition to the sheer size and diversity of users, 90 percent of Instagram users follow at least one business. This organic interaction with companies stands in stark comparison to other social platforms.
Outside of these metrics, Instagram is also a marketer’s dream for various other reasons. We break those down below.
Narrative: Although Instagram doesn’t focus on conventional written storytelling, the platform is about sharing a narrative through images, which is at the core of marketing. The platform is perfect for bringing your brand’s story to life through aesthetically appealing posts, stories, and ads.
Reach: A billion plus accounts use Instagram every month. One billion. The platform provides nearly unlimited access to audiences, allowing you to widen your reach drastically.
Community Engagement: We discussed Instagram’s high engagement rates with brands above. Outside of that figure, Instagram provides marketers with unique opportunities to connect with community members, fostering conversation and engagement.
Competitive Lens: Even if you’re not currently using Instagram marketing as a strategy, there’s a high chance your competitors most likely are. Take advantage of the platform’s visibility to assess what your competitors share, what’s performing well, and what isn’t. Establish best practices for your community by seeing what fails and succeeds for your direct competitors.
When coupled with the usage statistics, these four benefits of Instagram marketing make your presence on the platform a must.
How To Get Your Brand Started on Instagram
While this may all sound great in theory, how do you enact the actual practice of marketing your brand on Instagram? We’ve got you covered.
In the following section, we break down everything from building your business account to demystifying Instagram marketing analytics.
Customize Your Instagram Business Account
After establishing yourself as a business, you can optimize your profile for success.
Instagram offers businesses a variety of unique features unavailable to personal accounts; you’d be wise to take advantage of all of them.
Contact information: Include your physical address, email address, and phone number so followers can contact you directly. When you include this contact information, Instagram automatically builds related buttons (Call, Get Directions, Email).
Category or Categories: These groupings appear as circular topics under your name and are a simple way to showcase what your brand is about. Check our page out to see how we do it.
Call-to-action buttons: You can tailor these buttons to your business offerings to allow visitors to take specific actions, like making an appointment or booking a reservation. To incorporate these buttons into your profile, select Edit Profile, Contact Options, and add an Action button.
Create an Instagram Marketing Strategy
Whether you’re a beginner or looking to boost your Instagram marketing strategy, the following four steps can help you craft deliberate, successful campaigns.
1. Set some goals. These vary from business to business, depending on your ultimate aim. Whether you’re looking to get new leads or position your brand as an industry leader, you need clearly delineated goals that your campaigns work toward achieving.
2. Keyword research is a must for any successful digital campaign. Instagram is no different. Although Instagram is home to stunning visual images, much discovery occurs through hashtag usage. Since the platform relies so heavily on hashtags to help users find relevant content, keywords operate as the basis of discovery on the platform.
3. Define your audience. We’ve already established that Instagram’s audience is massive, but that doesn’t mean yours is. A clearly-defined audience increases the chances of reaching individuals most likely to take your desired action.
4. Run competitor research to learn about best practices for your particular market. When building your Instagram marketing strategy, dive deeper into competitor data to gain a granular view of their performance. By comparing competitor data to your own, you can gain a realistic view of performance and tailor your strategies accordingly.
Top Tips For Instagram Marketing
With millions of active users, Instagram is a major platform for businesses to market their products and services. However, with so many brands vying for attention, it’s often challenging to stand out from the crowd.
If you need help getting started, here are our top tips for marketing on Instagram.
1. Use Free Instagram Marketing Tools
Business profiles on Instagram aren’t all that different from Meta business profiles.
Through Insights, you can view statistics like impressions, engagement data, and more.
You can even get a breakdown of the demographics of your followers, including information on their age, gender, location, and most active hours.
Insights aren’t just generalized, either. For example, you can get specific insights on posts for the week that show you how many impressions you earned for that period and what your top posts were.
These free tools are priceless because you can use them to understand exactly how users interact with your content.
The more you know how users interact with your posts, the better you can adjust your content to boost engagement.
One category of posts that is almost always attention-grabbing is product teasers.
2. Post Product Teasers That Will (Gently) Urge People to Buy
What if you could sell more products by posting product teasers on Instagram?
Well, you can.
Instagram is a great place to advertise your products. And if you play your cards right, you won’t annoy or scare users off with advertisements, either.
If you’re too pushy, followers will drop like flies. However, product teaser posts are a simple way to talk about your product and increase excitement without looking like you’re trying too hard.
Here are some posts from Gilt’s Instagram page that don’t directly try to sell a product but provide a link for followers to their Instagram shop feature where users can browse all of the brand’s inventory.
3. Create Sponsored Ads
Instagram ads have become commonplace on the platform. The best part? You can control how much you want to spend on them by setting an ad budget.
You can showcase just one sponsored Ad or multiple Ads with the carousel feature.
This allows brands to target their audience in a whole new way. Before sponsored posts, only users following your account could see your updates and photos.
Now, brands can promote their photos to anyone that fits their target audience to increase their reach further than ever before.
For sponsored ads, use engaging content to appeal to the target demographic you want to entice.
You can also turn existing posts into sponsored ads, so keep an eye on your top posts.
You can push these high-performing posts out later to potential customers through sponsored ads.
Run multiple posts to different audiences simultaneously for even more engagement. Keep in mind that there are many other forms of sponsored ads that
you can post, such as:
Photo
Video
Reels
Carousel/Dynamic Ads
Stories
Stories Canvas
Whether sponsored or not, Instagram Stories or Reels is another excellent way to connect with followers.