4 Tips To Advance Your Instagram Marketing Strategy

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Build a presence that brings customers to you. 

Instagram is one of the biggest marketing platforms for brands today. According to an Instagram engagement report by Hubspot and Mention, there are over one billion active monthly users and more than 83% of the user base have discovered a new product or service via the platform. 

Instagram is a highly advantageous tool in a brand’s social media marketing strategy as well as a place for keeping up-to-date with friends and family. 

With the right Instagram marketing strategy, brands can bring new leads and customers into their orbit. 

Here are our top four tips to help advance your Instagram efforts.

Know why you’re there in the first place

The first question you need to ask when developing an Instagram marketing strategy is – what do you hope to achieve for your brand by having an Instagram profile? Do you want to build brand awareness? Attract leads? Engage with customers? 

Instagram is a visual-first platform for sharing photos and videos. It is ideal for brands who benefit from being able to demonstrate the impact of their service (e.g. make-up artist showing examples of the work they perform for clients). An Instagram profile can be a lucrative portfolio that brand owners can point to when scoping out new business and commercial opportunities.  

On Instagram, brands can tell their story and demonstrate their value through the range of content formats the platform offers: still photos in the grid, Instagram Live, IGTV videos, Reels (can be up to 90 seconds in length), and temporary Stories (remain active on profile for 24 hours).  E-commerce brands can also directly sell to users via the Shop tab.  

If you could visualize examples of content your brand could deliver while reading this, it’s a clear sign you’re meant to develop an Instagram marketing strategy and build a home for your brand on the platform.

Visit the Digivizer Academy for more videos to help you harness the power of digital marketing performance insights.

Set yourself up for visibility

To create an Instagram presence that attracts target customers, you first need to do the groundwork to ensure reach and visibility. 

With organic content, you need to include the right hashtags. Use hashtags that align with the search terms people use to find products and services like yours (e.g. a pet shop would likely want to use hashtags like #pets, #petlover and #petshoponline). Furnishing posts with relevant hashtags enables content to appear in places your target customers actively go to seek solutions similar to what you offer. Hashtags can behave as a kind of search directory for social platforms. 

Meanwhile, you should avoid dousing posts with generic hashtags like #selfie or #follow. Not only is this penalized by the Instagram algorithm, it’s off-putting for users to see brands attempt to gain untargeted reach for the sake of it. 

On the paid side of the content arena, Instagram ads are also key to widening exposure. 

Types of ads available within the platform include:  

  • Carousel ads – identical to photo ads, but users can swipe through multiple photos in typical carousel-fashion
  • Collection ads – include a cover image or video followed by three product images – a seamless journey from discovery to purchase
  • Explore ads – appear on the Instagram explore page grid
  • Photo ads – look like regular posts, but include a CTA button at bottom right and a sponsored label above
  • Story ads – look like regular Stories with a sponsored label in the top right corner
  • Video ads – look like regular videos with sponsored label on top

Because Instagram ads are integrated with Facebook Ads Manager, you can take advantage of the same optimization selections and targeting options that make creating effective social ads easy. 

Marry organic and paid social strategies to accrue prospects from all corners of the platform.

Maintain a recognisable look and feel

Don’t make the look and feel of your Instagram profile an afterthought. In this visual-first platform, looks fund your wealth.

A consistent creative direction should be a central pillar in an Instagram marketing strategy. It creates the first impression of who you are as a brand, where users assess a businesses’ reliability to deliver on a promise. 

Before you start posting content on Instagram, create a group of colors and design elements that represent your brand. Use this to inform the visuals of your posts. It’s a good indicator of a brand that’s committed to their identity and leads to greater brand recognizability as a result. 

Once you have a strong creative strategy, the next area of an Instagram profile to focus on is the BIO. This is the small area under the username where you can situate details about your brand. It can include a brief description, contact information, hashtags and more. Usually, the bio includes some kind of CTA (e.g. tag your photos, discover our range, etc). 

As the only place on Instagram that can host clickable links, the bio is a valuable lever that can be used to direct people to specific web pages. If you want to make posts that encourage people to travel to the web page that’s linked in the BIO, include a statement in the post copy that says “click the link in bio.”  

Connect beyond follower-base

Community management goes beyond interacting with your existing followers. Widen your reach by liking and commenting on posts from other brands and accounts within your industry. It enables you to discover how competitors build their Instagram presence as well as improve brand awareness. 

To connect with those who are yet to follow you, it’s also important to include a link to your Instagram profile in places like your website home page and email signatures. Drawing in traffic from outside the platform can only lead to greater growth!

How can you determine if your Instagram marketing strategy is hitting the mark? 

You can instantly access the full range of Instagram performance metrics when you connect your accounts into the Digivizer platform. At a glance, you can also compare the results of your Instagram marketing campaigns against other social, search and earned media channels. This gives brands the insight they need to know what works and which areas require a pivot.  

Sign up for free to advance your Instagram marketing strategy the easy way.  

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