Instagram Marketing Guide for Next-Gen Marketers
Before we start looking at marketing, we must understand how Instagram works. Since its inception, Instagram has come a long way and is the most popular social media platform for sharing photos. It has a user-friendly interface, which all users like, and the influencers keep pace with the algorithm.
The particular Instagram algorithm is difficult to understand, but one thing is clear: more people clicking on your posts will increase your reach, and you grow constantly. With over 2.4 billion global active users and each person spending at least 30 minutes on Instagram daily, it is now part of everyone’s routine.
Of course, brands had to develop strategies for using Instagram as a marketing platform. Thus, brands employ various trends and methods in this regard. In this blog post, we will look at some of them.
Table of Contents
How do you market on Instagram?
Instagram is always on top and is the most downloaded app to date. With the number of users it serves and its popularity, brands cannot ignore Instagram. It only seems fair that brands take Instagram as an integral part of their strategies. Here's how!
Switch to a Business profile right away!
To start with Instagram marketing campaigns, shifting from a personal to a business profile is critical. Go to your settings and change the profile. A business profile lets your audience contact you, and your brand gains credibility and social proof. Optimising your content with relevant hashtags and engaging captions can increase Instagram followers.
Revamp your profile
Your Instagram bio is the first thing potential clients see when they visit your profile. This is why your bio needs to be precise and should showcase a glimpse of what your brand stands for. It should be interesting, valuable, and enjoyable enough to grab the user's attention. Moreover, you can craft the perfect bio with Quicktools to develop one that can captivate the user's attention.
Provide only essential information, add hashtags, links, and much more. You can track this link to monitor the amount of traffic it gets. Update your bio consistently and upgrade it with every vital information that might come in handy to your users.
You cannot forget UGC!
Instagram is a platform where existing customers post and share their opinions and experiences about a brand. Brands then use this user-generated content to repurpose various marketing touchpoints and convert them into brand advocates. UGC builds trust, better brand-user relationships, improves the website's overall performance, and, most importantly, improves conversion rates.
The best way to leverage Instagram UGC on the website is through social media aggregator platforms like Taggbox. These platforms fetch UGC from over twenty platforms and display them in a unified format.
You can customise the widget per your requirements, change the background colour, font size, and font style, add a CTA button, banner, on-site UGC uploads, etc. Using Custom CSS, brands can change the theme and card style and add additional CSS to personalise the widget beyond the in-built settings.
With the moderation panel, brands can showcase only relevant and valuable content on their website. You can get UGC rights from original content creators and use their content legally.
Leverage Instagram on the website.
Embedding the Instagram feed on the website is a strategy many marketers adopt. Social media aggregator platforms like Taggbox collect social media feeds and display them unified. You can edit the widget and customise the layout to meet your requirements.
These platforms have moderation features that allow you to display relevant content, highlight the best UGC, and get UGC rights. The UGC rights will enable you to repurpose UGC anywhere without facing lawsuits.
You can leverage the Instagram feed anywhere on the website, develop a dedicated page for this, and embed Instagram shoppable galleries to enhance the website and make it more vibrant. This boosts user engagement, dwell time, conversion rates, and sales.
Utilise free IG marketing tools
With marketing tools like analytics, you can get information and statistics about impressions, engagement data, and more. You also get a breakdown of the demographics, including age, gender, etc. These tools are excellent and help you understand your audience better.
Post teasers to develop curiosity.
To keep your audience hooked to the next, you need to develop curiosity by dropping teasers about upcoming events, activities, product launches, etc. It is a simple way to increase excitement without looking like you are trying too hard.
Create Social ads
Instagram is a great place to market your brand and its products. If you play your cards right, you can get more than expected. You can create stories, posts, and promotional or sponsored ads. You have control over the budget, the duration of your ad, and how long you want it to run, and you can determine the budget.
You increase your reach and simultaneously improve engagement.
IG stories to the rescue!
Stories are a great source to keep engagement in place and generate leads. Stories differ from regular posts, as they stay for 24 hours, are always on top of the user's profile, and showcase content in a slideshow format. You can use the slider, create boomerangs, edit the images with filters, crop photos, etc.
Influencer marketing
Influencers are called influencers for a reason: they have a massive following, and people trust them; they follow whatever these influencers are doing and consider their opinions before purchasing. When collaborating with influencers, brands also increase their reach to the influencer's followers.
Use new features and updates.
Take advantage of the various Instagram features like stories, live stickers, reels, and videos. Launch product sneak peeks, share valuable educational videos, post-how-to reels, showcase hidden product purposes, and use stickers to enhance your content further.
Make your content look professional and visually appealing, use high-quality images, and write well-thought-out captions that benefit your marketing efforts.
Power up your hashtag game
Hashtags are highly interactive, and they go viral in no time. They boost your engagement almost instantly and are a part of free advertising. Your audience uses the hashtag and posts engaging content related to your niche. Your brand hashtag is exposed to many of Instagram's overall user base.
Find the perfect time to post
Understand your audience better by interacting with them and determining when it is most active on social media. Monitor the timeline when they like, comment, repost, and respond to your posts and stories. You can use Instagram's analytics panel to track the time and post accordingly.
You can also check when your competitors and large companies in your industry are posting their majority of content. Predict the time accordingly and post; you can also play around and learn what time works best for you.
You need to post regularly to avoid boring your audience. Post more on peak days, and do not forget to post on festivals, etc. There is a theory that Wednesday afternoon and Thursday evenings are the worst for posting, while the weekend is the best time. You can schedule posts and post about 1 or 2 posts daily.
Benefits of using Instagram for Business Marketing
Social media marketing is a big deal for marketers and entrepreneurs to become successful. Social media giants like Instagram help in business marketing, just like traditional advertising. Promoting brands on social media allows for better exposure, lead generation, and worldwide reach—all on one platform with just a few clicks.
Instagram alone has over one billion active users, making it an essential aspect of business marketing that marketers cannot ignore. With the proper usage and correct strategies, Instagram can help boost sales significantly. This large image and video-sharing platform can take your conversion rates to a new level, so buckle up and let's take full advantage of this platform.
Every marketer works towards reaping maximum results. With new updates rolling out often, Instagram keeps growing its features; marketers can monitor these features, understand them, and use them to capitalise on all these updates. Let's first understand the benefits of marketing your business on Instagram.
Significant benefits of Instagram for business
Whether a minor, mid-size, or large business, having an Instagram account and social media marketing can offer better results. Let's see some more benefits of Instagram marketing.
Helps understand customer preferences
Instagram has many features that give us insights into what your customers are liking and interacting with these days. It also helps us segregate how the audience shifted from one thing to another.
You can quickly determine their lifestyle, location, values, culture, age, gender, personal beliefs, and more; this information helps you develop customer personas.
Showcases products and services
Instagram is a photo and video-sharing platform. Displaying your product and offering a real-life experience with your product can be easy with Instagram. 60% of users seek to discover new products on Instagram. People trust and rely on Instagram, making it more accessible for brands to display their products, purposes, and advantages.
Builds better relationships
Customers nowadays require more attention than before; to satisfy them, it is essential to engage them in online communication through better content, questions, comments, direct messages, etc. With better interaction, you develop long-lasting and loyal relationships with your audience.
Drives traffic
This platform is all about communication. You have the power to convert your Instagram users into website visitors. You can add a link to your bio and promote your website in your posts and stories. This way, you drive most of your fans to the official website.
Reaches out to a massive audience
You probably already have a follower base who follow your work and other updates. They interact with you through likes, shares, comments, etc. But why stop there? The whole world is your limit; with Instagram, why not use it?
This platform helps you reach a massive audience; you can use hashtags and target the right audience. You can reach out to many people and increase your follower base. Reach out to influencers who post content around your niche and collaborate with them to reach out to their followers.
Makes brand advocates
The power of word-of-mouth is gigantic, and if you convince more people to speak for your brand, it can do wonders. Almost 90% of people trust online reviews from trusted sources, such as existing customers sharing real-life experiences with your brand. This way, you produce more UGC and transform the ordinary audiences into brand ambassadors.
Helps run Ad campaigns
Your Instagram marketing efforts don't essentially have to be organic. Marketers run ad campaigns on Instagram to reach the target audience and boost their brand awareness. Launching advertising campaigns on IG occasionally can help with visibility. You can display ads to your core audience chosen by gender, age, location, etc.
You can target the audience connected with your brand via the website, email, social media, etc. You also have the option to target an audience that fits in with your existing customers.
Boosts sales
After everything we have learned, we can conclude that Instagram can be a natural sales booster and help your brand grow. Instagram does almost everything – it raises awareness, generates leads, builds trust and loyalty, drives conversions, and much more. As a marketer, you can transform a simple social media platform into a marketing touchpoint; well, Instagram makes this easier and offers everything you need to market and grow your brand.
Social media is a natural business booster, so brands have used platforms like Instagram for their business marketing. You can run ads in different forms, like carousels, videos, etc., and reach the target audience.
With UGC, you can transform your users into brand advocates while reaching out to a massive potential audience. Social media also provides insights into what customers like and how their preferences change. Get ahead of your consumers and offer them solutions beyond their expectations.
Top 8 Tools to Optimise Instagram Marketing
Instagram has now become a primary source of marketing for brands. Digital marketers have made Instagram their key platform for social media marketing and promoting their products. While considering the engagement factor, Instagram differs from other social media platforms like Facebook.
Data suggests that Instagram has a ten times higher engagement rate than Facebook and, surprisingly, 84 times more than Twitter.
From small businesses to large MNCs, every marketing campaign runs on Instagram. With its many features, Instagram adds to its marketing efforts. You get to post images, videos, text, and so on. You can showcase your content using simple posts, stories, reels, IGTV, and more.
One of the significant parts of Instagram is that user-generated content (UGC) produced on this platform can be aggregated and repurposed on multiple marketing touchpoints to reap better results. More than 80% of Instagram users follow at least one business account they love the most. You must have an interactive and engaging profile to build your Instagram marketing strategy.
This blog will discuss some tools that help boost your Instagram marketing efforts.
Tools to optimise IG marketing
Building the perfect profile for your audience can be difficult with more focus on visuals than text. This section contains a list of tools that help build better profiles and optimise your Instagram marketing. You can turbo-charge your account, increase the follower count, and drive user engagement for your brand.
Taggbox widget
This is a social media aggregator platform that helps in curating widgets to embed on the website. This platform aggregates your Instagram feed based on hashtags, mentions, reels, videos, etc., and helps display it in a unified form. You can then copy and paste a simple HTML code into your website backend to showcase Instagram on your website.
This tool is equipped with features like customisation, moderation, and analytics. To help you develop personalised widgets, display only relevant content, get UGC rights from original publishers, and get detailed insights about their behaviour.
You can drive traffic on your website, get leads, acquire loyal customers, improve conversion rates, and, most importantly, optimise your Instagram marketing efforts using the Taggbox widget.
Awario
This tool is used to evaluate and analyse how your Instagram posts are performing. This tool is the most used tool among top influencers and big brands. Using this platform, you track your audience's mentions and tap into their sentiments to offer compelling content that resonates with them better.
You can track follower growth and engagement and your competitors' performance, making it a must-have tool for every digital marketer.
Canva
Canva is an online designing tool that allows users to develop top-quality Instagram posts and stories. This tool can be their saviour for small businesses unwilling to invest in graphic designers. This tool helps in curating trending posts.
Instagram marketing is worthless without perfect, stylish, and top-quality images and videos. You must create professional and aesthetic photos and videos to make an impact and instantly drive engagement. Any non-designer can easily create visually appealing images with its many templates, dimension options, filters, stickers, animations, and much more.
It is a free online tool and a no-brainer for marketers to optimise their Instagram marketing.
Grum
This third-party tool allows users to schedule posts on Instagram and other social media platforms. This tool can be their best bet for brands that publish a digital calendar and keep bulk posts scheduled. Users can post across multiple platforms through Grum. However, this tool is not free and offers a three-day free trial. You can play around with its features and make an informed investment decision.
Iconosquare
This social media tool allows marketers to check and analyse the engagement and performance of their posts on various social media platforms. Its unique value is that this platform can predict the best time to post based on user behaviour and monitor the target audience. Apart from analysis, this tool can schedule posts for brands.
Soldsie
This is an essential tool for eCommerce businesses. This platform helps brands upload photos of their products on their Instagram account. Users who register with Soldsie can comment on the brand's posts, and this platform takes over the transaction part.
This tool can take customers upwards in the sales funnel by taking over the checkout process directly from Instagram.
Hashtag for likes
This platform is a simple social media tool that suggests trending hashtags that hold the potential to drive engagement and likes. Since keeping up with new and trending hashtags is essential, this platform displays relevant hashtags with their engagement details and gives up the option to choose from numerous hashtags.
Social Rank
This platform allows its users to analyse and monitor their audience. Instagram is hinged on increasing follower count and engagement; this platform identifies the target audience and helps reach out to them. It also closely monitors current followers and provides detailed insights into their preferences.
Wrapping it up!
Instagram is dominating social media, and brands have understood its importance. Brands have been using Instagram to uplift their marketing efforts by leveraging it on their website, creating social ads and Instagram stories, developing curiosity, building a solid hashtag game to collect UGC, and leveraging IG UGC on other marketing touchpoints.
Instagram Marketing FAQs
What are some practical ways to grow an Instagram following organically?
Consistently post high-quality, visually appealing content that resonates with your target audience. Use relevant hashtags, engage with your followers and others in your niche, and collaborate with influencers or brands that align with your brand.
How can I leverage Instagram Stories for marketing?
Instagram Stories offer great opportunities for behind-the-scenes content, product teasers, user-generated content, polls/quizzes, and influencer takeovers. Use stickers, GIFs, and interactive elements to boost engagement.
What are some best practices for Instagram advertising?
Define your goals and target audience, create visually compelling ads, use relevant hashtags and location targeting, and experiment with different ad formats (photos, videos, carousels). Monitor performance and adjust your strategy accordingly.
How can I increase engagement on my Instagram posts?
Post at optimal times when your audience is most active, use compelling captions that encourage comments/discussions, ask questions, run contests/giveaways, and respond to comments promptly.
What are some ways to create Instagram content that resonates?
Understand your target audience's interests, pain points, and preferences. Create a cohesive visual aesthetic, use relevant hashtags, and experiment with different content formats (photos, videos, carousels, guides). Leverage user-generated content and influencer collaborations.
How can I leverage Instagram analytics to improve my marketing efforts?
Use Instagram Insights (for business accounts) to analyse your audience demographics, track engagement metrics (likes, comments, shares), identify top-performing content, and monitor hashtag performance. Use this data to refine your content strategy.
What are some ways to collaborate with influencers on Instagram?
Identify relevant influencers in your niche, engage with their content, and offer product/service collaborations, sponsored posts, takeovers, or affiliate partnerships. Ensure the influencer's values and audience align with your brand.
How can I incorporate Instagram into my overall social media marketing strategy?
Integrate your Instagram efforts with other social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) for a cohesive brand presence. Cross-promote content, run multi-channel campaigns and leverage user-generated content across platforms.
Author Bio: Deepanshi is a digital marketer who loves to write about and share information about marketing trends.
