Today more than half of the population are on Social Media Platform. Around the world more than 4.5 billion people are using the Internet. Social media users have now crossed the 3.8 billion mark. Worldwide now, more than 5.19 billion people are using mobile phones. In 2019, people spent around 2 hours and 24 minutes on social media platforms each day.
Social media has now become a vital medium for businesses to connect with customers and increase brand awareness among them.
Why should you choose Instagram for Marketing? Should your business be on Instagram. The answer is Yes, and here are for these reasons:
- Every day around 95 million photos & videos are uploaded to Instagram platform by the users.
- More than 400 million active consumers see the Instagram stories.
- Instagram clocked more than $10 billion in ad revenue.
- 90% of the top 100 brands around the world use Instagram.
- 3.5 billion likes are recorded on Instagram Every day.
- Users browse on an average of 53 minutes in a single day.
- Around 83% of Instagram users have discovered a new product or service on this platform.
Let’s discover here the top marketing strategies which can be adopted by any new beginner at Instagram wanting to tap the unexplored business opportunities for brand engagement:
Step 1: Download and launch the Instagram App
Open the Google Play store and download the Instagram App. Once it is downloaded, tap to open the app. Now you are ready to explore with Instagram.
Step 2: Creating your Instagram Profile:
Instagram gives you an option to choose between a personal profile or a business profile. Choosing the business profile is the best option because it comes with added options like Instagram Shopping, Instagram Ads and Instagram Insights.
To convert your instagram profile to business profile, scroll to your Instagram profile and tap the cog icon to open your account settings. Scroll down a little and tap “Switch to Business Profile”. Enter your business phone number and email address and then tap “Done”.
Benefits of having a Business Profile Account:
- Your followers can determine what is your type of business.
- They can locate your business on maps.
- You can also research the type of your audience by Insights.
- Your followers can contact you by CTA buttons.
Step 3: Optimize your Instagram Bio:
Use Instagram Bio to describe your brand as well as your products and services with your contact information. You can also share the URL of the website as well as your portfolio in your Bio. The first thing users see when they land on your profile is your Instagram Bio. Hence you need to build your Bio in such a manner that it can engage your users and is informative.
You can also use emoticons to make your profile more fun-based. Add proper hashtags and if you have another social media page, you can also include its link also.
The Bio should include:
- Relevant keywords;
- Line breaks and emojis to make your bio readable and neat;
- A Strong Call-to-Action (CTA);
- A Link in Bio Tool;
Step 4: Define a Posting Strategy:
How can you make your visual content stand out from the rest? Your posting strategy should include certain types of images that perform well on the instagram. Use these different types of instagram posts to engage your audience:
- Images with Product Tags: Product tags (also known as Shoppable tags) gives you the ability to tag a label on the image of any product you are selling with the name of the product along with its price.
- Multi-image posts: These types of posts are great for telling some stories. Apply them as part of marketing strategy to display a narrative about your product or an interesting story about your business.
- Moving images: They are like GIFs which can be used to show different functionality about your products that otherwise would be difficult to present in a static image. After the video ads, moving images are one of the best options to showcase your brand’s personality.
- UGC Images: User-generated content (also called UGC) is the next biggest thing in the internet. UGC images are considered as authentic and acts as a social proof to visitors what other users are experiencing about your brand.
- Influencer Images: Social media influencers can generate peak user interest and engagement rate if they can be featured in your image posts along with their permissions.
Step 5: Organizing Contests and Giveaways:
Contests and Giveaways has the capability to grow your instagram followers and generate more engagement on your posts. Contest requirements state that an audience has to tag a friend in the comments of the post, the audience then share their content with their friends. And if their friends also show interest in instagram contests, then they’’ll also enter the contests and tag their friends.
A giveaway campaign also generates excitement and interest if you are launching a new product or service.
Step 6: Encourage your followers to tag your friends:
Tag-a-friend allows you to make your brand reach to other people who are still not your followers on Instagram. For maximum reach of your brand, you can organize a tag-a-friend contents in which you can ask your followers to tag-a-friend in the comments section of your post.
Each person who is being tagged will likely get a notification and there is a likelihood of him clicking on the post and you may end up with a new follower.
Step 7: Include a Call-to-Action Button
The main purpose of Call-to-Action Buttons (commonly known as CTAS) is to direct people about what they have to do next. Common CTAs actions include asking people to buy your product, visit your website or getting in touch with you. You can introduce some common Call-to-Action buttons like “Call us Now!” or “Subscribe us!”. Also you can urge them to sign up your mailing lists or download a free guide as part of CTAs offer.
So always think as part of marketing strategy about what kind of action you want your viewers to take to include a call-to-action link.
Step 8: Enable your Notifications:
Push notifications are a great way to communicate with your audience. More than half of smartphone users have push notifications enabled on their smartphones and these can be used to benefit your business in following ways:
- You can lead users to your social media channels;
- Promote offers on products and services;
- You can engage users who are currently not visitors to your site.
- Notifying users of their abandoned shopping cart in case of e-commerce applications.
Always focus on delivering high-value content to users instead of being spammy.
Step 9: Have a Content Calendar in Hand:
If you want to gain maximum from Instagram, you have to be consistent in publishing content on Instagram. Create a content calendar so that you have your posting schedule on track. Try to automate the timing of publishing when your audience is most active during the time of day.
Beside the graphic or video link, also include the day, date and time of publishing. The content calendar should include the right mix of images, videos, memes, quotes, and infographics. Plan your content at least 1 or 2 week before the publishing schedule.
Step 10: Include IGTV in your strategy:
IGTV is a fantastic medium to develop user engagement for your brand. Through IGTV, brands can make videos of longer duration than typical Instagram stories & posts. For verified users, the duration of IGTV video can be upto 1 hr longer. Regular users can also upload videos of around 10 mins duration.
IGTVs are perfect to get user’s attention since videos are of longer duration without having the necessity to download the app. Recently introduced IGTV series feature allows to make a regular series of videos which can be published on a weekly or monthly basis. But IGTVs also have high cost and time investment associated with it.
Instagram has proved to be a brilliant platform for brand marketers to engage their audience. You can engage users to like, share and comment on your brands.
Adopt the best Instagram Marketing strategies in 2020 to get maximum engagement for your business and personal profile.