How To Use Instagram For Marketing.

Using Instagram for marketing, like all other social media channels, is a great avenue to connect with new people every day. Unlike most social media channels, Instagram emphasizes pictures/videos over text. This makes it more engaging and as the saying goes, a picture is worth more than a thousand words.

Story-telling, when done the right way, can be captivating and arouse emotions. That is the niche for Instagram for marketing. The need to master the art of telling compelling stories is important to using Instagram for marketing.

Telling your story with visuals can be a tough task. But then, knowing the ‘how’ makes it a lot easier. For example, to promote your product on Instagram, you can share the “how to use” videos and the “different ways of use” videos of that product. This tells a story of your product and also educates followers; it is like killing two birds with a stone.

There are some basics that must be considered when using Instagram for marketing. This includes having a consistent posting schedule and also sharing contents that are related to your product – whether remotely or distant. This way, you won’t bore your followers with similar visuals every time. The posting schedule keeps your followers anticipating when next they will get posts from you, that way; they are kept expectant and coming back for more. You may want to follow the Instagram for business blog for up-to-date insights.

Steps to Using IG for business

Create a business account

It is cool to have personal Instagram accounts, but business must be done separately from pleasure – not necessarily without pleasure. Therefore, you need to create a business account and choose a username that is a perfect representation of the brand.

Create a username that stands out and cannot be mistaken for something else. More so, you need to add a link to your website as a call-to-action for directing traffic and fostering conversion. Then, attach a catchy short bio and add the location of your store or office. Once the account has been created, you should move on to populate it with engaging contents.

Engage audience

To stand out, brands need to deliver contents that are appealing and fill a need. So, it is important to find the balance between getting followers to talk about the brand and increasing Amplification Rate. One tested way is to create a contest (photo/video contest). We all fancy rewards and we love it more when those rewards come as a result of doing what we love to do. So you must find a way of inspiring followers to discuss and share contents about your brand.

Much more than just increasing your Amplification Rate, contests allow your customers and followers do the marketing for you by sharing your product with their community of friends. It also reveals the idea of how your customers and prospects will like to see improvement in your products.

Content

We already know that Instagram is more about visuals than text. But the texts also help. Instagram has a 2,200-word limit for captions. So it is best to maximize your first three lines. These three lines appear without clicking the ‘read more’ button, and it is important considering the short attention time span of internet users. Use words that compel the audience to act.

There is also the hashtag. On Instagram, hashtags help to direct followers to new accounts and trends to follow. Using the right hashtag can project you to the right audience and engage them in the trend you want to create while opening them to a vast array of posts linked with that hashtag. As an effective strategy for increasing your Instagram community of followers, you want to customize an Instagram badge on your website and embed links from your Instagram posts on your website to direct visitors to follow you.

Leverage on Ideas from Leading Brands

Like every new field of learning, there is always something useful to learn from those who are already successful at it. Taking a cue from successful brands and learning to apply strategies and principles that successful brands use can be a great way of making a successful marketing campaign on Instagram. Brands like Nike and Levi’s have used Instagram to boost their brand recognition and market with obvious results. However, there is a caveat: when learning from strategies used by successful brands, you want to stay original and carve a niche for your brand while you are at it.  That allow the Instagram community remember your brand and not stray off into seeing the bigger brand through you.

Measure growth

This is where analytics tools come in handy. Pixlee and Simply Measured are examples of analytic tools to be used. Analytics helps you to measure your growth, popularity and to track the success rate of your marketing campaign. There are also statistical tools that can be used for monitoring brand progress on Instagram.

Two of them worth mentioning are Collecto and Iconosquare. One outstanding feature of Collecto is that it shows the most successful filter style for your posts. You might want to capitalize on that for future posts; meanwhile, Iconosquare stands out with features like showing your brand / post’s love rate, talk rate and spread rate. I assume that those terms are self-explanatory.

Having discussed the strategies for using Instagram for marketing, I strongly believe that following the outlined strategies will help you start a successful social media marketing campaign using Instagram.