Using Instagram can be beneficial for all types of businesses. Whether you own a small hardware store or a high-end luxury boutique, Instagram is the perfect platform to help you market your products. This is because it provides your company with significant online exposure and appeals to your more visual audience, which leads to more sale conversions and profits. Building on solid Instagram strategies helps to attract your targeted audience segments and increase your customer base.
Small and medium-sized businesses sometimes shy away from using Instagram; however, trends have shown that Instagram works. With more traditional marketing mediums becoming less compelling to younger audiences, it’s important to maintain a steady stream of new and/or young people to grow your business. Some businesses believe that if you don’t have a visually appealing product to showcase Instagram is probably not worth the hassle but that is the farthest thing from the truth.
Businesses that sell services and products can all benefit from Instagram. The key is to push your brand more often than your products in order to gain greater brand recognition and influence on Instagram. In order to remain relevant in today’s ultra-competitive consumer world, successful businesses should find a way to attract the attention of audiences who are now looking to social media entertainment and content networks by creating traction through both proprietary media channels and earned media worth of mouth recommendations.
Compelling content that drives audience engagement is key. Posting with Purpose and having high quality content can spark conversations and optimize engagement. Whether it’s an expertly photographed image or a series of videos, content creation is the backbone of successful Instagram Business accounts. However, engaging content is not enough to keep up with the business trends on Instagram.
Generating Ideas for Posts
The best way to make sure you have Instagram content that resonates with your audience is to consistently post relevant content and plan it out. Some small businesses decide to hire a social media manager or social media planners who is already skilled in these areas. These specialists are creative and have experience in creating words and imagery for brands to generate leads and sales. If you are not in the position to hire a social media planner just yet, you can give it a go yourself. It may take some experimenting to learn what captions and posts work best for your audience, but it is totally achievable.
Videos are pretty popular on Instagram as well. Utilizing Instagram TV could give you a significant advantage as they are always on the Explore Feed of Instagram. Instagram is a fantastic way to connect with your audience and create expertise-like credibility with them.
Using your existing customer’s social media to showcase testimonials is also a great idea. Do you have repeat customers who are loyal to your brand that use Instagram?
Many businesses are turning to creative agencies who hire influencers and micro-influencers that are already using similar products or services and pay them to push and advocate for your brand. The word “influencer” includes a wide range of socially informed experts. Skincare, beauty, “foodies” and tech influencers, among others, will help businesses to accomplish what can be challenging demographics. According to Buffer.com, recent studies show that 70 per cent of millennial consumers are influenced by their peer’s recommendations for purchasing decisions on brands.
Giveaways
If you implement it the right way, giveaways can help establish your Instagram account and brand, and build loyal customers and an active audience who will share your incredible products or services with a wider audience than you can organically. Decide on what it is that you want to give away. Whatever the service, product, or experience you’re giving away as your reward should be interesting to your audience. This will differ contingent on your goal. For example, if your goal is to spread awareness about product launch, you should most likely to give away the specific product as your reward.
Reaching out to other similar brands is also a great idea to cross-promote. Brand partnerships are especially helpful for younger, newer businesses. Aligning yourself with other reputable businesses and outlets can help to build your credibility. Move this process along by working with brands in your industry. Exchanging content or cohosting an event and promoting it on Instagram and other social media platforms can
push your business way farther than doing it alone. Your content will be twice as powerful with half of the effort.
Snapping Photos & Creating Videos
If you are creating content in-house there are tons of apps on the market that can help you get started with producing great photography and videos. Below we will outline some of the most popular apps and websites to help you jumpstart your Instagram content.
For high quality photos:
- Afterlight 2 is a pretty popular and powerful iOS-only photo editing solution. It’s pretty affordable and offers a lot of tools to make the perfect edits.
- Lightroom is a dependable mobile version of the much-loved Adobe suite platform. The application has a variety of presets that add a beautiful picturesque quality to your images.
If you want to start creating videos sooner than later there is good news. There are thousands of mobile applications and web-based apps that exist now that can take your video to the next level. Good news: There are a number of free and inexpensive video editing applications and tools you can download that run from super simple to powerful in-depth abilities. Some of the more popular options are listed below:
- Magisto is an online video editor with a web application and a mobile app for automated video editing and production for businesses and consumers.
- Inshot is an HD video editor that allows you to trim and cut video and movies, add music and video effects to stand out amongst the competition.
- Hyperlapse is an application that allows you to create time-lapse photography, method that enables your photographs to become motion pictures.
Optimizing Your Hashtags
Optimizing your hashtags is a great best practice to make sure that your relevant audiences are finding and following you. There are a host of websites and apps that can help guide to using hashtags in a smart and manageable manner. When you use the right hashtags, you directly help Instagram organize and arrange your posts. This will help them reach people who value your products and your brand. But is important to
know how to use them effectively.
There is a balancing act to using hashtags. You need to balance the ability to use common hashtags against the possibility of being squeezed out of trending and high demand topics. This is similar to SEO in many ways. As you try to search for keywords in the Google search engine that are more generic, you will get more broad and generic results back.
In 2018 Instagram enabled the capability for followers to follow hashtags. This enables users to stay up to date on new posts that feature certain hashtags that they deem relevant to them. It is also wise for your business to follow certain hashtags to stay in the loop on the content that is being generated and it could help you identify new trends and inspire your own feed.
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The Instagram Algorithm
The long-debated concept of the Instagram Algorithm has seen much criticism since its inception. No longer are users seeing content from their closest friends and family first, but instead, they’re being shown content of that the algorithm thinks they’d like the most. It used to be complex to understand, but in an effort to increase Instagram’s transparency, Instagram released more details on this last year.
According to their latest reports, posts are prioritized based on three key factors of the user: interest, timeliness, and the relationship the user has with the accounts they are following. Understanding these trends can help Instagrammers to reach their desired number of Instagram impressions and followers.
Many experts have written articles and think pieces attempting to debunk the algorithm, but the main takeaways have been the same: Instagrammers who post consistently and engage with their audiences consistently are given priority on the timeline over other posts. This is important to note as you are building up your account on the platform.
The primary goal of Instagram is to increase the time that users spend on the platform. The longer the users stay, the more advertisements they display.
Instagram Insights
Using Instagram’s built-in insights is a great benefit for accounts that are signed up as businesses. This tool gives you actionable information on how you can reach more people and meet your business goals. The tool has information on the demographics of your followers, your most liked posts, your activity and more.
It is wise to check this often to understand the times and dates that you are audience is online and the type of content they are engaging with the most. You can also learn what actions people are taking once they click on your profile. If they decide to visit your website or click on your profile based on a post, you will know it by checking the insights. Knowing your best-performing content can help you generate more ideas to
produce similar posts instead of doing your own research and trying to come up with what you think is best.
Building trust with your Instagram community
Businesses and marketing companies today face a massive challenge in trying to reach out to young consumers. According to a study conducted by executives from Crowdtap, Weight Watchers, and MRY 84% of Millennials do not like or trust traditional advertising.
Building trust on Instagram is easy, just use the same methods and strategies that you use in other areas. Your brand needs to have reputable products or services, and your message needs to be authentic. Share a clear, sharp vision of what your company stands for. This includes your company’s core values, philosophies, and outlooks.
To build a consumer-facing business, you need to use good marketing strategies and techniques. Businesses that have a hazy stance on community concerns will not get very far when trying to attract new customers or sell to existing customers.
Brands that have successfully used Instagram:
There are hundreds of businesses and brands that are successfully executing Instagram campaigns and have case studies you can learn from. Instagram is growing larger each day and it is one of the go-to platforms and best places for businesses to invest in ad space.
From smaller startups to the largest global brands, everyone is using Instagram in some shape or form, to boost their business. Below we will outline some of
the most notable business case studies, which use it effectively, and their results.
Adidas #MyNeoShoot
As one of the top brands in apparel and footwear, Adidas has utilized social media marketing to surpass its competition. The Neo brand was a new subset division of Adidas geared towards trendy, youthful consumers. They invited their followers to create Adidas-inspired Instagram posts with the hashtag and labeled them with the hashtag #MyNeoShoot. They then invited the best content creators were to model in a professional photo shoot for them and share their branded photos with engaging social media followers and on Adidas own account as well. Adidas even recruited Selena Gomez to help with the contest.
As a result, the campaign generated 71,000 mentions of the #MyNeoShoot for Adidas. The hashtag also enabled them to gain 41,000 new followers. This was a splendid example to show that a creative contest is enough to engage your viewers and to underscore the importance of social media influencers.
Old Spice
The Old Spice brand is somewhat known for its reputation for their clever and quirky ad campaigns but sometimes credibility can be more of a burden than a reward. How does Old Spice stay on the forefront of edgy advertising? How do you create engaging marketing assets when your target audience already has clear expectations for you to be creative? The answer for Old Spice was to focus efforts into unknown territory: social media with their Dream Runner Campaign.
In 2016, Old Spice introduced The Dream Runner campaign. The campaign encouraged their followers to win things by posting photos of their running routes in the shape of a prize they wanted to win – complete with the hashtag #runoldspice.
Once again, this campaign showed how, prominent Instagrammers played a major role in helping Old Spice hit their campaign goals. It’s also a great example of reducing marketing pressure by selecting influencers that already fit the brand’s ideals to promote the brand and their products that would be enjoyed by the majority of people who were exposed to the advertisement.
Camp Brand Goods:
Camp Brand Goods is a great example of a smaller company getting in on the Instagram trend. According to Business.com, the brand created the #keepitwild contest which awarded a weekly t-shirt to users who posted the most original photo with this hashtag. They ran this contest to increase their followers and increase engagement. During the competition, the company partnered with other Instagram users who are well-known in the outdoor world and helped them attract more followers.
Monetizing Strategies to Drive Sales
Instagram has now added the ability for qualified, eligible businesses to tag their products in posts. Customers can get details about your products from your posts and purchase them.
Once you have enabled a shoppable post customers can click on the link directly from Instagram and it will take them to a checkout page on your whatever landing page or e-commerce website you have your products on. To do this you will also need a Facebook for Business account to setup a catalog of your products. Unfortunately, this isn’t available for business selling services but there are other ways to connect your services through Instagram.
Using Instagram stories is beneficial for businesses that sell products and services. If you have an Instagram business account with a substantial following, you can advertise directly to consumers through your stories. You can also include a call-to-action prompting them to swipe up to learn more about the products or services you are offering.