Gaurav Sharma — September 26, 2019 Instagram has over a billion active users and more than 500 million people using Instagram Stories daily as well. It thus comes as no surprise that it’s an important platform for marketing your brand to your target audience. In fact, Instagram has over 2 million advertisers and more than 25 million business profiles today.
However, with so many competitors out there, it can be difficult to cut through the noise and make your presence felt on Instagram. To help you make the most out of your marketing efforts on Instagram, we’ve listed the best Instagram marketing strategies below.
1. Create Branded Hashtags
Instagram uses hashtags to classify similar posts under a single roof. You can use hashtags to generate engagement and create buzz around your products or business. All you need to do is create branded hashtags or custom hashtags that are relevant to your business.
You can then promote those hashtags during your campaigns and encourage people to add them to their own posts as well. When they do so, you’ll automatically start reaching a larger audience without any additional investment.
Nike, for instance, did this extremely well with their #runfree campaign. This campaign appealed to runners, especially to those who chose to run during the winter. The overwhelming response to the campaign shows its success. Currently, there are over 531.9k posts on Instagram using this hashtag.
2. Optimize Your Instagram Business Account
When you’re setting up your Instagram Business Account, you should put effort into optimizing it too. It’s crucial to include a link to your website in your Instagram bio to drive traffic to your website. Additionally, you should add useful information that describes your business in your bio.
It’s also essential to stay recognizable by keeping the same photo and name. You must choose a permanent name for your Instagram account and ensure that it’s relevant to your business name. In addition, keep your profile image consistent on your social media profiles to ensure that your audience always recognizes you.
3. Create Valuable Content
To attract your target audience, you must create content that they’ll value. That is why it’s absolutely crucial to understand your target audience first. Figure out their interests and pain points. Find out how you can solve their problems and then come up with content ideas related to those topics.
They must be able to relate to your content, and it should be helpful for them as well. When they figure out that you’re able to solve their troubles, they’ll be more likely to engage with you and your content on Instagram and other channels. It’ll also help improve their trust in your brand.
When more people engage with your content, it’ll work as social proof for others who come across it. This, in turn, will help you increase your presence on Instagram and boost sales too.
4. Partner With Influencers
Influencer marketing is a great way to promote your business on Instagram and generate sales. You can partner with Instagram influencers from your niche and ask them to promote your brand to their audiences.
Influencers are Instagram users who have massive and highly-engaged fan followings. Their audiences swear by their recommendations, and you can use this influence to promote your brand.
All you need to do is find influencers in your niche who have similar values and tone as your brand. This is essential because they will be viewed as an extension of your brand and may affect your brand image too.
You could also use social listening to find influencers who are already writing about your brand. For that, you can use social listening tools and track brand mentions.
Lastly, when you’re looking for influencers, you should analyze their profiles carefully. Check out their audience demographics, look at their engagement rate, and analyze other metrics to figure out their effectiveness.
This is necessary because there are many fake influencers on Instagram who purchase likes and followers. Partnering with them will only harm your brand’s image.
5. Leverage User-Generated Content
Coming up with unique new content can be a challenging task, especially when you have to do it regularly. If you don’t frequently post on Instagram, you might lose touch with your audience, and this can harm your brand’s presence and reach.
To generate engagement and remain relevant with your audience, you can leverage user-generated content.
All you need to do is ask your audience and customers to post using your branded hashtags. You can then select some of those posts and publish them through your Instagram account too.
Not only will this give you unique content, but your audience will be motivated to create more such posts.
Now that we’ve looked at the various Instagram strategies to grow your sales, let’s look at some tools that can make Instagram marketing easier.
Instagram Marketing Tools
1. iFluenz
iFluenz is a great tool that makes Instagram marketing easy for both brands and influencers. It allows you to create influencer marketing campaigns on the platform seamlessly.
Influencers can then find your campaign and apply to work with you. You can then go through their profiles and choose to partner with them and execute your campaigns. The tool also makes it easy to track and measure the progress of your campaigns.
Image via iFluenz
2. Influence.co
Influence.co makes the entire process of finding genuine influencers extremely simple. The tool has a huge database of verified influencers from a variety of niches.
All you need to do is select your niche, and the tool will come up with a list of relevant influencers who you can reach out to. Alternatively, you can post your campaign and let the influencers apply to the same.
Image via Influence.co
3. Awario
To find influencers who are already talking about your brand on Instagram, you can use Awario. This social listening tool notifies you whenever anyone mentions your brand on the platform. Through this method, you can find relevant influencers and also engage with your audience.
Image via Awario
4. Hashtagify
Hashtags are crucial for your success on Instagram. You need to find hashtags which are moderately active to ensure that your target audience notices your posts.
Hashtagify lets you do hashtag research to find high-performing hashtags, and it also shows you the latest trends in the hashtags too.
Image via Hashtagify
5. Later
Publishing posts consistently on Instagram requires a lot of dedication and time. Later simplifies the entire process of publishing content. You can schedule posts through this tool so that they can be published when you want them to go live.
Image via Later
Final Thoughts
Instagram is a great place to market your brand, and the best Instagram marketing strategies can help you maximize your results.
Research your target audience well and create high-quality content that can generate engagement. Partner with influencers and leverage user-generated content to further improve your chances of generating sales through Instagram.
Are there other Instagram marketing strategies you’ve found effective? Let us know in the comments.
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