Sahail Ashraf — April 28, 2017 One of the golden rules of marketing is ‘make sure you’re talking to the right audience’.
With a brand online, and on social media, this can sometimes turn out to be less than straightforward.
Social media is capable of bringing a lot of people to your door, but this also means that some people can turn up and follow you and, let’s be honest, never really have the need or circumstances in which they want to buy from you.
There is some work to be done here for any brand because social media can become so big and effective that you just keep taking in fans on a daily basis. And because it is so fast, you could end up with an audience that contains people who are not right for you.
We’re looking at Instagram today because it’s a thriving platform, and it has a feature that allows users to effectively engineer or tweak their audience so that it is more relevant. The potential benefits here are huge.
Knowing that you are updating your stuff to an audience that is not only aware of you but is more likely to be engaged makes your life a whole lot easier. One of the first things we will look at is a feature that is a little subtle. People are still not aware (generally speaking) of the value of this first feature, but we think it goes a long way towards making your brand more locally relevant.
Geotagging
This is where you take a photo and you simply tag the place or location that you take it in. It is very simple, and it allows you to tell your audience where you are. And if you are in a place that is local to your audience, all the better.
By geotagging as much as possible, you will become known as a local brand, which adds a ton of trust to everything you do on Instagram. This is a feature that was never (let’s be honest) made relevant for brands by Instagram itself. But the benefits that you could receive simply by tagging locally makes it a valuable time investment.
Oh, yeah, share
You know where you already have a built-in audience because they keep coming there? That’s right. Your blog is one of the most important places to help you build a custom audience on Instagram. We are talking about using your blog as a kind of bank of users. The more people subscribe to your blog or revisit, the more of an audience you can build. And that audience is into what you’re doing, so get them back on over to Instagram.
One of the simplest things you can do with your blog is displaying a widget that allows you to share your images in the sidebar, for example. There are hundreds of widgets out there for blogs, and some good ones when it comes to sharing Instagram feeds.
By doing this on your blog, you have an audience that is already interested in your business and the content you create. They will see your Instagram feed and go back to your Instagram as a ready audience. It makes perfect sense. Having that sharing potential on your blog (or website) just redirects a hungry audience. This is where Instagram is perfectly poised for building a custom audience. If you’re rocking Instagram because you sell a physical product, for example, use the imagery on your blog to redirect. It boosts engagement and tweaks that audience on the platform.
And the email campaigns that you send out to people and prospects? If your Instagram link isn’t there, you’re missing out on another huge opportunity. The deal here is to remember to share your feed as much as possible. You’ve worked hard to get it right so focus on ensuring that as many people see it as possible. But this is made even more enriching when you consider that:
● You are mailing to prospects
● Your site visitors (basically qualified through search as well as subscribers) can get to your feed too
Sharing is vitally important. And it’s non-aggressive in the sense that you are simply showing off your Instagram to people who are already interested in the brand or at the very least, qualified prospects. And they love the visual thing.
Hashtags
We could not look at audience engineering without dealing with hashtags. If anything, hashtags are probably the number one way to ensure you’re engaging with the right people. Whoever invented them was basically a marketing genius in our eyes.
Make it easy on yourself and create an amazing photo, one that will be there for years to come and is obviously your best work. Then, get on with the job of tagging.
Hashtags that you create around this photo can be many in number. No problem there. But make sure they connect with your ideal audience. What hobbies do they have? What is their favourite thing to do on the weekend? Why do they like your product (what does it do for them)?
If you sell cars, hashtags can include:
#weekenddriving
#fastcars
#driving
#dreamcars
You get the picture. And the beauty is, your ideal audience will most probably be the kind of people who would browser this stuff. And that means that you have hashtagged your way to pulling in more people who are in the market for your product. It makes perfect sense and we feel it is something every brand should be on top of.
And again, don’t worry about creating and using too many hashtags. Create a storm of them if you want. The more relevant they are, the more likely you are going to find a perfect audience. And if it is really stressing you out, test the engagement with your Instagram after your hashtags have been fed into the process. Take it steady, and measure as you go.
Just remember that you can have up to 30 hashtags per post. To be honest, we think that’s a healthy bucketload, so let your hair down and start finding the right audience by using hashtags as the tool. You can also add hashtags to a comment, so you can make it easy on the eye for the audience this way. Worth thinking about.
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