The Advanced Guide To Instagram Marketing for small businesses

Business Promotion on Instagram

Since its launch in 2010, Instagram has been successful in establishing itself as the best visual social engagement platform. Each brand and businesses across the globe today, are embracing Instagram as a strategic performance marketing channel. That’s not surprising when Instagram has:

• 800 million active monthly users of different demography, 500 million daily active users and 250 million daily content broadcasts across tunes of topics, which you may not be able to imagine
• 60% are adult users
• 80% of the user base is from global locations
• 25 million business profiles
• At least one business account followed by more than 70% of the Instagram users
• 60% of them reported that Instagram is the prime source of information for new products and services

From the above insights, it’s understood that it’s more than just an app, it’s actually the online power community for the entire world.

Hence, today Instagram is becoming the preferred sales and marketing station for the brands and businesses; as the app offers a unique opportunity to showcase their USPs, inspire and engage their target audience.

But, within this online crowd with millions & billions of photos, videos and stories broadcasted every day, the one question comes to everybody’s mind, how to stand ahead or how to craft engaging content and market correctly to keep the audience within your influence.

This Instagram management guide is an approach to power you with knowledge of various advanced Instagram marketing tools on how to produce fascinating visuals & illustrations, increase followers and drive audience engagement.

Let’s understand how to create a business account on Instagram

Before setting out for the Instagram journey, it’s very important to understand that Instagram is the platform for ‘in the moment content’. Hence, the necessity to post regularly to stay relevant. To keep your followers engaged, ensure to keep your profile updated.

Set Up Your Instagram Account

Instagram provides two options for the creation of the account:

a) With the help of your existing Facebook credentials

OR

b) With your mobile number or email id. If you have decided to create a business account (make sure to log-in with your business email only).

In the following steps, key in the necessary details such as the name of your business which will be displayed on your account’s profile. Then opt for a unique username for your profile so that your Instagram account is easily recognizable among your target audience.

Always try to put the name of your business as a username. You can also update or change your username in the settings section of the app.

How To Optimise Your New Instagram Account?

The key first step to having a perfect Instagram Profile is to set up an impressive profile picture for your account. Your profile picture selection should depict consistent branding and visual feeling of your business at any point in time.

Next, write your engaging Instagram bio for your audience; please note that it has to be short & sweet as the app allows only 150 maximum characters. Focus on your business offerings and its unique stand in the industry you are in.

To encourage users, you are free to include specific hashtags and clickable URLs (Make the content hyperlinked to avoid any clutter)

You can track the clicks on the URLs to understand the traffic density and demography. To change and update your Instagram profile you can use the Edit Profile button.

Understand Instagram Settings

Browse to the three stacked lines of the top right corner of your profile and click on settings. Instagram settings will allow you to change your account’s password, visibility on different posts you have liked, enable notification along with other hosts of features such as story settings etc.

With story settings, you will be able to manage who will be able to see and reply to your broadcasted stories. For greater reach and audience engagement of your account, you should allow the settings as shown on the image. This setting helps you to micromanage your connections to allow them to see and reply to your Instagram Stories.

This strategy is discussed below.

Ensure to switch your Instagram account as a business one for increased reach and business identification. The bunch of business tools and features offered by Instagram also make it easier to connect with your audience and share in-depth account growth insights for more informed decisions.

As per rule, to register as a business account on Instagram, your business must have a Facebook page.

Instagram Profiles

How to Switch to an Instagram Business Profile?

• Sign into the Facebook account of your business
• Allow Instagram to manage your business pages on Facebook
• Select the Facebook Page to connect to your Instagram profile
• You should be page admin of the Facebook page to run the above settings

Once your business profile is ready, check your account settings.

• Private Account: Instagram automatically sets your account as public. With the private account settings, you can opt to convert your profile to private from public.
  However, it’s not recommended as it will restrict views of your broadcasted posts.
• Comments: This allows you to moderate specific comments on your Instagram account, which you feel impact adversely. You can turn on this feature by adding in such keywords and phrases in your profile settings.
• Add Multiple Instagram Accounts: You are also free to add and switch between up to five accounts without login and log out efforts from each different account. To make use of this feature, simply click on Add Account and key in username and password.
  To switch between multiple accounts just click or tap on the specific profile you want to log into

Since the creation of account has been completed now, let’s understand the simple formula of success in engagement via Instagram. Primarily, marketing success on Instagram is awarded by a simple, emotional and engaging photograph supported by the sharp caption.

The most successful Instagram accounts have:

• Unified strategy and vision
• Consistency and uniform content frequency
• Speaks to the target audience
• Smart and simplified visual display
• Aesthetically pleasing to the eye

Journey Connected is one such apt example with a great attitude of Instagram marketing. Journey Connected has been immensely successful in the engagement of its target audience with 20,000 followers and average 3000 to 4000 likes per post. This level of audience engagement has been enabling “Journey Connected” to connect and communicate with its end number of potential and existing followers daily.

What is an Instagram Marketing Strategy?

It’s most important to have a clear vision or goal of your Instagram profile, whether you are a seasoned social networker or an amateur Instagram enthusiast. This will ensure that your strategy & content creation is right and will always drive you to that vision.

Below is a short list of goals usually a particular set of Instagram accounts follow.

• Promote specific products or services
• Build a forum or community
• Boost awareness towards the particular brand
• Showcase and establish organizational culture & values
• Connect with existing and potential customers
• Sustain and grow loyalty towards the brand
• Share news and updates
• Motivate user to engage

You can pick one or two of these for your own Instagram vision. Ask the below list of questions to yourself to define the right goal for your Instagram account.

• What is that one simple reason for creating your account on Instagram?
• How do you want Instagram to assist you?
• What is your time or financial commitment to Instagram?
• What market differentiations can you see on Instagram?

Know Your Audience Demography

Once you are clear on your Instagram goal, you need to understand you audience demography, do you have the right audience or not. Success in marketing on Instagram or on any other social media platform depends on delivering the right message, to the right audience at the right time.

According to Omnicore, below is a quick overview of 2018 Instagram user demography.

• Among the Instagram users, 68% are females
• There are 77.6 million people in the United States, who are on Instagram. Among them, 31% are female and 24% are male
• Globally, six out of ten adults are on Instagram
• Instagram is used by 31% of American women and 24% of men.
• Among the global Internet users, 32% has an Instagram profile. Among them, 59% of internet users who has an Instagram account are between the age of 18 to 30. 33% consist of age between 31 to 49
• Among the global Internet users, 38% of women use Instagram and 26% are men
• Number of teen Instagram user stands at 72%

Learn How to Build A Winning Content Strategy

Content is the foundation, pillar, and heart of your Instagram account. According to Omnicore, 25 billion photos have been posted on Instagram to date and daily more than 100 million photos and videos are being broadcasted on the platform by 400 million active users.

To earn the desired visibility and to drive audience engagement, content should drive your Instagram strategy.

Content needs to depict your decided Instagram vision. For example, a brand or a product company like Nike showcase its products and engage existing as well as potential customers.

On the other hand, service providers such as We Work promotes culture and community.

Learn How to Build Content Pillars for Your Instagram Account

A well laid out content strategy is the foundation for your content pillar for Instagram.

Below is a list of the most popular content pillars Instagram includes:

a) Customer stories

b) Culture focused

c) Fun

d) Educational

e) Product-focused

f) User-generated content etc.

Here are two very successful examples of Instagram content pillars:

FedEx: The Instafeed of FedEx is very uniform, eye candy and constantly focuses on deliver force, vans and cargo planes with very high-quality photography. They too follow and share the contents of their followers, which is a great way to connect with customers.

Budget Travel Bugs: The content pillar of Budget Travel Bugs is fun-filled and extremely engaging with solid vibrant colors and backdrop. The vibrancy of its feed helps them to stand out among the crowd and target audience love their communication.

Understand the Use of Instagram Stories

Instagram stories is a very unique and popular content feature launched by Instagram in the year 2016. This feature allows account holders to broadcast photos and videos for 24 hours.

Click on the “+” icon on the top left corner of your screen to launch your Instagram story.

The feature allows you to track the number of views and who all have viewed it.

As per reports, over 400 million people broadcast content via Instagram stories. Business has been garnering swift marketing gains via Instagram stories. Below is a list of ways on how you can use Instagram stories.

1. Promotion of content

You can use Instagram stories as a promotional tool to drive awareness for a particular product, service, event or place etc.

2. Behind-the-scenes

You can use this feature to engage your audience behind-the-scenes:

3. Host Instagram takeovers

Via Instagram takeover, you can take temporarily take over other’s account and share content with their audience.

Solid Content Approaches to Drive Desired Results

To achieve exceptional results, your content plan should have defined style guide which will be accompanied by uniform composition, colour palette, fonts, filters/presets, captions, and hashtags.

What is a Style guide?

A style guide for your content plan should include all the must-have details such as the design, layout of the posts, hashtags etc. A style guide ensures post and profile consistency across all broadcasted content.

Hence, it’s the key to your Instagram strategy.

In Instagram strategy, a style guide covers the below:

• Composition: Composition in style guide refers to the arrangement of visual ingredients on the produced content as a prominent subject. The composition consists of: a) solid background colour b) the prime focus of the content
• c) ensuring free space across the top and bottom of the image.
• Color palette: Selecting a color palette will ensure your account’s uniformity and feed consistency. Picking a color palette ensures that you are consistently applying only those selected colors as a theme. This ensures greater audience followings and increased brand visibility. For example, the most popular chocolate brand Cadbury communicates a distinct brand identity via its Instagram profile with its vibrant purple colour palette.
• Fonts: For greater audience engagement, each broadcasted images should contain well-depicted quotes. Across such quotes used fonts should be consistent. Headspace is one such great example.
• Filters: Instagram filters are the handiest tool for amateur photographers. Filters power you to bring life to your picture or video by enhancing its look and feel. This rightly helps in greater audience engagements.
• Captions: A well thought out attractive caption for your post has the power of content enhancement and will experience a greater reach. Though Instagram captions are limited to 2,200 characters, they tend to initiate likes, replies, and comments among the audience.
• Hashtags: Hashtags is the unanimously accepted content discovery keywords across various social media platforms. A post containing up to 11 relevant hashtags will earn higher audience engagement.

Tips for Hashtag Management:

1. Avoid inclusion of too many of them in captions
2. Select the right ones from audience perspective for content discovery, try to find out the popular lists of hashtags for your domain
3. You are free to add hashtags in the comment section to make ensure they aren’t the focus of your caption

Best frequency and posting schedule

The right post conceptualisation content strategy will help the performance of your Instagram account, depending on the frequency and timings of your broadcasting activity. A regular and consistent posting schedule play a greater role in audience engagement, this rightly maximises your success.

According to a study by Union Metrics reported that most of the successful Instagram accounts post twice a day consistently.

How to ensure consistent frequency?

Once your content strategy, theme, content pillar and style guides are ready, you should always work on the content calendar. According to your defined content calendar, craft them and schedule them for broadcast. This is highly recommended for a never breaking posting frequency on your Instagram account.

In addition to the consistent frequency, time is the key to success. You need to post when the audience is active on Instagram. According to multiple social media studies, below-listed timings are key for your Instagram success journey.

1. From 11 am to 1 pm during lunch hours
2. Evenings 7 pm to 9 pm

How to Increase Your Instagram Account’s Growth & Engagement?

Here are four tried and tested ways you can embrace:

• Engage with user-generated content: Instagram users across the globe daily shares a wealth of information. You can share those popular content post on your account and increase like, reply, comments, discussions and follower base of your account.
• Face creates connects and value: Try to include faces on your content. According to a study by Georgia Tech, it earns 38% more likes and 32% higher comments.
• Take help from Facebook: Sharing of Instagram post on Facebook helps in a great way by increasing audience engagement. According to the study carried out by Buzzsumo across 1 billion Facebook posts found that Instagram images posted via Facebook receives greater engagement.
• Try out Instagram ads: Among millions of daily on Instagram, it’s quite a hurdle to earn the required visibility. In such a scenario, Instagram’s advertisement feature will be able to help you to reach out to your specific audience but if you need more help here feel free to reach out to our friendly team at Social Growth Media.

Measuring Your Instagram Account’s Performance Is Important

As a business account holder, you will get access to growth metrics of your account via Instagram Insights. Instagram Insights will enable you to monitor, audience & follower growth or degrowth, number of likes, comments, share etc. Based on these insights you will be able to re-strategise your content plan and work on course correction.

Concluding Thought

With around 800 million active monthly users, today, Instagram has been a powerful growth tool for individuals and businesses; which started as a humble photo sharing application. The users across Instagram today value high-quality, thought-provoking content and above is a brief Instagram marketing guide towards your successful Instagram journey. We look forward to your views.

Originally published at www.socialgrowthmedia.com.