The Next-Gen Business Tool
The future of Business is here, appeal and interact with your customers like never before!
Instagram, the social media hub isn’t just a place to share memories and photos anymore, it has become a place to create, connect and generate income. Over time Instagram has proven to be a powerful marketing tool for businesses looking to expand their presence and the visibility of their products. Instagram may be considered as a Business- to- Customer (B2C) form of business, wherein products are directly sold to customers without the involvement of third parties. Getting started on Instagram is free and businesses can establish a significant community with consistency and strategy. The platform provides opportunities to present oneself/one’s business to a global audience, along with increasing product visibility through posts, stories, live streams, and reels. Essentially, starting a business on the platform is so simple that even social media amateurs may succeed in doing so.
Instagram provides for the ultimate customer engagement. To put in simple words, customer engagement is the ongoing interactions between a company and the customer, offered by the company, chosen by the customer. Customer engagement benefits buyers and suppliers alike by increasing close rates while meeting current B2B customer expectations. Customer engagements increase brand experience and value by building a loyal foundation and customer-brand relationship thus, improving the overall shopping experience.
The presence of a brand online improves the conversion rates. A conversion occurs when a visitor to the website completes the desired goal, such as filling out a form or making a purchase. The percentage of total visitors that convert from being visitors to customers is called the conversion rate. Conversation Rates can be calculated by taking the number of conversions and dividing them by the total ad interactions over a specified period of time. For example, if the sales made in a month is 50, and 1000 people visited the website, the conversation rate would be 5%, (50/1000) *100). A good Conversion rate could range from 2–6%.
Steps to getting started:
- Subtle, yet strong Profile: The essence of business lies in its profile. It is important to have a profile that is appealing, friendly and provides insight into your business. Key things to include in a profile are subtle and understandable descriptions/bio, website links/ details, and amicable posts regarding the products. Another thing to keep in mind is to have a Public Instagram profile so that it's visible to everyone. While these things enhance the profile, an appropriate username that represents the brand entirely is advised. It is also possible to add in contact information for further communicative purposes.
Some examples of a good profile include:
a) Gucci
b) Apple
2. Community and Niche: A community is the one thing that supports the business and shapes its past, present, and future. The niche of your business becomes defined when the target audience intersects the actual audience. The audience that interacts with your account eventually becomes potential customers. Hence, catering to the audience to keep engagements intact and increasing the chances of more reach is a prime factor to your business online.
3. Hashtags: Essentially, Hashtags are online tools that indeed are masked in the form of simple, related words preceded by a hashtag. Hashtags can be added to a post as a part of the caption. Hashtags help in gaining reach by fueling the visibility of your page by ranking it higher in search results. Instagram ideally allows the use of 30 Hashtags for a post and 10 hashtags for a story. While adding hashtags to a post, you can see how popular a particular hashtag is and also shows other related tags. The best hashtag research tools include:
a) Hashtagify: https://hashtagify.me/
b) TweetBinder: https://www.tweetbinder.com/
c) RiteTag: https://ritetag.com/
4. Narrative: People and brands who tell the most amazing stories build loyal and massive audiences. Every object, every person has a story and it is in the rawness and reality that people connect. Instagram provides visual and textual opportunities to lay narratives. Captions on Instagram having a 2200 characters limit encode most of what a person/brand intends to convey. Captions can be added to posts and reels. For example, Tiffany & Co portray their story as well as their customers through alluring posts and also tends to establish similar connections with other audiences.
5. Creativity: Creativity is just intelligence having fun, it is connecting things and expanding perspectives. With the majority of the world online it has become easier than ever to express and evolve. Your business with the right dash of creativity can diminish your limits. Top accounts on Instagram which can give you the right creativity boost include:
a) GoPro
b) Nasa
6. Stories and live streams: Yet another set of amusing features which enhance the customer-business relationships. These tools help you communicate directly with the audience providing a better understanding of either side and increasing compatibility. With quick polls and stickers, it is possible to engage your audience and facilitate conduct. Direct replies to the stories initiate conversations and aid in building connections, additionally, stories can be easily shared and facilitated. Livestreams are live calls that anyone can remotely join, and on request, also be a part of. Livestreams can be saved for 24 hours on the timeline after which they are archived, or they can be saved as posts on the feed forever.
Building a loyal following on Instagram won’t happen overnight. The silver lining is that the Instagram algorithm, once familiar with your account would indeed help you flourish when you apply the above-mentioned techniques. Hence, when the business is put into action, you would witness the brand picking momentum and grow organically online! While you are prepping for your business to go online, do let us know your favorite online business account/page that inspires you!
