Instagram’s quick facts:
In the United States alone, there are 600 million active users, 400 million daily active users, and 80 million daily active users.
It’s also one of the most rapidly expanding social networking sites.
Instagram is a popular social media network that allows small companies to advertise for free.
Instagram marketing, when done correctly, can help you grow your brand, create leads, and increase income.
You can’t, however, use the same technique on Instagram as you do on your other social media channels.
It’s not enough to just create a profile and toss some hashtags about – everyone else is doing it.
You must advertise yourself properly to make your small business stand out and build your Instagram following and results.
In this post, I’ll go through how to promote small businesses on Instagram.
Also, how to develop a content strategy that promotes and grows your small business.
1. Set up an Instagram account for your business
- Make a bio that is concise and to the point.
Your bio should swiftly and convey to your fans what you’re all about.
This entails describing your company’s mission statement in a way that fits the image you want to project.
If you have a physical location, make sure to provide any key information about it, such as the address and hours of operation.
- In your bio, including a link to your website.
In the sense that connections don’t truly “function” within Instagram, it’s a bit of an outlier.
This means you can’t use hyperlinks in your articles, but you may include a link to your website in your bio.
As a result, be sure to add your most essential link in your biography so that users may access your site via a fresh link.
This may be a link to your home page, your most recent product, or your most recent blog article.
- Pick a username and a photo that expresses who you are
Hopefully, when you choose your business name, you double-check that you’d be allowed to use it on as many social media sites as possible.
You should be able to choose an Instagram handle that is similar to your company name.
If an exact match isn’t feasible, choose a handle that is as near to your company name as possible.
This might mean using underscores, abbreviations, or small modifications, but keep it as near to your company’s real name as feasible.
This might be your logo, your shop, your items, or even some of your staff in terms of your photo.
It doesn’t matter what kind of photo you choose as long as it represents your business and the image you want to project.
2. Make fantastic Instagram posts
- Prioritize high-quality images
Instagram is, without a doubt, the most visually appealing social networking site available.
This implies that for your Instagram to be effective and engaging, you must make it aesthetically appealing.
This doesn’t mean your items have to be gorgeous (though it helps), but it does mean that your Instagram should be coherent, and the images you publish should be well-lit and of the greatest possible quality.
- Make your photos more attractive by using photo editing software.
By this stage, you should have thought about your brand’s color palette, which will help you figure out what your Instagram feed’s general “look” should be.
Perhaps this means subdued pastels, vibrant brights, or desaturated neutrals will dominate your Instagram feed.
Using editing tools will assist you to make your photos work together cohesively, regardless of the color palette that best matches your business.
The built-in filters on Instagram are a fantastic place to start, but you should also experiment with the “editing” option to get greater personal control over your pictures.
- Follow the 20/80 guideline when it comes to selling.
Instagram should, in theory, assist in driving people back to your website or into your business.
However, you should not put all of your efforts into selling your product.
Although it may seem contradictory, the basic rule of social media marketing advises that just 20% of your postings should “sell” your products.
The remaining 80% should be spent on high-quality material that engages followers but isn’t directly related to your product or service.
In the next sections, I’ll explain how to generate this sort of material.
So, in terms of that 20% rule, how can you sell effectively on Instagram?
For one thing, avoid obvious advertising and an unduly promotional tone, especially while presenting your products or offers, since this is guaranteed to turn off followers.
This does not preclude you from subtly highlighting your products or services.
Encourage your followers to use hashtags unique to your company (more on that later) or advise that they tag your business is a fantastic way to see what consumers are saying about you, and you can share this material on Instagram as well.
What a wonderful way to build brand loyalty while also obtaining amazing content!
This will not only make your fans feel valued and special, but it will also feel more genuine.
- For a behind-the-scenes peek at your company, use Instagram Stories.
Instagram’s new video feature, which competes directly with Snapchat’s Stories feature, caused quite a stir earlier this summer.
As controversial as it may be, it is an additional function that allows you to interact with your audience on a personal level.
Look at this image from Lorna Jane’s new film, which shows a behind-the-scenes look at the “essentials” from a brand photo session.
3. Use hashtags to your advantage
- Recognize that more is, indeed, more
Don’t be afraid to use a lot of hashtags on Instagram.
While four or five hashtags can appear excessive on Twitter, that number (or more) has been found to significantly enhance conversations on Instagram, with interactions peaking at 11 or more hashtags.
It’s worth remembering that you’re only allowed to use 30 hashtags per post or comment (and Instagram rules aside, too many hashtags may make you appear spammy or desperate).
- Look for hashtags that are similar to yours
Spend some time conducting some research to locate the finest hashtags.
Spend some time coming up with a collection of hashtags that are important to your business, using hashtag-finding tools like Hashtagify and RiteTag to identify popular related hashtags.
Put them as a comment rather than in the body of your post.
Everything I’ve stated about hashtags thus far comes with one major caveat:
Your hashtags should preferably not appear in your post’s content.
It’s acceptable if you include one or two brand-specific hashtags in the caption beneath your image.
If you wish to include more than one or two hashtags, create your post first, then leave a comment with these hashtags immediately beneath your posted image.
In this manner, your hashtags are visually separated from your content while still enabling it to be found.
- Consider coming up with your hashtags
As I previously said, collecting content from users and encouraging them to tag their posts with your brand hashtag may be a wonderful method to add authenticity to your brand and build devoted fans.
You’ll need a branded hashtag for this.
This may be as straightforward as #yourbrand, akin to Birchbox’s request that people tag their posts with #birchbox, or it can be more creative, depending on what you want your users to share.
4. Provide incentives to your fans
- Discounts and deals should be shared
Your Instagram is a fantastic way to post current deals, discounts, and promotions that you are doing, in addition to curating material that both discreetly advertises your goods and develops a lifestyle story around your company.
You may include your sale or promotion in the photo’s description, or make a picture in Canva or similar with text overlaying that summarizes the deal.
If your promotion is available online, don’t forget to provide a direct link in your bio!
- Contests may be used to increase engagement
Instagram is an excellent platform for hosting competitions;
By developing a hashtag relevant to your content, you can encourage brand followers to join by shooting photographs and tagging them with your hashtag for a chance to win (photos which you can later share on your page).
Contests also allow your fans to perform some promotional work for you:
By tagging your brand in their photographs, your company’s Instagram will be exposed to a whole new audience.
Your contest may include a gift, product discounts, and so on—the possibilities are endless.
5. Make the Most of Marketing Campaigns
It’s time to start running some real marketing efforts at this stage.
There are numerous approaches, but here are a few tried-and-true methods for marketing your small business.
- Influencers:
Reaching out to influencers in your market might help you gain a large number of followers.
Working with influencers may take various forms, including affiliate partnerships in which they receive a percentage of purchases, content cross-promotion, and even paying them to run advertising for your account in their feed.
- Ads:
Ads are a tremendously effective method to both expand your following and directly sell your goods, thanks to Instagram’s superb targeting tools.
- Useful Tools
You should concentrate on the tools that produce the best outcomes in every element of your small company marketing plan.
There are lots of automated technologies you can use to enhance your results and reduce the time it takes to execute your campaigns for everything else.
Buffer can help you plan your posts, Whalar can help you identify influencers for your campaigns, and Canva can help you design beautiful quotes-based images.
You can quickly build a basic and effective Instagram account for your small business using all of these strategies.
Just make sure it fits well with the rest of your marketing efforts so that your customers get a consistent experience across all platforms.
6. Key metrics should be measured and tracked
- Decide what you’ll be monitoring
I’ve spent a lot of time laying out several different options for your Instagram approach.
However, if you don’t measure the effectiveness of your efforts, they’ll be a bit pointless.
When developing an Instagram strategy, it’s important to consider what your actual goals for growing your Instagram presence are.
This will most likely entail selecting a few critical metrics to track.
If you want to improve your Instagram presence in general, you might concentrate on boosting your following, increasing the number of likes per post, or another critical Instagram measure.
Alternatively, you may be more concerned with growing sales, in which case you’d track clicks back to your site, total sales growth, and so on.
The field of social analytics is enormous, and I won’t be able to cover everything in this article.
Spend some time thinking about your objectives, and then narrow down your research to what you can track to see if you’re on pace to achieve them.
Make use of tracking tools to keep track of your progress.
After you’ve decided what you want to measure, you can start looking for tools to assist you to do so.
- A/B testing can help you figure out what works
Testing different forms of content to see how they perform is one of the best methods to enhance your results.
You may fine-tune your overall strategy as you understand what works best for your unique audience.
Here’s how to perform an Instagram A/B test:
- Select an element to evaluate (image, caption, hashtags, etc.).
- Create two variants based on what you’ve learned from your study.
- Except for the one aspect you wish to test, keep the two copies identical (For example, a similar image with a different caption).
- Each post’s outcomes should be tracked and analyzed.
- Select the winning variant.
- To see if you can enhance your findings, try another tiny modification.
- To develop a library of best practices for your brand, share what you discover with the rest of your company.
- Restart the process from the beginning.
Conclusion
You should have some ideas for a winning Instagram approach at this point.
While it may appear to be a lot to handle at first, Instagram allows you to genuinely engage with customers and elevate your business image to new heights.
