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Complete guide to Instagram marketing
As you know, creating a website for your business or blog is the most crucial step to your online success. But there’s still a lot left to do after publishing your site, such as bringing in traffic and targeting the right people.
To reach your audience, you’ll want to get in front of users where they’re already spending a lot of their time – on social media. One of the most popular social media channels is Instagram, which has over a billion active monthly users. There, people come to get inspired, discover new content and learn about new businesses and brands like yours.
In this Instagram marketing guide, we’ll discuss all the ways you can use the channel to meet your marketing goals, including setting up an optimized Instagram business account, creating solid content pillars, knowing the best times to post, partnering with influencers, and more.
How to boost your Instagram marketing game?
We’ll uncover this by following questions and also the tip for Instagram marketing that will help you boost your Instagram marketing game.
- How to create and optimize your profile for better Instagram marketing.
- Type of content to post on Instagram
- Develop an Instagram strategy
- Effectively use hashtags for Instagram success
- Instagram marketing tips
1. Create an Instagram business account
The secret to getting ahead on Instagram is getting started. If you don’t have one yet, the first thing you have to do is to create an Instagram business account. Once your account is set up, you’ll need to convert your profile to a business account. This will grant you access to premium features like advertising, analytics, and shopping posts.
Here is how to get a professional business account:
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Signup
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Go to settings > Account > switch to professional account
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Connect to Facebook. You’ll be asked if you would like to link your account to your Facebook business page. This is recommended because it will allow you to easily share posts on both channels and find relevant people to follow.
2. Develop an Instagram strategy
Instagram’s funny memes and throwback Thursday photos sure are entertaining. But to turn Instagram into an instrumental marketing channel for your business, you’ll first need to work on developing a solid strong strategy. For this you have to do the followings:
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Set clear Instagram marketing goals
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Identify your Instagram target audience
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Conduct a competitive analysis
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Build a solid optimized profile and bio
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Decide on a consistent Instagram aesthetic
3. Strategically use all of Instagram's formats
When you are done with your Instagram business account set up and developed a strong Instagram marketing strategy, it’s time to decide what type of content you’ll be posting on Instagram. Content is key to developing organic followers on Instagram and communication with your followers.
So, which type of content do you want to publish? Starting from only still images, the app now offers IGTV, reels, Instagram Stories links, Instagram Live, and shopping formats.
Being captivating isn’t the only benefit of using more than one Instagram format. The algorithm has said to reward those accounts that use many of Instagram’s different products.
Let’s explore each format type and how you can leverage it for your business.
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Standard Images
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Videos
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Stories
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Carousel posts
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Story Highlights
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IGTV
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Reels
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Live and Live rooms
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Shopping
4. Build Robust Content Pillars
As beautiful as your product photos are, you cannot only rely on them for your Instagram marketing strategy. To truly be successful, you should also include materials that educate, inform, and inspires or entertains. We recommend building content pillars that fall into these categories:
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User-generated Content
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Behind the scene Content
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Quotes, Employees
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Product Promotion
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Educational, Seasonal Posts
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Events, Testimonials
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News, Press, and Publicity Posts
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Entertaining or humorous Content
5. Effectively use Hashtags for Instagram Success
Without any doubt, Instagram hashtags are powerful. They can either make your marketing campaign or break it. Using the right hashtags can expand your audience, engage your audience and boost your reach.
So, one of the best ways to get more eyeballs on your Instagram post is to use trending hashtags. Following are some best tips to get the most out of hashtags:
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Use insights to see which hashtag works best
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Include hashtags on Instagram stories
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Avoid spammy and banned hashtags
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Don’t use repetitive hashtags
Instagram marketing tips
While there are hundred of tips and tricks to marketing on Instagram, we’ve narrowed it down to the top most essential growth strategies:
1. Understand the Instagram algorithm
The first thing you need to keep in mind is that, rather than being in chronological order, the feed displays posts depending on the type of content Instagram thinks users would be most interested in and will spend more time viewing.
To use the algorithm to your advantage, you must prove to Instagram that people find your content interesting in a short amount of time after posting. Here are some ways to get the algorithm interested in your post and boost them as a result.
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Increase the time people spend viewing your post
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Encourage saves
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Get more shares
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Drive post engagement (comments and likes after posting)
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Write an alt text description for your images.
2. Write compelling captions
Captions are a powerful way to make your brand’s voice heard and get the post’s message across. In addition to crafting informational and entertaining text, it’s important to include a call to action (CTA) in some of your captions. Don’t forget to use some emojis and hashtags, as more than half of Instagram captions and comments contain emojis.
3. Engage with your current and potential customers
The more you engage with other people’s posts, the more likely they are go back to your profile, engage with you, follow you, or maybe even come to your website to convert into loyal customers. Here are some practical ways to interact with your audience:
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Try to respond to all your comments, or at least the ones written in the first few hours after your post.
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Collaborate with similar accounts. Agree on mutual value exchange actions such as sharing each other's posts on your Story to allow for more engagement from new audiences.
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Join or start engagement groups that like, comment, and save each other's posts.
4. Run a contest or giveaway
Many people are eager to follow, share, tag friends and heavily promote another Instagram account for the chance of winning an appealing prize. The ideal outcome is that the cost of the giveaway will be worth the price you want to pay for more followers, reach, and customers. Depending on your budget and audience, the reward can be an expensive gadget, a discount sale, or your product giveaway.
5. Partner with an influencer
Influencers are people with a lot of followers who can influence purchasing decisions. While some influencers are more like Instagram celebrities, some brands also work with micro-influencers who have a smaller following but still can be valuable brand advocates.
6. Know the best time to post on Instagram
To build a strong presence, you need to be consistent and know the best time to post on Instagram. Ideally, you want to post 1-2 times a day on your feed and publish 10+ Stories a day. What time you should post? Here check the several performance peak hours to post on Instagram.
Instagram Scheduling Tools
The influx of social media scheduling tools available in the market can lessen your marketing efforts and save you significant time and energy. Here Is one of the best tools to boost your Instagram presence.
AppuSocial
When it comes to the best Instagram scheduling tools, then AppuSocial tops the list.
AppuSocial supports Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google Business Profile. You can connect multiple accounts into its simple, intuitive dashboard and manage them simultaneously.
With AppuSocial, you can easily create, edit, schedule, and share your content. Schedule your content for up to a long time with the bulk upload feature. Know how your post is performing by comparing monthly and weekly performance. Boost engagement levels with trending hashtags and escalate your Instagram marketing, bring all your IG conversations under one roof with Social Inbox, and more. Get it today for a 14-day free trial.
Conclusion
As you progress with your Instagram marketing strategy, you’ll begin to notice some trends and what types of content help you to reach your goals. It’s never easy to build a loyal, engaged following on any channel, but with the right approach and enough experimenting, you’ll find a great fit for your brand.
