7 Instagram Marketing Strategies For Business
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I love Instagram! It’s great for connecting with your audience on a more personal level and showing them your personality through images or live Instagram stories. Instagram is a highly visual platform that presents a great opportunity for businesses to build brand awareness and improve their social media strategies. If you want to know more about how to get more followers on Instagram, click the link to get my free guide.
With so many users joining Instagram and more businesses investing in it, it’s getting harder to stand out from the crowd. Using the increased competition from other users and brands, you might be surprised to know that the average Instagram user misses about 70% of content on their feeds. Instagram has also followed Facebook’s lead when it comes to the algorithm ruling what content is being shown in your feed. In an effort to create a better user experience, the order of photos and videos appearing on your feed are now prioritized to those Instagram thinks you’ll be most interested in based on your previous Instagram activity, your relationships, and the timeliness of the post. So, where does this leave you, the Instagram marketer? You’ll need to be smarter with how you deliver your content and on where to focus your energy.
Here are my favorite Instagram marketing strategies that you can implement to get more followers and better performance.
Leverage the bio link. Have you ever seen those posts that say, “Click the link in my bio for x?” Placing links in your social media posts that direct users to your website or store or any landing page you want to take them to is a great source of conversions for business. And at the time of filming this, Instagram does not allow links in the caption of your posts, so the trick here is to maximize your bio. For most businesses, the bio is where they place their website link and mostly ignore it afterwards. But what they don’t know is, this piece of real estate can enable you to achieve your objectives. Use the bio to maximize your CTAs, call to actions. Place links to new content or relevant content.
Let’s say you’re a blogger. In one post, you can use that to announce that you have new content. You can also mention that you have the link of your content in your bio. This would push the user to take action and take a look at your new blog post. Voila! To do this, what I suggest is to create a custom Bitly or shortened Google link and then place this in the bio section of your Instagram. I like to use Bitly links because I’m just curious to track the performance and know the number of clicks it gets over time. But you can absolutely just use the original URL.
Be exclusive. One of the smartest ways of using Instagram is to deliver exclusive content. This helps create loyalty and develop an attachment for your business. Using this only us approach requires that you announce to your customers that special products, discounts, features, and other content will be shared via your Instagram account and only your Instagram account. If you post the same content everywhere, your audience doesn’t have an incentive to follow you on all the platforms, if they can just get the same content from just one.
Leverage on hashtags. Another way of getting around the lack of links in comments in post descriptions is through hashtags. Tap into popular hashtags such as throwback Thursdays or flash back Fridays for your content in these categories. These allow your content to be noticed when people search for those hashtags. You can include up to 30 hashtags in the caption of one post. These hashtags are great for generating impressions and to boost your followers. Incorporate trending hashtags and content to create more impact.
Build relationships and conversations with other influencers. Look for popular accounts, brands, or industries within your industry. Try to identify key opinion leaders or influencers who follow these popular accounts and interact with them. Like one of their photos, place a high-value comment on their post, and follow the user. Keep the ball rolling and the user will most likely follow you back. Continue to create great content with those people that you have similar interests with so that other users will follow you back too. Download my free guide if you want more strategies on how to grow your following on Instagram.
Place a call to action for each post. In creating content for your account, ensure that you have a strong CTA. To get your followers to do your intended action, you just need to ask. Place a call to action on your Instagram post. This could be something as simple as asking users to like the post, tag their friends, or access the link in your bio. Regularly incorporate these call to actions in all your content so that the users won’t just look at your posts. This leads to better performance overall for your Instagram account.
Analyze your Instagram Insights. To access your Insights, change your Instagram account over to a business account. Go to your settings and then click, “Switch to Business Profile” link. When you’ve switched, a little graph icon will appear in the corner. This will enable you to check out the impressions, reach, number of website clicks, follower activity, video views, and saves. Use this information to understand who your followers are and what content resonates with them.
Cross promotion works wonders. Don’t just create native content, cross promote them. Use your website, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat account to generate interest in your post. Cross promotion is the basic act of making sure that your un-duplicated followers in different platforms know that you have new content available on your Instagram. This ensures that you divert traffic in these channels to your post.
Instagram is a great tool in generating higher engagement for brands across all social media platforms. These seven proven strategies can help you get more followers and achieve your objectives.
