Every teenager, young adult, and even a middle adult is hooked to Instagram these days. A recent study revealed that Instagram has approximately 1.440 billion monthly users worldwide.
This makes Instagram the second most used social site after Facebook. The popular visual-first social medium highlights to have over 500 million daily Instagram stories globally.
From posting pictures, sharing their everyday lives, and running a pet account to successful businesses, everything is under the umbrella of this most used social site.
This means that the number of brands with their online presence on Instagram has skyrocketed. In the words of Oberlo, around 71% of US Businesses use Instagram.
No wonder we all are so updated about them.
The point is this — Instagram is not just for personal use. It is a great platform that allows businesses to optimize their content, showcase their products or services, and soar to the greatest heights.
This article will guide you on the easy steps to build a successful marketing strategy on Instagram.
Why Instagram Marketing?
The 21st century is the era of global networking. Today, people prefer to have desired products delivered to their houses with a single click on the screen.
Instagram has an advantage over other social media platforms due to its visual nature. Not only given to its unbelievably high reach but also videos, images, and illustrations are all great content that fits perfectly on Instagram.
Having a strong digital marketing strategy instead of just blindly diving into the platform is crucial for your business’s success. Your strategy will determine the type of content to post and when to post it. Every business comes with its strategy, which is why yours need to be unique, smart and audience engagement.
Here are some of the steps you can follow to build your own successful Instagram strategy.
Set Smart Goals for Instagram
Before you simply go and start posting on Instagram, introspect with yourself and debrief your team what exactly are you here for?
Ask questions to yourself, such as why are you on Instagram? Why are you making this post? What do you want to say to your audience?
Look within your mind and debate if you, as a user, would be intrigued by the same post that you are going to make.
You must not just simply walk in the footsteps of others. To be successful on Instagram, you must have smart goals and purpose to justify your time, money, energy, and investment.
You must define your Instagram goals before beginning. And yes, you can have more than one. You can post product images while also sharing user-generated content. It’s all about why you are sharing it.
Know your Target Instagram Audience
Marketing is all about your audience’s psychology. If you know that, you are one step closer to success.
Therefore, before you market on Instagram or post your products, determine what kind of audience you want to reach, understand their emotions, and the psychology behind their choices, and play with that.
Analyze various factors of your targeted audience like age, gender, income, location, interests, motivations, pain points, taste, etc., and create posts in regard to that.
If you are unaware of how to start with that, the best way to do so is to follow the popular hashtags related to your business. Explore them and see what kind of audience is following them. Once done, try to engage and follow these audiences.
You can also skim through your competitor’s followers to attract their audience with your unique and engaging ideas.
Conduct a Competitive Analysis
Now that you have set your goals and defined your audience, the next important step is to do a competitive analysis.
Competitive analysis is smart work to know what your competitors are doing in your field. It gives you a head start as to where you are standing in the market and how you can win the race.
If you are aware of your competitors, start analyzing their profiles, their followers, their reach, their content, their aesthetics, their strategies, etc.
In case you are unaware of them yet, start by searching for items and hashtags related to your field and work your way from there.
Conduct a quick audit of the few famous accounts to see what posts have the highest engagements and how their content, captions, hashtags, etc., are different from others to reach such a high audience.
Design an Editorial Calendar
Creating an editorial calendar is a smart way to save time and manage your Instagram presence. It is always better to plan certain things than just go with the flow, especially when it comes to business.
Hence, we recommend you fill in your calendar beforehand with various sections, including; Instagram post types, captions, hashtags you will be using, aesthetics of the picture, themes, and posting time.
If you have any special key event, such as a new product launch, sales, special offers, etc., you can always mark it in your calendar.
This will help you keep an eye out for various opportunities rather than just wasting time on last-minute scribbles.
Be a Consistent Brand on Instagram
The major drawback behind various businesses failing is their inconsistency. Random or disjointed content can confuse your audience, lose their interest and result in loss of followers.
Therefore, you must be a consistent brand and maintain a consistent aesthetic feed.
Determine your brand’s aesthetics, themes, and visuals, and try to stay consistent with that. Keep your audience engaged every day by posting stories, BTS, asking their opinions, ideas, etc.
The more consistent you are, the better your reach will be.
Expand your Follower Base
When your patience breaks down, you might be tempted to buy followers. Don’t do that.
Buying an audience will gain you followers, not buyers.
You must expand your follower base in a way that reaches the audience who are genuinely interested in buying products or getting services from you.
Here is what you can do:
- Make sure your username is recognizable and searchable
- Populate your feed with at least 15 posts before reaching an audience
- Follow accounts of your interest and related to your business
- Interact with their content
- Encourage others to share your content
- Organize fun giveaways
- Send PRs
Growing a business on Instagram is a task full of patience and persistence, but if you follow the above steps smartly, you will start from a good place and see your business flourishing in days to come.
