Instagram as a platform has always been tricky for businesses and creators because of its ever-changing algorithm and periodic additions of new formats. While some things keep changing on the forum, others are fundamental to building a great social profile. This article will discuss four strategies that always work on Instagram to build your business.
1. Make the Most of Your Profile
Instagram has three different account types: a personal account, business account, and creator account. Each of those come with their own set of tools and stats. Using all the Instagram offerings is a great strategy to build your small business on Instagram.
Business account for your brand
Using your brand’s account as a personal account is the biggest mistake. Instagram business accounts offer different optimization tools and Instagram stats that help boost your business. These tools include contact buttons and detailed insights into your content performance.
Bio, links, and profile
As they say, first impressions make all the difference. Your bio, profile picture, and links build your first impression on the audience. You must ensure that they contain all the critical information you want the audience to know. Tools like Linktree come in handy in this.
Messaging
There are different ways of building your messaging, and it’s one of the most creative processes in your brand journey. While you can explore your creativity in this, a few fundamental questions need to be addressed in your messaging. They are – who are you, what you offer, and what you want the audience to know about your company. While creating messaging for your brand, you should also make sure that the brand name and the services offered need to be constantly mentioned to improve the recall for your audience. Defining your design style is also a great way to build strong messaging.
2. Use Hashtags and Mentions to Increase Post-Exposure
Hashtags are one of the most crucial tools for growing your followers and reach. Like how people follow accounts, there is an option for people to follow hashtags. If you use a relevant hashtag in the category you work in, your posts show up to the right people, which helps attract people to your profile and service. Here are a few ways you can build an intelligent hashtag strategy.
Invent unique hashtag
In setting up your brand, you must consider inventing a hashtag for it. Unique hashtags are your hashtags that are not used by anyone else. These hashtags can be then combined with your Instagram stats. Building a hashtag structure for different categories under your brand is also smart. For example, #Brand_Category_Product. It helps you understand your content’s performance.
Use trending hashtags
Along with your brand’s hashtag, there are generic hashtags that brands and individuals use to reach a wider audience. If your brand is in the fashion business, using #Fashion under your messaging is a great way because people who search for fashion on Instagram will be navigated to your post through the hashtag. Often, there are trending hashtags bloating around on the internet, and you can leverage those to grow your reach.
Be open to collaborations
Collaboration is a practice where two or more people come together and create content relevant for both of their target audiences. Collaborations expose your account to a completely different set of followers, increasing your reach and followers. Fashion brands collaborating with models and celebrities is an example of getting a good number of profile visits and followers.
3. Tell a Story
Storytelling has become a popular format while talking about your brand. It’s a great idea to build your brand personality just like you build an individual’s personality. While doing this, you can use your motivations, testimonials, and a few other interesting stories around your brand. As humans, we are inherently attracted towards well-narrated stories, and this can be leveraged on Instagram to grow your business.
Talk about your vision and mission
As a small business owner, you have a solid drive to build something. This drive work on your motivations. Have you figured out a long-term vision for your brand and the purpose it’s trying to solve? A brand’s vision dictates what it stands for and where it is headed, while mission specifies what the brand is trying to solve. With an example of a fashion brand, the vision can be to create sustainable fashion at affordable rates. The mission can be to reduce environmental degradation due to fast fashion.
Build a brand image and identity
What is your brand about? What does it achieve to solve? What are your brand’s motivations? Having clarity about these questions is great but explaining it to your audience is even better. This way, your audience can better understand you as a brand, and the likeness of them using your product or service drastically improves. Things like a brand story, customer testimonials, how to use, What we do are examples of content that can be created.
4. Run Promotions
Paid promotions are an essential part of your Instagram marketing strategy. It helps you reach a far wider audience, and if your advertising content is good enough, it will land you a large sum of leads, followers, and engagement.
Run objective-driven ads
One of the most important things while promoting a content piece on Instagram is to decide its objective. Instagram promotions give you a couple of different options to run your promotions: brand awareness, reach, website traffic, video views, lead generation, engagement, conversions, store traffic, etc. Defining why you are promoting something and selecting the right objective and call to action decide the success of your promotions. Therefore, defining your objective is one of the most important things.
Turn followers into customers
So you have a couple of thousand followers on your Instagram profile, and now you want them to explore your product or service. You can target promotional campaigns to a defined target group and convert them into your customers. A lead generation or store traffic campaign will give you the desired results. Paid promotional campaigns on Instagram give you a choice to target a very niche audience and reach them through personalized promotional content. The more personal your content is, the more chances that the ad will appeal to people, and they will take the desired action.
While it feels tricky and intimidating to use Instagram correctly, it’s not as difficult if you use the right marketing strategy to build your small business on Instagram. Instagram stats are created to help in this process, and thus understanding how they work can define how good your strategy is.
