Top 10 Instagram Marketing Strategy Tips for 2020: Enhance Your Brand’s Presence and Engagement
Instagram has evolved from a photo-sharing app to an important marketing platform that brands use to target their prospective customers.
When it first started in 2010, it was just another social media platform for people to share. However, now it has become an important social media marketing platform crawling with influencers, brand and marketers.
The key to successfully utilizing Instagram marketing in 2020, as with other social networks, is building an engaged following and positioning yourself as part of the online community which could very quickly become your future customer base. If you are a small business owner finding yourself wondering how to do Instagram marketing, you’re in the right spot!
We’ve rounded up the most useful Instagram tips for business owners.
So, let’s take a look at what makes it so useful as a marketing platform and how you can use it to your advantage.
Why Instagram Marketing?
Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms with a massive user base. As of April 2020, Instagram had over 1 billion active monthly users. So, the platform’s user base is too big for any brand or marketer to ignore.
If that’s not reason enough for you to start marketing on Instagram, check out these Instagram statistics that will definitely convince you.
Instagram has approximately 2 million monthly advertisers and over 25 million business accounts.
- 44% of Instagram’s active users use the platform for researching and discovering the brand.
- 53% Of Instagram users follow their favourite brands on the platform.
- Over 95 million posts are created on Instagram every day.
1. Set Up an Instagram Business Account
The first and most important thing that you need to do before you start marketing on Instagram is to set up a business account.
Instagram provides you with the option to either create a personal account or a business account. If you want to market on Instagram and establish your presence as a business, then the latter is the way to go. Moreover, it comes with its own set of advantages.
An Instagram business account comes with cool features like the ability to add links to Stories and to create Shoppable posts.
2. Optimise your Instagram Profile
Your Instagram profile holds the power of making a lasting impression on viewers, potentially converting them into customers. In this fleeting moment, you must captivate and convert. Crafting an optimized Instagram profile is paramount, particularly for business endeavors. It serves as your digital storefront, beckoning visitors to explore further and engage with your brand. Make every character count, as you create a compelling entry point into your digital realm.
Here are some things that you can do to optimise your Instagram profile:
- Select a profile name that accurately represents your brand.
- Write an engaging bio to tell your story and showcase your brand to prospective customers.
- Add a link to your website in your bio, preferably a shortened URL that looks neat and is trackable.
- You can also promote your branded hashtag in your bio.
- Select an appropriate, high-quality profile picture that represents your brand.
- Select a colour palette or brand aesthetic for your posts and use it consistently.
3. Create a Content Calendar for Instagram
An important step toward getting the maximum output from Instagram as a channel is to be consistent in publishing content. Hence, having a content calendar in place helps marketers keep their posting schedule on track. It allows them to forward plan, and automate the process of publishing it when their audience is most active.
Your Instagram content calendar must have the primary fields of content type, caption, hashtags, graphic or video link, and the day, date, and time of publishing. Plan your content ahead of time so that you can keep your calendar flexible for alterations.
To keep your audience engaged, use the right mix of content types and formats in your calendar such as images, videos, text graphics, quotes, memes, and infographics.
4. Post product teasers that will (gently) urge people to buy
Instagram is a great place to advertise your products. And if you play your cards right, you won’t annoy users or scare them off with advertisements, either.
There are three formats for advertising:
Photo ads: These look like regular photo posts, but they have a Sponsored label above the photo. They also have a Learn More button in the bottom right corner under the photo.
Video ads: Like the photo ads, these look like regular video posts, but with a Sponsored label on top.
Carousel ads: These ads look identical to photo ads but feature multiple photos that users can swipe through.
All three ad formats appear in users’ home feeds. These ads support four objectives: video views, click-throughs to your website, mobile app installations and mass awareness.
5. Use Instagram Stories
The benefits of Instagram Stories for brands are truly endless. For starters, Stories are displayed at the top of follower timelines where users already look daily.
Brands can use stories to capture behind-the-scenes insider posts that may not be as “high-quality” as regular posts.
And you don’t have to worry as much about posting content that aligns with the “aesthetic” of your brand or your Instagram page when it comes to Stories. So, get creative and start using Stories to get a wider audience and a better customer reach!
6. Stream live videos
In addition to Instagram Stories, users can take and stream live video that disappears – sort of like a cross between Facebook Live and Snapchat. You can give customers a live look behind the scenes of interesting aspects of your business, show products or answer live questions through the comments.
Once the video ends, it lives in your Instagram Stories for 24 hours. Streaming a live video is also a very successful technique as your followers receive a notification each time that your profile goes “live”.
7. Experiment with Curated Content
Being creative and captivating with your content can sometimes become exhausting for marketers. The best way to ensure your creativity does not burn out is to use curated content from relevant profiles. Marketers have used content curation as an escape from being monotonous and repetitive. The same concept applies to Instagram marketing where you handpick relevant pieces of content that you think will interest your followers and give the content your own voice.
Curated content is a great way to fill in the blanks in your content calendar where you could not fit anything else. It also has its own benefits, such as networking with fellow profiles, branding yourself as an industry expert, connecting with influencers, and being updated with trends on Instagram.
An ideal way to build a curation strategy is to follow similar profiles sharing content that is relevant to your audience. Identify the content that you want to repost, use a caption that describes your intent to share this curated post, promote your own brand along with it. Do not forget to tag the original content creator and give appropriate credits where due.
8. Incorporate Relevant Hashtags
Instagram allows a maximum of 30 hashtags in a post or comment, but using that many could be excessive. The fewer hashtags you can use to get quality responses, the better. Using a lot of popular hashtags might earn you a lot of likes from other users, but it probably won’t increase your following that much, and the interactions you get will likely not be from people who are interested in your brand but rather those who just saw and liked your image.
Once you understand hashtags, you can branch out and experiment to find which ones work best for your brand. It’s also smart to create a custom hashtag for your business or even an event you’re hosting. This way, customers can follow along with an event, even if they aren’t there in person.
9. Collect user-submitted photos
If you already have an engaged audience. Whether it’s hundreds of people or thousands, you can leverage your audience to generate useful content for you. Not to mention that your followers will probably enjoy user-generated content even more than they enjoy yours because it’s authentic and unpredictable.
This works great if you own an E-Commerce business as user-submitted photos will also build your brand’s awareness and credibility.
10. Make sure you track the right metrics
You can’t improve your Instagram performance and optimize it unless you know how well your page and posts are performing (or underperforming). When you keep an eye on what the growth rate of your followers looks like, you can see how the kind of content your posting (or your posting frequency) is affecting things.
Ultimately, you want to find out the average engagement percentage of your total followers as well as the average engagement rate of each post to get a clear picture of how your page is performing.
Conclusion
Instagram has dominated the social media world. It’s the go-to place for image sharing, with over 800 million monthly users.
