What is Instagram Marketing Strategy?

Since Instagram’s launch in 2010, it has completely taken over the social media world. It has transformed from a single photo-sharing app to the massive platform it is today. Its users have closely followed this evolution and 22 percent of millennials ranked Instagram as their favorite social media platform. Thus, making it essential for marketers to focus on it and leverage the network even more.

Instagram is a photo and video-sharing social networking platform that has soared in popularity, especially among millennials. Instagram hosts dozens of filters that users can use to edit while uploading photos and videos to their profiles. Users can also edit their pictures directly in the platform by using Instagram’s editing feature to separately change the structure, brightness, warmth, contrast, saturation, sharpness, and many more.

How Relevant is Instagram marketing for Ecommerce?

Check out our Tiktok Marketing Tips and Instagram Marketing Tips.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not a new term, at least for those who have some idea about internet marketing. To make a website successful or an e-commerce business profitable, one needs to invest time as well as money in search engine optimization. How has the success of a website or e-commerce business been measured?

Well, it is only measured by its popularity. To make something popular, you need to reach more people, specifically more potential clients as well as customers. Today, social media platforms are used as tools for SEO. Along with popular social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, webmasters or SEO experts are giving importance to Instagram as well.

Instagram has a strong pursuit work that is fixated on hashtags and also area, brands and individuals names. In the same way, you want to boost your visibility on major search engines such as Google and Bing, you additionally need to have control over what clients see when they look through your image’s name or a hashtag identified with it on Instagram.

Site improvement and web-based social networking are interconnected. Be that as it may, you may be thinking about whether online networking engagement impacts your positioning on significant web search tools. Word in the SEO business is that Google does not factor in web-based social networking in its positioning framework.

In any case, that is a long way from reality; web-based social networking engagement is an aftereffect of stunning substance, which thus brings about back links, notices from your Instagram adherents, rehash per users and lower ricochet rates, all of which are SEO signals that draw in the consideration of web indexes.

Instagram is basically a budding social media website, which comes with many exciting benefits in offering. Popularly, it has been used for sharing pictures or other media files with the social groups. The more followers for Instagram you shall manage to get, the more potential visitors, as well as potential customers for an e-commerce business, can be generated. However, it is not at all easy to get real followers on Instagram.

Features of Instagram

1.  Instagram Stories

This feature allows users to share photos and videos in a slideshow format which will be only visible to that user’s followers. These stories disappear after 24 hours, however, you can highlight them and make them easily accessible sitting right at the top of the app, unlike Instagram posts that can get lost in the feed.

To make your stories more attractive and relevant, you can write or doodle on the images, tag users, place Instagram filters, and more. If you want to engage your audience then the possibilities are endless as these stories can feature a poll-type question and there’s another feature too where you can ask a question to your followers and get to know their responses.

2.  IGTV

IGTV has certainly been one of the most successful features by allowing users to go live on their Instagram Stories. Instagram launched IGTV in June 2018, thus offering to watch and enjoy a long-term vertical video for the first time as IGTV videos don’t have a 60-second limit, unlike typical Instagram videos.

3.  Offers High Levels of Engagement

More than 60% of Instagram users are logging in every day and 75% of Instagram users take action after seeing a business post. If you scroll through your Instagram feed, you would at least find one tasty-looking meal’s post from a trendy restaurant that has just opened up down the street.

This is because Instagram offers great opportunities for engagement by interacting with customers who have tagged you and have commented on your posts. Things like comments, shares, likes, reposts, and tagging your customers on Instagram posts you share help in catering to high levels of engagement.

4.  Reaches new audiences through Hashtags

Hashtags make it incredibly easy to reach new audiences as including a hashtag on your post creates a link that leads to every other post that has been shared with that hashtag. Thus, taking advantage of popular and relevant hashtags can help your brand get discovered on Instagram and increase your ROI for that platform.

5.  Advertising on Instagram

Having a massive base of more than 1 billion active users, Instagram tops all social media networks with 2.2% of Instagram users interacting with an ad. Thus, whether you’re a small business or a large enterprise, using this feature and advertising on Instagram will be great to broaden your audience.

What is Instagram Marketing?

Instagram Marketing is a social media marketing tactic wherein brands use the network to connect with their target audiences and market their offerings. It’s an excellent opportunity to show your brand’s cultures, recruit new employees, show off your products and services in a new light, and engage with your customers.

You can become an influential brand by posting the right kind of content that will be relevant to your current followers and would bring in some new ones too. But it can be hard to go about the process and know what works best for your audience. So, here’s how you can get started with Instagram marketing and use the popular platform for all that it’s worth.

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How to grow Instagram from Zero to 10k

Instagram Marketing Tips 2020 For Ultimate Growth
Instagram Marketing Tips 2020 For Ultimate Growth

The number of Instagram users are increasing over the years. Moreover, with the rise of social media, the scope of promoting, showcasing, and branding your niche has also risen.

Instagram is one such app giving you and your work an exponential exposure. All you need to share is photos and videos to attract your audience to your curated content. But there’s an underlying problem here.

Most probably, you all would know how to set up an Instagram account and how to go about posting videos and photos on Instagram. Additionally, you would also know about the hundreds of thousands of people who are using Instagram. Did you get a hint about the problem?

It is very, very easy to set up an Instagram account, what’s difficult is growing it. Instagram is crowded! Crowded with similar photos, similar videos, and similar content. Your competitors or similar businesses might have already established their brand. So, why would your target audience choose you over them while they provide the same products and services as you do?

In addition to that, to gain popularity on Instagram isn’t that easy as the name ‘Insta’-gram suggests. The truth is that instantaneous popularity is quite rare here. Sometimes, it may seem frustrating to you seeing similar businesses having thousands of followers while your business having a mere 200 or 300 followers.

What should you implement to gain more Instagram followers?

Instagram Marketing Tips For Ultimate Growth
Instagram Marketing Tips For Ultimate Growth

If you want to make a mark on this lucrative platform and scale up your Instagram from 0 to 10k then here are some tips that can help you in reaching this milestone. Yes, you heard it right. We’ll take you to this milestone from scratch!

Stick to the theme

Look at some of the successful Instagram accounts. The one thing you’ll find common in their feed is their theme. They have a decided theme for their account upon which all their posts are based.

Now, this theme can be based on how their pictures are captured, color coordination, delivery of a message, etc. You need to hit that ‘something similar’ point because as you’re looking at a successful Instagram account, you’re pleased to see this similarity in their posts.

Following a theme gives your visitors a perception that you’re a dedicated artist and that you’ve put the effort in connecting and growing your art. Instagrammers are not likely to follow you if you cover anything and everything on your account. In fact, they are likely to hit that blue ‘follow’ button if they see rich content that is targeted to one of their specific interests.

However, this isn’t a hard and fast rule to follow. If you wish to showcase travel, food, and nature all at once, you can show that as well. In fact, all these three industries go hand in hand. But you need to take special care while curating your content accordingly.

It’s just that having dedicated content and little deviation from specific themes has more power in getting you a loyal core community which further increases your chances of getting discovered by other users having similar interests.

Use Interactive Branded Hashtags

Hashtags were released long back by Instagram and are still included in their current design. This itself shows us the value of those hashtags. Many early Instagrammers have received fame by the use of hashtags as they help your posts reach the right audience.

You can check the following of any hashtags that pop up in your head and then use them accordingly. But there’s a problem here too. If the following of a particular hashtag is more, say, 50k posts per day, then that clearly indicates that your posts are most likely to get lost in the crowd.

Thus, don’t just rely on such popular hashtags. Use all those that seem to match your theme within your 30 hashtag limit. Do not overdo the same as well. Additionally, you can also seek help from Webstagram in getting some of the most trendy tags related to your content. Also, do not make the mistake of neglecting the unpopular hashtags. These may in turn come in your favor being your greatest source of exposure as there’ll be less competition here.

Coming up with interactive branded hashtags is a great way to create instant engagement as customers can then use the tag to create user-generated content, which would then allow users to search through all posts that are related to your brand. This is free advertising as each time someone posts using the tag, they’d expose your company or brand to their followers.

Curate your Content

It has never been an easy job to curate content on Instagram. First of all, what is curating for Instagrammers? For most successful Instagrammers, curating content may point towards their account’s first impression while others may keep their best performing posts in mind. And that’s what you should be concerned with as well. Best performing posts and your first impression.

If you want to know about your best performing posts, you can easily do that by switching to a business profile wherein you’ll be provided with necessary analytics. You can click on ‘Insights’ to have a look at the performance of your posts and the behavior of your audience as well.

Thus, you may consider deleting or archiving photos that haven’t done well. The simple reason why they didn’t do well is that your audience didn’t gravitate towards them. Then why keep such content on your account?

Your account will then be a place for just the best performing posts that have the power of attracting your audience. It will help you understand your audience and you’ll be able to give an aesthetically pleasing look to your account.

In addition to that, your account’s first impression really matters when it comes to new visitors. Aesthetically pleasing accounts hold a higher chance to grab the attention of first-time visitors and earn more new followers. You can make your account so powerful by using the Preview app that will help you plan your layout, patterns, colors, and themes to make your feed look beautiful and attractive.

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Post Consistently

According to a study by Tailwind, daily posting has largely helped in increasing audience engagement rates. This is true according to Instagram’s algorithm as well. Because the app has now been showing you at the top based on your account activity. Thus, posting daily can immensely aid you in your success.

Don’t you worry about missing an opportunity to release your posts! There are tons of scheduling tools available online that you can make use of to schedule the posts that would go at the right date and time without you worrying too much about it.

But the most important thing here is to post at the right time. There have been researches on finding out the right time for posting on Instagram. All answers are pretty vague and totally different from one another. Thus, you cannot go about with these studies.

The help you can seek in this matter is through your experience. You need to check the analytics of your account to find which of your posts are doing extremely well and at what time they were posted. Similarly, you need to take care of posts that didn’t do well and note down the timings.

Basically, you need to understand your audience and their reactions in order to come up with the best time for your posts. The audience is the main reason why even surveys cannot come up with a definitive answer because audiences differ in a variety of aspects.

Moreover, since you’ll be posting everyday or say 3-4 times in a week, make sure to come up with interesting ideas for your posts. Do not compromise on quality to meet the time constraint and also throw in a few spontaneous posts to avoid seeming like a bot. Make sure to keep your push notifications on so that you stand a chance to interact with your audience with your scheduled posts.

Do Not Post the Same Content Repeatedly

SEO or Search Engine Optimization should look natural. It must not look like spam. So, on your Instagram account, you need to post regularly, but you must be careful about what you are posting. To make posts more frequent, some people post the same content repeatedly. This causes annoyance among the followers. They would certainly get annoyed with this, and that can cause damage to your business’s reputation. Some people also have the habit of sharing same content in different ways. For example, people keep posting a photo in various editing versions. Doing this thing frequently is also equally annoying like posting the same content again and again.

Define your brand’s Identity

The best part about Instagram is that it doesn’t differentiate between big and small, local businesses. Both are provided with similar things and are given a chance to build their brand’s identity. One way by which you can achieve this is including geotags.

Geotags function similarly to hashtags and can be added through the location option. Thus, if there are users searching for that particular geotag, they’ll stumble upon your posts. Geotags are especially useful for local businesses as users will easily be able to reach your business through geotags.

You can also consider creating your own hashtag. It’s like creating your own slogan, tag line, or business motto. If you share this across your social media handles, you’re most likely to be recognized by that hashtag because hashtags are quite trendy now! Make sure to include a bit of yourself into these hashtags and geotags to boost your brand’s reputation and build its identity.

Engage with others

The main motive behind social media is engaging and interacting with your audience and others. Just don’t be there for picking up their likes. If any comments have been dropped by them then respond to them generously and politely. Take their feedback into consideration, for that matter be open to constructive criticism as well.

If they give you some suggestions and you implement them, that’s the best thing a follower would want from you. Get your users to interact with your posts by asking questions, liking and responding to their comments, and implementing other effective calls to action. This would make your brand trustworthy in their eyes and they in turn may recommend you to their followers, friends, and family, thus expanding your reach and boosting your popularity.

In addition to your followers, you can also consider engaging with other accounts that are based upon similar interests as yours. You can interact with these accounts, get a fair idea about the content they are producing, their followers, and become an active member of the Instagram community.

By genuinely engaging yourself with other accounts you can make your Instagram interactions more meaningful, sincere, and thoughtful. Moreover, if you’ve dropped your interactions at the right place, a place having thousands of followers, then it can turn into a golden opportunity for you.

You can collaborate with these accounts, hold Q&As related to your similar interests, conduct contests, challenges, and giveaways together. Accounts having a large following promoting your content is the best thing you can get because these are trustworthy brands that are followed by so many people. You stand a great chance to attract some of their eyeballs to your own account.

Use your posts across Social media

Social Media is a huge game wherein every single thing is interlinked! The sooner you understand this, the better it would be for you to survive in this game. You can make use of other social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc to advertise and promote your pages, links, and posts.

These platforms give you a chance to share posts through reblogs, retweets, shares, and other similar functions. This particular technique helps in taking your exposure outside of Instagram by broadening your potential audience constantly.

You’ll then be able to coordinate your posts well and will be in a position wherein you’ll be able to take the best advantage of each social media platform with your online presence. There’s so much to offer out there and certainly, it isn’t just Instagram alone that has helped several other successful businesses to scale up. Integration plays a very important role in this tactic.

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Schedule your Posts

You need to be consistent with your posting to stay in your audiences’ news feed regularly. However, don’t over-post as it may turn off your existing followers. The best way you can ensure this is by posting during peak days and hours when your followers are online. You can also use Canva to design and schedule your post. Please note the scheduling option is only available if you are using Canva Pro. I do you use it.

You can find about these peak days and hours on Instagram Insights and then schedule your posts accordingly with a tool like Hootsuite, CoSchedule, or Sprout Social.

Track the right Metrics

First, keep an eye on your follower growth rate which can be tracked with a tool like Influencer Dashboard. Then keep a tap on your measure engagement rates that includes likes and comments. This will give you an idea about how your content is affecting things.

Finally, you need to track your URL click-through rate and measure how many clicks your link is getting in comparison to impressions and engagements. A tool like Sprout Social can help you out with it. Your click-through rate will certainly be higher with an effective Instagram Marketing strategy. If not, then you need to analyze and work on improving your approach. 

Additional Instagram Marketing Tips For Ultimate Growth

So, here’s how you can get started with Instagram marketing and use the popular platform for all that it’s worth. You can also have a look at the digital marketing guide.

Switch to a Business Profile

Before stepping your foot into Instagram marketing, make sure you have an Instagram Business Account. The business account comes with benefits that would allow your followers to contact you right from your Instagram page just like they would do from your website. If you have started a blog, you can put your URL in the bio section too. It will help you increase the traffic on your blog.

Also, having a business profile will give you the ability to create and publish Instagram ads and access Instagram analytics tools called Insights which would provide you with statistics informing you about the impressions and reach of your posts. You’ll now be able to use this platform to track metrics and understand your audience.

Use free Instagram Tools

As mentioned earlier, you can use Insights to keep track of statistics like impressions, engagement data, and more. You’ll also be provided with a breakdown of the demographics of your followers which would include information on their gender, location, age, and most active hours.

Check out Tools we use.

The more you know how your users are interacting with your content, the better you would be able to adjust your content in the future to boost engagement. These tools are priceless for understanding your target audience and can give you specific insights on posts for the week as well. 

Post compelling Product Teasers

You can advertise your products gently and smartly, keeping in mind not to annoy your users with tons of advertisements. The main motive behind product teasers is to just increase excitement about the product without being too pushy. Talk about your products in a simple way without looking like you’re trying too hard.

This way you don’t push them into buying but get them interested in it. They may buy it or at least engage with your post by liking it or sharing it with a friend.

Create Sponsored Ads

You can use the carousel feature to showcase one or multiple sponsored ads. Moreover, the best part about this platform is that you can exactly control how much you want to spend on them by setting an ad budget.

Use engaging content for sponsored ads that would fit your target audience and increase your reach. You also have the ability to turn existing posts into sponsored ads and push high-performing posts to potential customers in the form of sponsored ads.

Partner with Influencers

Partnering up with influencers who already have a large following can be really beneficial for you to reach potential customers. Many Instagram users trust these influential people and if you partner with the right industry influencer then you can introduce your brand to these users.

So, make a search and identify a few influencers having an audience that is relevant to your product or service. Additionally, building a relationship with each influencer will also help increase your brand awareness.

Conclusion

Yes, it looks way simpler for businesses, entrepreneurs, or an individual to make it big on Instagram but now that you have gone through the tips, you would have understood what it takes to get the best out of your efforts. Of course, there’s no doubt that content will always win, relevant and valuable photos and videos will always make it to the top but it needs appropriate backup.

Content is in your hands and we know you’ll give your 100 percent to excel in it but for your backup, we have provided you with these tips that can straight away take you from nothing to a whopping 10k followers. Trust me, that’s the best feeling because it requires lots of effort, dedication, love, perseverance, and creativity!

The social media world is certainly dominated by Instagram having over 800 million monthly users. Thus, this is a great platform to increase your brand awareness, to market your services, and also to attract higher web traffic. All you need to do is just have the right plan to become an influential brand and work towards growing your audience and bringing in new ones.

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