19/09/2022
what is instragram marketing?
Instagram marketing is a type of social media marketing, which involves promoting a brand on Instagram. This social media platform helps brands connect with an enormous audience, increase brand awareness, and boost sales.
Contents
Why is Instagram marketing important for businesses?
4 Benefits of Instagram for Business
Instagram Marketing Strategy
5 Instagram Marketing Tips
3 Instagram Marketing Ideas and Examples
Why is Instagram marketing important for businesses?
Instagram is the perfect channel to reach an enormous audience – over 1 billion active users monthly. On average, users spend 53 minutes per day on Instagram, which makes this platform the second most visited social network after Facebook.
Instagram facilitates maintaining your relationships with customers and prospects. People enjoy being connected with brands through this network – 90% of users follow at least one company on Instagram.
Another point to consider is Instagram’s selling acceleration opportunities. According to Facebook research in 2019, 65% of people polled visited a brand's website or app after seeing it on Instagram. 46% of interviewees purchased from a brand online or offline.
Access to a vast audience, which actively interacts with brands and wants to buy from them, is a core advantage of Instagram marketing. However, this social network has a handful of other benefits.
4 Benefits of Instagram for Business
Brand strengthening
Improved engagement
Enlarged sales
Audience growth opportunities
Over the past few years, Instagram has evolved from being a place for flexing wealth or achievements to a helpful platform for business purposes. There are four ways Instagram can affect your business positively.
Brand strengthening
Instagram marketing works wonders for brand awareness. 83% of users confess that this social network helps them discover new products or services. Better yet, people show more trust in the brands presented on Instagram.
74% of users consider brands with Instagram accounts relevant and 78% perceive them as popular. In contrast, brands that do not have an Instagram account are likely to be avoided by potential customers.
Improved engagement
Social networks are one of the best channels to maintain relationships with customers. They allow you to get feedback from your audience through likes or comments, engage them with captivating content, notify them about special offers, and more.
In turn, Instagram works for customer engagement even better than other social platforms. Usually, a photo on Instagram gets 23% more engagement than a post on Facebook, though the latter platform has twofold more active users.
Enlarged sales
We already know that the Instagram audience makes purchases willingly. This buying audience is gigantic – 11% of social media users in the US shop on Instagram.
Knowing this peculiarity, Instagram lets businesses make the most of their platform. Instagram offers a robust set of tools that allow users to shop right from Instagram. Among them are links in Instagram Stories, shopping tags, ads, and more. Consider reading the full list on the Instagram website.
Audience growth opportunities
Instagram boosts your business’s reach by letting you define your target audience precisely. This opportunity is available on Instagram ads manager thanks to its targeting options. With them, you can pinpoint the most suitable audience according to demographic data, interests, behavior, and more.
Better yet, Instagram ads manager provides you with robust retargeting options. Targeting and retargeting coupled allows you to not only drive more qualified Instagram leads but also nudge leads from other channels down the sales funnel effectively.
The Instagram analytics tool allows you to measure your ad performance. You can track outreach, total campaign spending, the number of purchases, cost per purchase, conversions, and more.
To sum it up, Instagram marketing strengthens your brand, brings you a willing-to-buy audience, and keeps them engaged with your business. Read on if you want to get maximum value from this channel. In the next part, we’ll find out how to set up an Instagram marketing strategy.
Instagram Marketing Strategy
Set your goals
Define your target audience
Analyze your competitors
Get a business account
Design your content
Build a consistent aesthetic
Configure an editorial calendar
Grow your follower base
Turn followers into customers
Every marketing channel needs a well-designed strategy to drive amazing results for your business. To build a strategy for Instagram marketing, follow our step-by-step instructions.
1. Set your goals
Start crafting your Instagram marketing strategy by setting goals. Goals will underlie everything you do on Instagram, from defining your content formats to using advertisement mechanics. Popular objectives brands try to leverage through Instagram are increasing brand awareness, reputation management, building a community, sales acceleration, getting customer and market insights, and more.
Your goals should correlate with your business needs. If your financial results are more or less good there is probably no need to boost sales through Instagram. Try focusing on getting customers or market insight instead.
For higher efficiency, make sure your goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. They may sound like “We need to yield a 20% increase in sales through Instagram in 5 years.”
2. Define your target audience
Determining your audience is an essential step; miss it, and all your efforts to achieve business goals will fall flat. A pro tip here is to craft a buyer persona. Learn who your typical customer is, their age, gender, occupation, location, income level, and so on. The better you know your customers, the better results you will get.
A major mistake to avoid here is crafting a make-believe persona. Use a data-driven approach instead of guesswork. To get information about your potential customers, you can explore Instagram hashtags related to your business. For instance, if you are marketing an event agency, you can examine , , or .
Take a closer look at profiles that use these hashtags. Then try to learn more about the people who interact with these accounts – what reactions they share, what comments they write, what they love and loathe about the profiles. To learn more about creating customer profiles and other techniques, follow our comprehensive guide.
3. Analyze your competitors
To get your head around Instagram marketing, research your competitors’ profiles. Find out who they are, what kind of content they post, how they interact with their audience and other brands or influencers. You can also research your rivals’ branded hashtags to get a hint of how popular they are.
Try to focus not only on successful tactics but also spot the things your competitors might be missing. This will help you come up with effective and unusual tactics for your brand promotion. Imagine that you are marketing a psychologist’s practice through Instagram. Typical doctors on Instagram publish static images with instructions on diagnosing psychological conditions. Thus, to stand out, you can entertain your audience and post videos with interesting psychological experiments.
Researching competitors through Instagram is painstaking work. Luckily, you can alleviate some of it with social listening services or CRM systems. For instance, Sprout Social can compose competitor research automatically. Follow our compilation of great CRM systems for more information.
4. Get a business account
Instagram offers its users two types of accounts: personal and business. The latter gives you a lot more benefits and opportunities. For instance, you can track your performance in real time, learn more about your followers' behavior, add information about your company, and more.
Follow our precise step-by-step guide to switch to a business account, and then return here for some non-technical marketing tips on setting up your profile. Here they are:
Create a perfect bio. Make a 150-character description of your business, focusing on why it stands out.
Optimize your profile photo. It should be recognizable and reflect your business. You may opt for a logo, but remember that Instagram shows it as a 110 x 110 pixel photo.
Link to your website. This is crucial for lead generation – your profile description is the only place, apart from Stories, where you can add a link.
Use business options. You can add a category, contact information, and CTAs in business mode. Do not neglect this opportunity to get in touch with customers.
