When done the right way, Instagram marketing that boosts sales and revenue as well as opens more money-making opportunities. If you’re an Instagram marketer, stick to this page and continue reading this article to learn the best Instagram marketing tips you need to succeed.
There are close to 1 billion registered users on Instagram with close to 500 million daily active users. A good number of these users are young people who have money to spend. The truth is, you can make a lot of money marketing your goods or services on Instagram if you know what you are doing.
Unfortunately, many marketers get discouraged when trying to use Instagram as they do not get returns the way they expect. The major cause of the lack of returns is not unconnected because they have been doing it the absolute wrong way.
Instagram marketing is a serious business that requires strategic planning. By now, it is expected that you know that you are competing against others with more experience and a financial budget than you. How then do you intend to stay away from the crowd and be seen?
You will need to be purposeful not to get lost in the crowd. In this article, I will be showing the best Instagram marketing practices that will help you succeed.
1. Make Your Profile Professional
I doubt I will be ready to buy from a seller that is less concerned about the message his profile is sending to viewers. While you can potentially do with an average profile, you will need to step up your game by creating a professional profile.
This means that you will have to separate your business account from your personal account, except you are just an Instagram celebrity being paid for sponsored posts. But if you are selling a service or product, then you will need to create a business account for the business. This is to get more targeted followers and allow you access to other features not available to personal profiles.
For the look of the profile, make sure it is visually appealing and make the written content engaging. Unlike in the past, there is a good number of affordable profile building services on freelance platforms.
If you want to do that yourself, make sure you use a profile picture that captures your business well. For the bio, you have 150 characters or less to let viewers know what the profile is all about – send the message concisely and precisely. For the icing on the cake, earn your business page a verification badge as a sign of authenticity.
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2. Post High-quality Images and Videos
Instagram is a visual focuses social media platform – and users have eyes for great visuals. Most of the content with impressive engagement are high-quality images and videos. You will have to invest in a high-quality camera and have visual editing skills to get people interested in your post.
Remember, your content is not the only one in your target audience feed. There are hundreds of other posts, and you will need to stand out. You need to do more than average, and posting only high-quality images and visuals will do that for you – of course, they must be engaging too.
It is also a good practice for you to have some forms of consistency in your content. This could be in the form of brand color and the way you structure your visuals. The advantage this has is that it creates some kind of memory in your audience, which gets them to associate your content with your brand easily.
3. Balance Promotional Content with Informational Content
It is common for marketers to want to promote and sale their products at any given opportunity. But if you’re going to be successful on Instagram and build a followership base that is ready to listen and buy from you, you need to resist the urge of selling at any given opportunity.
Make sure you post a mix of promotional content with information posts. Believe you me, no one will be ready to follow any account that only sale and promote it content. Most millennia which makes up the bulk of the IG audience are on Instagram to make friends and have fun – not to buy fake followers.
If they are looking for a marketer place, they will be on Amazon, Walmart, Aliexpress, and other e-commerce platforms. However, while on their quest for social interactions, they are open to buying products that spark their interest. For this reason, you need to avoid giving your audience the impression that you are there only to sell. Most of your posts should be informational and educational – only a few of your posts should be promotional.
4. Post Consistently at the Time Your Audiences Are Active
I hope you don’t plan to be inconsistent in your posting schedule? I am talking about posting 3 images in one day and then not posting against for the next two days. When it comes to Instagram marketing, you need to be consistent in your posting. You could make it three times or even once in a day. There is no one size fits all number of posts you should make in a day. The major thing is being consistent. To do this, you should have a posting calendar and make sure you prepare content ahead of time.
Also necessary is the time of posting. As a marketer on IG, you need to know that your audiences are not always online. However, there are times that a good number of them are online – these times are the optimal times for you to post. This is because if you post at a different time, they are most likely to miss your updates as you are most likely sharing their feeds with others.
5. Set Achievable Goals
Goals are what get us to do things and achieve more. Without goals, you will not have a focus, and without a focus, you will most likely achieve things by accident or as they occur. As a serious marketer on Instagram, you need to set goals and map out well-detailed strategies to achieve them. When setting goals for your IG marketing, you have to be realistic and set only achievable goals. You can’t just create an account and set a goal to grow it to have 20K followers in a month. While this is achievable, it is hard for many to do this in their first month.
You need to have goals for engagements; follower count, sales/ lead generated, and posts. Set small goals and achieve them before going for the bigger ones. Also, instead of just having a yearly goal of follows, sales, and engagement based on the algorithm, it is important if you also have quarterly, monthly, and weekly goals. Goals with a smaller duration give us something to measure for the short term in other to achieve our long-term goals.
6. Make Data-Driven Decisions
The world is moving towards the data trends where data is becoming an integral part of any business decision making process. As a social media marketer on Instagram, you also need to make sure your marketing decisions on IG are backed by data.
In the point above, I made mention that you need to post at optimal times of the day that your audience are most active. How do you know these times? You will need to monitor your engagement and the time you have the best of engagement – this is how easy you can use data to your advantage. But there is more.
As a marketer, you will need to track your post performance and engagement. Measure the popularity of your brand and use data to discover opportunities. With data analytics, you can detect areas your marketing flops and improve on them. While likes and follower count matters, you need to dig deeper.
What are your audiences saying? With natural language processing and machine learning, you can get a deeper understanding of your audience.
7. Avoid Spammy Practice
There are Instagram bots in the market that promise to automate all of your actions on Instagram, including sending DM, replying to comment, and even viewing stories. We believe in automation and do not see anything wrong in using automation as they can help us take care of the boring tasks – while we focus on tasks that really need our attention.
However, when using bots, this really same as buy instagram follower and likes, I will advise you to use them minimally if you do not want to risk getting your account ban. I will only use bots to do follow/like/comment with accounts I am ready to lose. For my business profile, I take a white hat approach.
When using bots on accounts, I am not ready to lose; I only schedule posts and reply to comments that require generic replies. Many users will get frustrated when bots reply to them with prewritten text. I try as much as possible to be involved directly with the account and keep spam activities to a low.
8. Use Hashtags to Your Advantage
You will not get popular by just posting content except if you have a huge budget to promote your brand – or you are already popular. For small businesses, you will need to follow trends and bring your account to the notice of others. How do you do this? You can visit the Explore page and discover some of the trendy posts and hashtags.
From your hashtag research, you can come up with posts that appeal to audience interested in the hashtags you go with. With this and consistent posting, you can get popular pretty quickly.
While at this, you need to avoid overusing hashtags or overstuffing your content with hashtags. I have seen marketers have many irrelevant hashtags in their posts. This could give the impression that you are just spam.
9. Post Only Contents Your Audience Will Like
Controversies are not for you – and there is a reason I said this. Even big brands suffer from controversies, and as such, your business can even die before even becoming popular. When planning to content, ask yourself? Will my owners like it? If you answer no to this question or you do not have a convincing answer, then trash that content. Your audience are following you because they love your posts. When you develop the habit of posting what they do not like, they will lose interest in following you.
It is because of this that I advise marketers to have separate personal accounts. You can post whatever you want on your personal account, but the content your post on your business account must appeal to your audience. There is no way about this. Even when you disagree with your audience, you have to do it subtly to avoid triggering their emotion in an unpleasant way.
10. Engage Your Audience in a Swift and Friendly Manner
When it comes to engaging your audience, you will have to be professional and friendly. It will even do you good if you become informal and crack some jokes once in a while. Your audience has limited time, and you do not want to keep them waiting.
I say a lot of brands making the mistake of neglecting some of their followers. While big brands can’t reply to every comment they get from their audience; you should be able to do that. And when responding, make sure you do that as early as possible. You do not want to keep potential customers waiting.
Conclusion
As a way of concluding this article, I need to stress that growing and marketing on IG organically can be difficult and takes time for marketers with little to no experience. However, after getting your hands dirty and you successfully get your account popular, the result can be impressive.
You have to put in your best at the beginning and do the work first. There is a lot of opportunities available on Instagram for those ready to take up the challenge. By following the best practices discussed above, you can set yourself aside from the average accounts out there.
