Are you leveraging the full potential of Instagram for your business? In this article we share 5 Tried and True Tactics to Use Instagram to Support Marketing for Your Business.
If you answered “No,” then you’re missing out on tons of opportunities to drive engagement, conversions, and sales.
Instagram can be a goldmine for expanding your reach and following, including turning passive audiences into paying and even loyal customers with the right strategies.
If you want to learn more about how you can leverage Instagram to support your marketing efforts, then these five time-tested tips are for you.
Table of Contents
1. Plan and Schedule Your Content
Instagram is an excellent space to engage your audiences and, ultimately, entice them into acting on your offers.
However, effectively engaging your Instagram audiences requires continuous interactions and maintaining a solid online presence—which you can achieve by posting regularly.
Ensure seamless content posting by planning and scheduling your content.
Create a content calendar to help you organize, prioritize, and plan to publish content on Instagram.
Doing so helps ensure you don’t miss opportunities to engage your audiences while allowing enough time to produce your content.
Leverage IG tools designed for marketing to streamline planning, creating, and scheduling your content.
For instance, Vista Social lets you schedule your content posting on your preferred dates and times with a few clicks.
You can create your Instagram Story, Reels, and other content types, and the Social Media Marketing (SMM) platform can auto-publish them to IG on your set schedule.
If you want to publish several content pieces on the same date, add your posts to a queue. Vista Social can auto-publish them on peak times (or your preferred time) for you.
Vista Social also offers a Smart Publisher feature that can curate and publish your IG content for you. Set the specific category and keywords to include (or exclude) to help the platform find and post the appropriate content to Instagram.
Leveraging SMM tools on top of other robust digital marketing software such as graphic design apps to create visual social media content easily can save you from hours of manual work.
You can optimize your content planning and posting for maximum exposure and engagement on IG.
2. Optimize Your Profile
Optimizing your IG profile for business is an excellent way to help your audience learn more about your brand and products. It can also help lead your followers to your website, book appointments, purchase your products or services.
Even marketing experts and a professional web design agency in NJ don’t pass up the chance to optimize their Instagram profiles to ensure their IG channels are ready for business.
Make the most of your Instagram profile with these tips:
- Write an excellent bio. Reel in people who were curious enough to read your bio by giving them a good reason to follow, engage, and buy from your brand.
Use the 150 characters (or less) in your IG bio to describe your brand, including showcasing your brand voice.
Keep your brand description short and sweet. Get right to the point and tell audiences what your company is and what it does.
Add Calls-to-Action (CTAs) to tell people what to do next while giving them a good reason to click and act on your offers.
- Use a consistent profile picture. Use the same photo on IG and across your other social channels, whether you use your logo or other branding images as your profile picture.
Doing so makes it easy for your audience to recognize your brand, helping you increase your Instagram engagement and brand visibility and awareness.
- Choose a relevant link to include in your bio. Accounts with less than 10,000 Instagram followers can post an organic clickable link only in the bio.
Make the link you include count by ensuring your link in bio leads to your latest blog post, landing page, current campaign, or website.
The IG user below is a classic example of including a link to the website in the Instagram bio.
3. Share Compelling Visual Content
Instagram is all about visual content, making it crucial to post eye-catching, stunning images, videos, etc., to draw your audience’s attention and drive engagement.
Posting stunning visual content as part of your content development strategy can also support your efforts to establish a recognizable visual identity.
Consider the following tips to help you create, post, and share attention-grabbing visual content.
- Write compelling captions. Make your visual content more compelling on Instagram by writing catchy captions.
Create captions that help you tell a story and make your photos, videos, Reels, or memes more meaningful, interesting, fun, or valuable to your audience—the way Poo-Pourri does with their caption below.
Compelling captions can tug at your audiences’ heartstrings, entertain your viewers, and encourage interactions with your brand. It allows you to build trust and, in turn, drive engagement and conversions.
- Use reliable and easy-to-use tools. Leverage the right tools to edit your images and photos easily without the help of graphic designers. You can maintain your aesthetic, add your branding elements, and make other creatives with ease.
You can also use tools already in your arsenal for editing your content. For instance, you can easily speed up your videos with your iPhone and use them for your IG Reels and Stories.
4. Boost Engagement with Hashtags and Cross-Channel Promotion
When used strategically, hashtags can help make your Instagram content, promotions, and other marketing-related posts searchable and easy to find.
It can also draw more eyeballs to your content, including getting your content in front of audiences who don’t know your brand yet.
Below are some tips to help you leverage hashtags for your Instagram marketing efforts.
- Create branded hashtags. Make branded hashtags that embody your brand while encouraging your followers to share User-Generated Content (UGC) that fit that image.
It’s an excellent way to engage and connect with your audience better while encouraging community among your followers.
- Find the best hashtags to use. Besides branded hashtags, use other relevant ones to help increase your content’s exposure and discovery.
Consider looking at the hashtags other accounts and influencers you follow use, including the content type they use the hashtags with, and emulate them in your posts.
Use top-tier task management software to plan and organize your hashtags to simplify developing your strategy.
Find the right hashtags and use them strategically to encourage interactions and UGC-sharing, increase your brand and content visibility, and support your marketing efforts on Instagram.
5. Run A/B Tests to Determine What Works
Know which content, headline, CTA, captions, hashtags, and other elements your IG audiences best respond to and compel them into action.
Follow these quick steps to run A/B tests on Instagram.
- Select an element to test, such as a caption, image, or hashtag.
- Create two variations of the content except for the element you wish to test. For instance, you could post the same photo with two different captions.
- Track and analyze the results from each post.
- Choose the variation with the best responses, such as more likes or shares.
- Test other small variations to determine whether you can improve your results.
- Document the results to create a resource of best practices for your brand.
Conduct A/B testing to know what works, helping you refine your content and overall strategy to improve your results.
Harness the Power of Instagram for Your Marketing Efforts
Make the most of Instagram to help grow your following, engage and connect with your audience, build relationships, nurture trust, and drive conversions and sales.
Use the tips in this guide to kick off your Instagram marketing initiatives.
Further Reading: Tips to Use Instagram as a Graphic Designer
Join The Logo Community
We hope this article has helped with How to Convince People to Subscribe to Your Emails.
If you would like more personal tips, advice, insights, and access to our community threads and other goodies, join me in our community. You can comment directly on posts and have a discussion.
*TIP – We use and recommend DesignCuts for all your fonts, mockups and design bundles.
