We have prepared the following guide to help you develop an Instagram marketing strategy based on clear goals and measurable results.
With more than 40 billion shared images and 400 million active users per month, Instagram generates an average of 80 million photos per day. The mobile phone-based social network that shares videos and pictures drives the ability to share images and create a community among users worldwide. At just six years old, the platform has shown significant growth across the entire user base and nearly every demographic over the past year.
Because people join Instagram as a group, brands have a unique opportunity to engage with their fans: Instagram posts generate a 4.21 percent follower engagement rate; 58 times more participation in keeping with followers than Facebook and a hundred and twenty instances extra than Twitter.
For manufacturers to achieve success on Instagram, it takes greater than posting compelling images: it takes the considerate approach and a well-described emblem identification primarily based on visible creativity and powerful network management. As you explore the potential of Instagram for your business, keep in mind the particular strength of the visual social network so that you can tell a compelling story about your brand.
We have prepared the following guide to help you develop an Instagram marketing strategy based on clear goals and measurable results.
Determine your goals
Whether you haven’t posted a single photo yet or want to increase your existing presence, keep the following in mind when creating your Instagram marketing strategy:
- What does Instagram permit you to try these different systems don’t?
- Who is your target audience? Which members of your audience are active on Instagram?
- How will Instagram integrate with other networks in your strategy?
Instagram’s approach to sharing visually offers a unique platform to showcase your culture and people in addition to your products and services. The app’s mobile nature allows you to quickly capture moments and give followers the ability to engage with your brand in a way that may seem more casual and instantaneous than other networks. Based on industry, brand, and key performance indicators, your Instagram marketing strategy may include many of the following goals:
- Increase the perception of the brand.
- Demonstrate the culture of the company.
- Show your team and recruit new talents.
- Increase customer engagement and loyalty.
- Show products and services.
- Increase and complement event experiences.
- Encourage consumer participation with your brand.
- Share the news about your company.
- Grow your community.
- Connect with influencers.
- Drive sales through third-party applications.
As you continue to develop your strategy, these objectives will guide you in determining the best method for each part of the process.
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Develop a content strategy
Content is the foundation of the presence on Instagram. Many B2C companies use Instagram to make their product the star of the show, while other B2B companies generally focus on company culture and team recruitment. Keep your target audience and their goals in mind to develop a plan to deliver eye-catching content to your community consistently.
Create a style guide for Instagram
When posting to Instagram, you have more to decide which type of filter to use. From visual composition to location tagging to using hashtags in your captions, planning your approach will allow you to exploit the potential of every Instagram feature and function fully.
Develop content themes
Review your goals and determine the aspects of your brand that you want to show in Instagram content. Products, services, team members, and culture offer rich potential for future topics. Once you have a list of specific content topics, brainstorm possible topics for your images and videos.
Some companies focus on showcasing their products and services and offering hands-on tutorials or going the other way and creating fantastic pages with their development as heroes. Oreo does a tremendous job with this by using their cookies in the artwork, usually landscapes or recreations of historical moments.
Determine content types and proportions
Instagram started as a photo-sharing app, but its vast creative user base is posting everything from graphics to animated GIFs. As you plan your content, it is recommended that you maintain a balance between the types of content that will work best for the resources you have and the engagement you want to get from your audience. If the video allows you to tell a compelling story about your product, add it to your content more often. If you don’t have the resources (time, skills, or confidence level) to run videos at the level you want, you can choose not to publish the video at all or reserve it for specific campaigns and promotions. When it comes to a composition for Instagram, quality is essential, and it’s worth taking the time to create the best content possible.
Set a content calendar, but be flexible.
To establish and maintain an active presence on Instagram, determine how often you’ll post, and create a content calendar that runs through your topics and integrates key dates and campaigns. Instagram does not have a scheduling feature and does not offer third-party API access to posts, so you can’t schedule posts directly on Instagram or through your social media management tool. With that said, you can easily prepare content (photos, videos, captions) in advance and create a content calendar so your team knows when posts are due.
Some of the best Instagram content will come off spontaneously, especially if your goal is to highlight company culture or events. By preparing your content and establishing a general schedule in advance, you can achieve the flexibility to take advantage of opportunities when they appear. During events, be prepared to post quickly to take advantage of real-time social engagement.
Consider using user-created content. Spouse
Suppose your network participants on Instagram are sharing their content material that mentions your b. In that case, you could get the right of entry to a repository of capacity content material that is well worth gold. By maintaining content material out of your fans, you could increase target market engagement and create an initiative for your target market to percentage their innovative methods of interacting together along with your products, services, or companies.
You can find user-generated content on Instagram by searching for your branded hashtags. As always, the photos you choose to keep should match your brand aesthetic. Be sure to review user accounts and other posts before sharing their content to determine if it is appropriate to align your brand with them when sharing their photo publicly. It is polite to ask someone for permission before sharing (“republishing”) an image for good practice reasons. Always acknowledge the original photographer by @menting them in your caption, and provide your fans with information on how to share more photos that your brand can use in the future.
Pottery Barn does an excellent job of increasing brand awareness by encouraging Instagram users to use the #mypotterybarn to get their photos shared across the brand. When republishing a customer’s image, Pottery Barn uses the caption to comment on the original; it usually leaves a compliment for the photographer and always highlights the specific Pottery Barn item shown.
Use filters, lighting, and creative tools: Instagram offers different ways to edit photos and videos.
Review the filters and their effects to select several that adapt to your brand’s aesthetics, and thus you can ensure visually consistent content. To edit photos, you also have the option of applying to light or using creative tools. Lighting (sun symbol) adjusts the contrast and saturation of your image.
The tools (wrench symbol) allow you to individually adjust brightness, contrast, warmth, shadows, color, and more. For video editing, you can select a filter, crop content, and choose a specific cover image that will appear in the News Feed.
Your style guide should outline your approach to each of the following points:
Brand aesthetics: Review your existing visual representations of your brand: your logo, website, graphics, stock photography, among others. Do you have an established color palette? A warm or cool tone for your images? Your content on Instagram, the editing effects, and the filters you choose should reflect the same.
Composition: Not all social media marketers are natural photographers, and even for those who are, Instagram’s square frame strays away from traditional landscape and photo frame images. Determine your focus on just a few essential elements of the composition to create a sense of visual harmony when a user looks at your profile.
- Money
- Blanks scales
- Dominant colors
- Theme
MailChimp is an enterprise with a well-described emblem aesthetic and excellent, regular picture graph composition. Your photos, videos, and GIFs generally use simple backgrounds with a dominant color to make the subject stand out.
Set clear guidelines for your team: style, publication, and workflow
Maintaining a consistent voice on the social network is key to building your brand, and on a visual platform like Instagram, the need for a clearly defined aesthetic adds one more point to take into account. Even if one person is responsible for managing your Instagram account, guidelines should be established to compose photos and videos and use filters and captions to ensure your Instagram content is part of a unified brand experience. For your followers.
Caption: Approaches to writing Instagram captions vary, as captions are limited to 2,200 characters; that is, some users omit the captions, and others decide to share a caption similar to a microblog to tell a short story that accompanies each post. Don’t worry about lengthy captions, as they won’t prevent your followers from engaging with your content. According to Simply Measured, there’s no statistically vast correlation between caption period and engagement.
As with all aspects of style, consistency is critical. The guidelines should include if sentence snippets are accepted, if emoji and hashtags will be used (and how many to use in a given post), and what the policy is regarding @menting other users.
Hashtags: Hashtags allow Instagram users to discover content and accounts to follow. So using them is an excellent way to connect with new followers and increase engagement on your posts. A Track Maven study found that for Instagram accounts with fewer than 1,000 followers, posts with 11 hashtags received the most interactions (likes and comments). For accounts with more than 1,000 followers, posts with five hashtags obtained the most interactions on average.
Instagram allows a maximum of 30 hashtags per post or comment. So decide if your brand will use them, how many can be included in a typical post, and if you want to create branded hashtags to align with the content topics. You can use hashtags within the footer in terms of copy guidelines: “welcome to #NYC” or at the end of a post. Which one do you think looks the best?
Discover and disseminate
As you monitor branded hashtags, you can identify popular hashtags in your industry, track them to drive engagement, and use them in your posts. Join conversations related to your brand by searching for the hashtags you use and then examining the hashtags other people use to share similar content.
Analyze your results
Tracking your content’s performance and future growth will allow you to adapt your Instagram marketing strategy over time, deliver more content that your audience will respond to, and optimize your plans for future campaigns. Looking at the messages sent, analyzing the number of comments and likes received. The participation rate for each publication will allow you to know the different types of content’s performance. Engagement rate is a percentage of likes plus comments on the post, divided by the account’s followers when the post was sent.
Other metrics like total followers, mentions, branded hashtags, and location tags can give you insight into the results of your posting and engagement efforts. You can also use post performance data to assess other factors, such as the best time of day for audience engagement.
Many brands also use a link to a specific Instagram homepage or with a particular UTM tag to track the number of clicks on the link on your Instagram profile. Instagram stats on Sprout Social can help you monitor your audience’s engagement, identify your most popular posts, discover influencers, and more.
As you develop and implement your Instagram marketing strategy for your brand, you will find the types of content, workflow, and engagement practices that work for you. Building your brand and growing your brand following on Instagram can be challenging, but you can tell a powerful story with the right strategy and encourage more engagement on the platform and more.
