15 Instagram Marketing Tips for Business

Check out these tips to drive your Instagram marketing strategy toward better engagement and higher ROI.

If you’re looking for a way to grow your business, you may want to consider Instagram marketing. Instagram is an essential part of many business owners’ social media marketing strategies. This guide covers the benefits of using Instagram for business and top Instagram marketing tips to follow. Mixx is the ideal way to get followers, views, and likes on your social media. 

How to get started with Instagram

Opening an Instagram account for your business is simple. Most business owners prefer to start a company account rather than use a personal account for promotional purposes. Follow these steps to start a business account on Instagram:

1. Create a profile. If you already have a personal account, you can switch it to a business account.
2. Click “account settings.” Under the “account” menu option, you can set the page as a business account.
3. Select the relevant categories. Choose the industry of your business to reach your target customer base.
4. Add business details. Share your company’s contact information, including website URLs, business address, phone number and email. Choose a profile picture for your page (most businesses use their logo).

Business benefits of using Instagram

Instagram is a smart marketing tool if your business has products and services that can be presented visually and your audience is active on the channel. If your business checks those boxes and you carefully plan and execute your Instagram social media marketing strategy, this social media channel can have these big benefits:

• Increased brand awareness
• Followers’ trust
• Brand loyalty
• A boost in website traffic
• New leads
• New customers
• Repeat business

Instagram marketing tips and best practices

Instagram marketing strategies vary from business to business. Although the following Instagram marketing tips have been effective for select brands, you should cater each tip to your unique audience and sales offerings.

Know your audience.

If you don’t know your audience, you are essentially creating content blindly. Many small businesses think their audience is everyone, which is almost never the case.

To help pinpoint your target audience, HubSpot suggests creating buyer personas. You can have more than one buyer persona, but limit them to five to ensure they are manageable. Include important details about your target audience, such as their demographics and how they think and act. For example, consider the following characteristics:

• Age range (keep it within 10 years)
• Specific location (city and state)
• Job title
• Gender
• What motivates them at their job
• What motivates them at home
• Three main problems they have
• Any additional information you can identify (e.g., if they have pets and/or children, their salary range, their hobbies)

When developing buyer personas, make them as clear and as detailed as possible. The more specific your buyer personas are, the better you’ll succeed in creating content that appeals to your audience.Email them a survey, letting them know how long it will take to fill out. 

To further entice your current customer base to take your survey, you could offer a promo code to be applied to their next purchase, and you might even get some extra business from it. If your business is brand-new and you really don’t have any idea where to begin with surveying your customers, reach out to your personal social media networks for assistance. There has to be an audience you had in mind when you started your company. Find those people, even if you have to go through your personal Facebook friends list and phone contacts.

Another option is to use a paid digital tool to survey a group of people. If you choose this route, start with an audience of 100 or fewer people, and increase it as needed. Sometimes, a small sample is helpful and saves you money.

Optimize your bio.

Your bio is an important part of your Instagram page, and it needs to be optimized. Include the following elements:

• A bio that tells a story of what your brand or Instagram influencer page is about
• A link that visitors can access for more information
• Hashtags (when applicable)

Example: Just for fun – micro-influencer Instagram bio

Source: Zoey the Maltichon / Instagram

Incorporate relevant hashtags.

Hashtags, including those that are trending, can help people find your page on Instagram and Twitter and are essential to grow your audience and sales. Josh Stutt, founder of ABCD E-Commerce, said to make sure to research hashtags before you start using them. If you’re not a widely known brand or celebrity, using generic hashtags won’t get you anywhere. 

“You have to be compelled to realize hashtags that square measure generally on purpose [and] have an honest following however are not being employed by everybody else in your area,” Stutt aforementioned. “By victimization, the Instagram search operate, you’ll see the recognition of any given tag #tshirt has thirty eight.5 million posts, however #vintagetees solely has 388,000. Dig around and realize fifty close to tags that square measure applicable to you.”

Once you have done this, use regarding fifteen hashtags in varied combos on your posts, and keep track of wherever you employ all, Stutt recommended. After that, he said, review the results, staring at that posts resonated, that hashtags brought folks in and what folks talked regarding in your posts.

“As you learn which of them work for you, use them unendingly whereas slowly adding in different ones and attempting to proportion as you gain quality,” Stutt aforementioned. “Once you begin connecting on sure tags, that is after you will hit the Discover section, and that is however you get Instagram operating for you rather than the opposite manner around.”

Interact with other users in your target audience.

Building relationships is Associate in Nursing old sales manoeuvre that’s effective in social media moreover. it’s conjointly the most effective organic thanks to increase your audience and obtain new business. The key to putting together relationships is to be real. Here square measure a couple of ways that to create relationships on Instagram:

• Follow people in your target audience who interest you.
• Like and comment on their posts.
• Sometimes, share their posts to your stories.

It will take time to create these relationships, however doing thus will generate a number of the most popular leads.

Team up with other brands to host giveaways.

Jenna Labiak, owner of The Silk Labs, aforementioned hosting giveaways with different tiny businesses that have constant values, location and target market has been helpful to her business on Instagram.

“This way, we will have a dependent relationship among this giveaway and share each of our audiences with each other,” she said. “On average, i might say for every giveaway with another tiny business, The Silk Labs gains two hundred new customers.”

Source: The Silk Labs / Instagram

Use a link tool to drive traffic to your website and other important links.

There square measure quite few link tools out there, however one amongst the foremost effective and wide used is Linktree. after you created and add Linktree to your Instagram profile, users United Nations agency click the link square measure directed to the Linktree page that shows all of the links you have got side. you’ll customise the Linktree page with a profile image, like your company brand, and edit the links at any time. The Linktree tool incorporates a “forever free” set up that’s ideal for little businesses. further plans begin at $6 per month.

Capitalize on affordable influencer marketing.

You may understand that partnering with Instagram influencers, or folks with giant followings for a specific interest or class, are often an efficient promoting strategy. However, it usually comes with a hefty tag.

As a cheaper various, “Strike a win-win upset different corporations that have affiliations with influencers, and do a collaboration,” aforementioned Amy McWaters, business executive of The Hamper mercantile establishment.

As Associate in Nursing example, McWaters’ Australia-based company collaborated with Ponting Wines, that is promoted by Ricky Ponting, a cricket legend. As a part of the collaboration, her team created stories that includes him and, in return, he promoted his wines within the Hamper Emporium’s e-commerce store.

McWaters aforementioned her company received loads of direct messages asking regarding the merchandise, and therefore the campaign resulted in Associate in Nursing overall sales increase of forty third that quarter.

Set goals.

Your Instagram goals ought to be slender and targeted for your business. you do not wish to fill your followers’ feeds with fluff that does not facilitate your come back on investment. each post ought to be rigorously planned and keep in line together with your goals for the platform. square measure you trying to extend your variety of followers? does one wish to introduce new merchandise and services to current customers? square measure you targeted on product sales? you’ll amendment your goals, however specialise in one or 2 at the beginning to develop a higher complete strategy on Instagram.

Humanize your brand.

This is a technique that works well across all social media channels. accept the content that resonates with you on the pages you follow. presumably, it is the stuff that you simply will connect with in person, not company business posts. that is why it is so vital to indicate your human aspect.

For example, payment process company Priority Payments native created a “Meet the Team” series and, throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, got its team along to convey the message “We’re beat this along.” The image of the company’s business development manager, Vincent Napoli, shows him during a totally different lightweight than his purchasers square measure accustomed seeing him in: along with his son.

Source: Priority Payments Local / Instagram

Leverage Instagram analytics (also called Instagram Insights).

Instagram Insights, Instagram’s analytics tool, is out there to use without charge on the Instagram app and is out there on business accounts and contributor accounts (sometimes known as influencer accounts). The tool provides the subsequent metrics:

• The number of accounts reached (with increase or decrease percentages)
• Content interactions (with increase or decrease percentages)
• Total followers (with increase or decrease percentages)
• Content your page shared
• Instagram story content
• IGTV video content
• Promoted post data

This data is out there for the previous seven-day amount. sadly, in contrast to Facebook’s analytics tool, it doesn’t show the most effective times to post differing types of content. If you have got a Facebook business page, experiment with the most effective posting times (as determined by once your audience is online).

Post awesome content.

You and your audience might not have constant plan of what constitutes spectacular content. analysis what sorts of content get the foremost engagement on your competitors’ pages.

Fill your followers’ Instagram feeds with engaging content. Note the type of content that gets the most engagement, so you can keep giving your audience what it wants. For example, some brands do better with Instagram Live posts than they do with Instagram Stories. Ultimately, you can define “awesome content” by how well it performs. Your posts should be carefully planned, crafted and distributed.

Invite user participation.

Hashtags on Instagram can tie into a specific marketing campaign. For example, Nike used the hashtag #runfree to get followers to submit photos related to their running achievements. Spread your brand across Instagram by getting people to tag your business page and add the campaign’s hashtag. You could even attach a giveaway to the campaign to improve participation levels.  

Grow your page and your business with Instagram advertising.

Instagram advertising can be beneficial for expanding your brand’s reach across the social media platform, thereby growing your following and increasing sales. The company’s strategy was to target consumers within a specific age group in the local area who had an interest in the credit services and financial categories. When someone clicked on the ad, Credit Repair Kings used ClickFunnels to capture the lead to schedule a call with them using Calendly.

Source: Credit Repair Kings / Instagram

Source: Credit Repair Kings / Instagram

Source: Credit Repair Kings / Instagram

Go beyond product photos.

Many Instagram pages are just product image after product image. If you repeatedly share the same products from your brand, your page can easily become monotonous. For example, instead of posting product-only pictures, use an image of a person using the product. Break up the product promos with other content, such as jokes or memes. 

Test and try again.

The social media landscape is always changing, so it’s important to test new tactics. Don’t be afraid to create Instagram content that gets zero or little engagement. Learn something from every post, and keep trying. With time and practice, you could find yourself with a flood of new sales straight from Instagram.