Instagram has more than 400 million monthly active users who have shared more than 40 billion images. This social network continues to gain momentum, and it’s more important than ever for you to get involved on the platform. While people join in droves, brands must follow suit by creating an Instagram marketing strategy to engage and connect with the hundreds of thousands of potential customers.
There’s an immense opportunity for engagement on this network, with a per-follower engagement rate of 4.21%. While that may not seem like a lot, it’s 58x higher than Facebook and 120x higher than Twitter. This post will walk you through exactly what you need to develop a strategy that taps into the wealth of potential offered here.
Determine Your Objectives
This is your vision. What do you want to accomplish with your Instagram marketing? Is it to increase brand awareness? Demonstrate your company culture? Increase customer loyalty and engagement? Connect with other influencers?
Determine your objective before embarking on any other part of your strategy. It’s vitally important for you to understand the why of your profile. Doing so will bring clarity and coherency to the content you post. Instagram is platform that thrives on appearing polished and successful. It’s important to have a clear grasp of your brand message before publishing. This will help you to fit in with the culture of the network, which will enable you to grow a larger following.
Know What Type of Content you’ll publish
Instagram has three main types of content: images, videos, live video and stories. Ideally, you’ll want to incorporate a variety to keep things interesting. However, that’s not a feasible strategy for every brand. Understand your capabilities and play to your strengths.
When posting images, remember to keep things creative and visually appealing. Images with quotes do very well, so if it’s within your brand voice, consider incorporating these into your feed as well as other types of images. Likewise, showing off a behind-the-scenes look of your brand does well too. Get creative with it!
Figure out How to Get Views, Likes and Followers
There are tons of ways to see growth. You can invest the energy into organic growth, buy Instagram views, or do a combination of the two. What’s important is that you make the decision early on.
For those who want to do the organic route, the strategy is simple. Find hashtags that your ideal customers use by going into Instagram search. Then go through the feed of images and engage on the pictures with likes, follows and comments. It will take a few minutes out of your day, but you’ll begin to notice people liking, commenting and following you back.
As you can see, it’s not very difficult to create a strategy that works. You’ll need to invest a bit of time and creative energy. However, the payoff is definitely worth it. Don’t become paralyzed by fear – get out there and build a successful Instagram profile today!
Author Bio: Rehan ijaz is a Business graduate, freelance writer and blogger. He loves to write on tech, start-ups, policy and marketing. You can reach him at [email protected]