12 Best Instagram Practices To Include In Your Marketing Strategy

Instagram is becoming a popular marketing platform when compared to other mediums. Incorporating the best methods for presenting your brand lets you obtain more attention than the rest. Besides creating a persistent theme, well-planned content, and being aware of when to post, there are other things to consider before posting every content on Instagram. Let us dive in to know the twelve best marketing strategy to establish a strong presence.

1. Identify Your Audience

With more than one billion users worldwide, Instagram acts as an ideal platform to create brand awareness. Knowing your ideal customer should be the initial step in planning an Instagram strategy. Categorize audiences by age, gender, locations, and interest. Once you identify the audience's interest, planning your content paves the road to an effective strategy.

2. Set Your Goals

A great way to acquire traffic, loyal customers, and brand awareness on Instagram is by setting up smart goals. Every business wants to have a million followers in its account. By posting appealing content consistently, you can keep the existing customers and invite new ones. Focus on key goals:

• Regular posting schedule.
• Concentrate on the first 1000 followers.
• Use brand hashtags
• Be interactive on posts with comments and likes.

Eventually, posting engaging and creative content can allow like-minded people to comment, follow you, and like your content.

3. Track Your Performance

Tracking how your content performs is important to increase followers and build your reach. You can learn more through Instagram insights; it tells how your content gains engagement from the target audience. It would be easier for you to post if you have a better understanding of when and how your content works.

Below your Instagram post, tap 'View insights' to know the number of likes, comments, shares, etc that the post acquired. And also, Insights provide statistics about reach, impressions, profile visits, website clicks. Match the insights of every post with one another to see what type of content audiences are interested in, and the time you post gives a clear idea about when your audience is more active.

4. Stick To Consistent Style

The look and feel of your Instagram page are essential as it is a visual-oriented app. Make sure you stick to a particular style of color theme or a uniform photo editing method. People tend to judge your brand by looking at the quality of photos or videos you share. So better the images, you will acquire more likes, comments, and more engagement. Following a unique Instagram aesthetic like colors, layout, and overall look of the page can increase auto likes on Instagram for every post that helps you to attract loyal customers, generate sales, and gain an excellent engagement rate. It simply speaks the brand's voice, a personality that lets your follower recognize your content on their feeds. To develop unique content, all you need is just a smartphone, some bright lights, different editing apps to experiment.

5. Use Content Calendar

Posting on Instagram with consistency could be a tough job. Planning content in advance and schedule to post ensures key to success. Make sure you look at the following things before heading to schedule:

1. How often do you want to post content on your page? To be successful, you need not post daily but post often to stay on top of followers' minds. On the other hand, please do not post more often and flood their feed with your posts, leading them to unfollow you.
2. Maintain the same photo filter on every image or video you post to ensure brand recognition and attain a high engagement rate.
3. Drafting your content and captions well in advance lets you save time, hence avoiding the last-minute struggle for a new post.

6. Determine The Right Time To Post

The demographics data from your business profile tells a lot about the Instagram audience, when they are more active, and what content excites them based on insights. Under the insights page, click on 'your audience' to know your follower's details like age, gender, most active times. You will get a clear picture of the right time to post, the correct hour, and good days to post on Instagram, paving the way to attract more followers.

7. Utilize Instagram Stories

Instagram stories are a great way to improve engagement, increase brand visibility and drive sales. It lets you make announcements of new products or daily business updates. You can add a single photo or more than one photo and give them insights into your product from manufacturing to dispatching.

Make the best use of interactive features like location-based geotag stickers, clickable links, poll stickers, question stickers, on-brand images, or videos, allowing you to understand your followers what they like and what they don't.

Apart from posting photos and videos, you can type text with colorful backgrounds and publish on Instagram stories using the 'create' feature.' Make a shoutout to wish a friend on their birthday or anniversary. Use GIPHY search, create lists and exciting content to get your followers engaged.

8. Create Unique Instagram Reels

Instagram reels provide incredible ways to raise your brand recognition to a large audience. You can demonstrate what's happening behind the scenes, from production to sales to dispatch. Instagram lets you add text in reels, create a video using your smartphone camera, go to your feed, click on 'Your Story' at the top left corner, and swipe right to 'REELS' and select the video to edit from the camera album. Press add, then tap the music icon to add a soundtrack of your choice; you can now type out text and adjust to place them in the video where you made gestures. You can also set the duration of the text when to appear and disappear. The next step is to check whether the text transitions in the video are perfect and finally can upload the video.

9. Use Instagram Highlights

Instagram highlights are a set of images, videos, or posts that you have published on Instagram stories earlier. Adding an Instagram story to highlights gives you a good feeling that all the efforts to create it do not vanish off after 24 hours. Highlights let you showcase some of your great stories to existing followers and new ones forever. Make the best use of it to protect your brand.

Highlights let your followers easily and quickly know product information, FAQs, and answers, revert them to your website, or sign up for the newsletter, shop your product, etc.

10. Instagram Profile Bio

Instagram bio is an essential part of your business account. Bio is just a tiny portion of your profile that helps to establish a strong brand presence. When a visitor clicks on your profile, either through Instagram hashtags or from paid ads, or stories, it tells them about your brand and what you offer. Craft a clear text of up to 150 characters long that inspires people to follow you and buy your product. Some other key elements that are part of bio are:

• Name and Username: Instagram username is your identity that appears in your profile URL. The name could be your original or brand name. 
• Profile Photo: It could be a brand logo or some pictures related to your brand.
• Website: Drop in your website link to let people know more about what you offer and how your brand stands out from the rest. 
• Category: Instagram allows you to mention under what type your brand falls in, for example, a restaurant, a media, fitness, etc. 
• Call-To-Action Buttons: You can include a call-to-action button allowing people to take a step directly from your profile to buying products or booking tickets.
• Contact Details: It could be your email, contact number, or location address of your business.

11. Boost Sales With Instagram Ads

One of the great ways to reach a wider audience is to make use of paid advertisements. Instagram provides an excellent ad space to promote your brand; if you are not aware of it, you miss a massive aid out of it. Instagram ads let you display your brand to new people through stories to inspire people, increase opportunities, construct a following for your business and strengthen engagement rates. People are likely to follow you when they feel that your brand is trustworthy, so always post eye-catchy and attractive ads.

To run ads on Instagram:

1. Convert your profile to a business profile.
2. Select a post or story that was already shared or create a new one with photos or videos.
3. Set up your ad with details like destination, audience, budget, etc. Then click 'create a promotion.' Once Instagram approves your ad, you will receive a notification, and you are ready to run your ad.

12. Partner With Influencer

Instagram is the best channel for influencer marketing to reach people quickly and easily. Partnering with an influencer is more like trying something that your friend recommended. As customers are now looking for authenticity, influencer marketing lets you collaborate with influencers who have great bonding with their followers. When influencers speak about your product, it has a significant impact on the audience's minds.

Influencer marketing provides a lot of opportunities for your business. By partnering with influencers, you tend to attract more customers indirectly and improve brand awareness and build engagement rates.

About the Author:

Sarah James is a Content Writer at VoxCorp with more than 8 years of experience in Social Media Marketing. In her free time she loves to talk with her friends on food, travel and ancient culture.