Are you in the right place?
Before doing anything else, you should ask yourself: “Is Instagram the right tool for my business?”
Each platform will suit some businesses and not others. Try to imagine what marketing content you would want to put out in the formats available on Instagram: posts, stories, one-minute videos, IGTV and live streams. If you struggle with this step, this might mean that other formats on other platforms will suit you more.
Realising this is important — it could prevent you from wasting precious resources on the wrong strategy. Just because it feels like every business out there is on Instagram that doesn’t mean it’s the optimal choice for you!
Why Instagram?
Instagram is best used for eye-catching visual content rather than large chunks of text or sharing links. While it is possible to include links to other sites in an account’s bio and to direct users to it via post captions, it is (by design) a clunkier process than it is on other platforms. This is worth considering if your marketing strategy relies heavily on users following links to other content or to online stores.
Where to begin
Now that you’ve decided to add Instagram to your SMM roster: let’s think about how to keep your followers close and your potential followers closer…What really makes a marketing account successful?
1. Consistency
While one viral post will certainly do a lot for your visibility, that success will go as quickly as it came if you fail to keep any of those new followers around. Your clients want to rely on you for what you do best. They liked your innovation, your look, your ideas once — so give them more!
- Own your style. The shot angle, the editing or the design of your images; the tone or the language of your captions: your unique combination of choices here is what makes you attractive. Sticking to your guns and keeping these mostly the same will create a very important thing between you and your followers — trust. Professionalism is reliability. Your followers will keep coming back to see more of what they love. If you’ve decided to pick and choose your hashtags and mentions on one day but flood your post with them on the next — this might put a few people off. Of course, it’s good to experiment from time to time! Even once you’ve found what works for you. But a business that has confidence in its own image will inexorably attract the right kind of attention.
- Keep your posts regular as clockwork. No-brainer right? But what if the nature of your business makes this difficult? Posting regularly doesn’t have to mean posting twice a day. It doesn’t even have to mean posting every few days, or once a week. Delivering on what your followers want is more important. Your followers would rather wait 10 days for each expertly crafted post than be sporadically spammed with filler that is clearly a plea for attention. Of course, there are plenty of ways to get creative with content outside your key posts but just make sure that this content is still well thought-through.
2. Quality content
It doesn’t matter how many marketing tricks you may have up your sleeve — nothing supersedes the value of putting in the time to make your content the best it can possibly be.
- High quality images and errorless captions. Many seem to have started taking this for granted — don’t! Little can damage someone’s impression of a post more than a clumsy spelling error; a low-res or badly edited photo; a glitch in graphic design. It comes back to professionalism: how do you want your business to be perceived? It’s worth getting that extra opinion before posting, just to catch those careless mistakes we all sometimes make.
- Exploit IG’s full potential. Every business will have an idea of what their base content will be. Maybe it’s a slew of images, maybe it’s video, IGTV, stories, or a combination of these. Never used stories before? Brainstorm ideas of how you could and try some of them out. If a format isn’t for you — that’s ok! Focusing on optimising your cornerstone content may well be the way to go but you won’t know that for sure until you’ve at least given everything a try. You might surprise yourself.
- User-generated content. This is a terrifically powerful type of content and one that is easy to forget about when busy worrying about everything else. The more you connect with your followers, the more they will give back. Feature people’s experiences of your product or service. Suddenly everyone will want in and before you know it you’ll be rewarded with more glowing reviews, attractive images and new content ideas than you know what to do with.
- Don’t limit your reach. Focus is good: if you have sure-fire ways of targeting your core audience this will take you very far. Stay true to your business but don’t be afraid of going a little broader in your content once in a while. Catching the eye of those in neighbouring online communities means only one thing — more followers! This allows you to keep one eye out for those new opportunities, that next direction to take your business in. This way, someday, you could hit that vein that whisks you away to new heights!
3. Relevance
You’ve got a backbone of content creation knowledge that won’t let you down: now it’s time to start playing the game. How do you know for sure what works and what doesn’t? Which decisions were the right ones? Which changes should you keep and which should you discard?
- Use analytics. This can seem like a huge topic with too many elements to get your head around. The truth is, the analytics you use can be as complex as you want — but every little bit of data helps if you know how to use it. Focus on following the basic stats: things like comments, likes, tags and shares. Even from this little information you’ll spot some trends yourself without the need for any fancy graphs or modelling. If your posts consistently do better at 8pm than at 12pm, this is actionable insight!
- Follow the competition. Familiarise yourself with the communities you are trying to reach. Keep note of industry-specific hashtags, events that attract your audience’s attention, popular content formats. This will help you stay ahead of trends and maximise your visibility. Remember to balance this against your own instincts and ideas. Your followers will be able to tell the difference between great content that you’ve managed to make relevant and pandering.
- Stay up to date on IG’s algorithm updates. Instagram decides which posts to show users when they are exploring and does so based on specially designed algorithms which favour certain characteristics of a post over others. The problem is, the algorithm changes. For instance, sometimes posts with a lot of hashtags are favoured, and sometimes they are not. It is worth researching this and keeping it in mind when possible when designing your posts.
Instagram marketing is nothing to be afraid of. Producing consistent, high-quality, relevant content, following our advice above, will get you to exactly where you want to be!
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