10 Simple Instagram Marketing Tips for Small Businesses
With Facebook’s popularity going on a decline among younger users, more and more businesses are turning to Instagram to reach younger demographics. Instagram has over 600 million active users every month and marketers has now the ability to reach thousands of different demographics as users add to the millions of photos and videos uploaded every day.
600 million is a huge number right? Impressive but that’s not all….
Instagram is the fastest growing social media platform and around half of its user base use it every day. But in order to improve your Instagram marketing, you need to increase your following on a steady and consistent basis. After all, the more people that come in contact with your brand and follow you on Instagram, the larger your audience is that you can potentially reach every time you post. Here are 10 simple tips that may help you market your brand in Instagram.
- Knowing the Instagram hashtag culture.
The difference between Instagram hashtags and branded hashtags can help organize your posts and bring attention to your content through multiple topics. Instagram has universal hashtags, such as the one that correlate to days of the week, are some of the most used hashtags on the social platform. The hashtags provide a perfect opportunity to appeal to emotion, mood, nostalgia and other characteristics. Using general hashtags will help you be found in products and lifestyle posts. It also keeps you up to date on trending tags associated with your content for the opportunity to have it seen by thousands in a matter of minutes. - Understand your Niche and brand hashtag culture
You can create you own unique tag for your brand or business. Include your brand name in tags for any contests and campaigns that you host. A unique tag for these campaigns makes it easy for your audience to connect around your post as well as to check out the competition for any contests you may be running. - Focus on your followers/customers.
Engagement is key so follower engagement helps attract more customers for your brand. Give your followers their 15 seconds of fame (well not exactly that short but you get me right?) by reposting their photos and videos on your brand’s Instagram account. If a customer has featured you product in one of their post you can repost that and feature it into your Instagram feed. Of course, you have to credit that picture to the original poster by just linking them on the post description. Like your followers photos when the include your product or connect with your brand in any way. Show that you care by commenting on followers posts and responding to all comments on your account, especially if they’re negative. - Network with influencers.
Find and follow influencers with the same niche of your brand. Working with influencers in your niche helps you gain some levels of exposure by leveraging the relationships they have with your customers. Get influencer and celebrity attention by @Mentioning on posts that you think would appeal to them or posts that directly involve them either in content or context. The opportunity to collaborate here is huge for growing awareness. - Plan the layout of your gallery.
Don’t just think about what you want to post every day on the day itself, a good approach is to plan your posts. Instagram is becoming a curated platform where businesses and individuals only post their best and high quality photos according to specific themes instead of every photo they take. Take note, it is important to have a well-curated and consistent profile gallery. - Don’t overwhelm your audience.
You may want to post often enough that your brand stays relevant, but at the same time you don’t want to post too frequently that you may overwhelm you followers and they may end up unfollow your account because you keep spamming their news feed. There is no magic formula for posting that will work for every brand. You need to test and see how your audience responds to your posts. As a start posting twice a day is good way to get yourself notice. Make sure to post in different times during the day. Then start to experiment with more and less posts per day and be creative in your captions on each posts to engage with your followers. Post frequence optimization is a never ending task. - Tell Your Brand Story Without Selling
Brand marketing on Instagram can be tricky. Younger demographic users tend to be sensitive to over-promotions. Avoid annoying these users by identifying ways to share key components of your brand’s image without resorting to outright sales tactics. - Give a “Behind the Scenes” Look
The Ellen Show for an example is one of the most popular accounts on Instagram, but the images her team shares aren’t the kind of polished production photos you’d expect. Instead they post her candid behind the scenes. So you can do this by using instagram stories or the live feature if you don’t want to break the theme of your feed. - Host a Contest or Giveaways.
Run an a photo contest or challenge. Contests allow your followers to upload content under a certain unique hashtag you will create for the contest or challenge. Contests are great because they offer a tangible incentive for people to follow your account, contribute, boost your chosen hashtags, and promote that content to their friends. Also giveaways helps. To show your gratitude and give thanks to the followers/customers who supported your brand. - Schedule time to engage
Another important task is responding and engaging with others on Instagram. By batching them and scheduling the time to do that, you gain control over your schedule instead being dictated by notifications on your phone.
Here’s what you can try:
A. Turn off notifications for your Instagram account.
B. Schedule 30 minutes to an hour on your calendar every day to reply to comments, like, and comment on your followers’ posts.
C. You could also schedule up to a few sessions like this in a day if you want to have a faster response time on Instagram.
This will prevent notifications from disrupting you on your other responsibilities during the day.