6 Useful Instagram Marketing Hacks and Tips to Try This Year
With over 500 million active accounts daily and more than 1 billion active accounts every month, Instagram is a valuable marketing platform that allows businesses to connect with potential customers in every part of the world. So how can you be sure your business is getting the most out of the popular social media network? We’ve created a list of helpful marketing tips and hacks to ensure you are using Instagram to its full potential.
Instagram business accounts have free access to informative data under the “Insights” section in the app. In this section, you can view important statistics including impressions, engagement, and data about your audience. This information can help you monitor which content performs best, learn more about your followers, and curate content that leads to new followers and higher engagement.
If your brand is ever short on content, repurposing videos and photos from other Instagram accounts is a great source for fresh content. Be sure to follow the user, ask permission, and give credit when you pull content from other accounts. They are also more than likely to return the favor with a comment on the content, a follow, or reposting your content, exposing your brand to their audience as well!
For our clients, such as BluePoint and Ancestral Acres, sourcing content creates a dynamic feed for their followers. When we repurpose content from other accounts, we always tag the original source in photo or the copy.
It’s impossible to ignore the marketing power of social media influencers in 2019. Every industry, no matter how niche or small, has influential people on social media who have earned a substantial following and impressive engagement on Instagram. These users have built an audience that likes their content and trusts their opinion, making them an important marketing asset to your brand. Connect with industry influencers that make sense for your service or product and ask them to promote your brand. This helps your business build brand awareness with a new audience, their audience! Along with using Instagram influencers to promote your brand, you can also look to these accounts for excellent content inspiration.
Instagram stories are beneficial to your brand for countless reasons. Firstly, stories appear in a fixed position above users’ Instagram feed making this content highly-visible for your followers. The slideshow-format of this feature permits your brand to create interactive content using Q&As and polls and tell a story through a sequence of images. Instagram stories also allow you to create content that deviates from your regular aesthetic. Because they are only visible for 24 hours, stories give your brand the opportunity to experiment, share behind-the-scenes videos, post content that may be lower quality than your feed, and feature time-sensitive content. We create Instagram posts for our clients’ approaching events to excite their followers and provide information about the event in a visually-appealing way.
Interactive branded hashtags are a great way to engage with your Instagram audience. When creating a hashtag, it’s important to choose a hashtag that is unique to your brand, this can be your business name, the name of a key product or person, or a phrase or word specific to a marketing campaign. Coca-Cola, a brand with a successful Instagram marketing strategy, regularly creates interactive hashtags for their social media campaigns. One of their most recent hashtags #TogetherIsBeautiful campaign received over 1,000 posts using the hashtag.
With interactive hashtags users can post content using this hashtag, making it easy to source user-generated content and track customers who promote your brand on their account. Another plus: it’s free advertising on their Instagram!
With Instagram advertising, your brand can promote content to audiences based on parameters your brand decides to target. This gives your brand an opportunity to reach users that do not necessarily follow your account, increasing your exposure. Instagram ads are non-intrusive and therefore less annoying to your target audience. You can choose different formats for your Instagram ads including videos, photos, carousel/dynamic ads, and stories so it’s important to choose a format that works best for the audience and the content.
With 80% of Instagram users following business accounts, it’s clear that Instagram is a must for your brand. Implementing our marketing tips will allow you to take full advantage of the social network resulting in improved brand awareness, maximized exposure, and eventually increased sales!