As a business, it’s important to ensure that your brand is represented on all of the social media networks, including Instagram which is often one of the most overlooked platforms when it comes to marketing businesses online.
Before you begin your Instagram marketing campaigns you will want to ensure that your business profile page looks great and is attractive for your audience. Nobody will want to engage with your business's brand if you have a boring and stale looking social media page.
Instagram has rapidly become one of the best social media marketing channels for businesses that wish to launch their digital marketing campaigns and build an engaged audience around their brand. By broadcasting their brand message and informing potential consumers about the products or services they offer.
Promote discussion around user generated content.
Brands that engage with their audience on an individual level and allow their customers to tell personal stories about a company’s product or service perform much better than those that don't and keep all of their content marketing in house.
Audiences of a brand want to feel a connection to a company and want to share in the excitement which is generated when happy consumers talk about the product or service in a positive voice. Everyone loves being in the spotlight. It’s human nature to enjoy being recognized.
Smart businesses use this to their advantage and build ‘feel good’ case studies around happy customers, using them as a focal point and apart of the brand’s overall digital marketing strategy. Happy customers result in increased engagement and people sharing your content with their friends and their followers.
Ensure brand consistency to increase followers.
Consistency as a part of your Instagram marketing policy will ensure that your brand message stays on point and that your audience remembers your brand.
Your company’s online personality, which consists of your brand’s logo, font type, colors and brand message, should stay the same regardless of the visual message, which you publish on your Instagram account each day.
As a business owner, you want to be sure people can find you easily as well as recognize your brand. By using your logo as your Instagram profile picture along with the title of your business, you are reinforcing your brand's identity.
Engage your brand with your audience.
When engaging your brand with your industry audience and the followers of your Instagram account, you need to keep in mind what your business does better than the competition and discuss those as a part of your overall social media marketing strategy.
If you can show your business in an engaging way and connect to your audience on a personal level, through the medium of Instagram visual posting, you will be one step ahead of your competition. Remember to keep in mind that the content you share doesn’t need to be flashy or try to constantly sell to your audience, you just need to ensure it is interesting and engaging.
Incorporate hashtags into your marketing strategy.
Using hashtags as a part of your overall content marketing strategy is a great way to help your audience find your content on Instagram. In a similar way to Twitter, people can search for hashtags and click on them to find more posts on that topic.
From a branding perspective, this is a highly effective method for creating a following around your brand and engaging with a broad audience that has an interest in topics connected to your business. Always be sure to stick to the same hashtag and not overdo it. One or two strong hashtags should be more than enough to build familiarity around your brand.
Josh MacDonald is a desktop, Web and iOS software developer. He blogs at JoshMacDonald.net/blog.
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