There may be times when you will feel and people who will suggest you that having a carefully and perfectly designed website is enough to promote your brand and product. They may be true but in parts for sure, given the current scenario where most of the people are connected to the social media networks almost all the time.
If you want to make a better impact on your brand and product, you will have to make the best use of one of the social media networks. While social media content management is not easy, it’s vital to get it right to ensure the success of your online brand. Visit here to read how social media management works and its importance for your business. Amongst all, Instagram seems to be the best platform to promote a business. This is because there are millions and millions of users who are active on this platform at any given point of time.
This means this specific social media channel will give you a better opportunity to reach out to a larger audience, encourage them to engage and turn them into your prospective clients. As a result, you will improve your business potential and prospects significantly.
Using Instagram features
Sometimes when you design a website, all it takes is:
- Smart choice and use of colors
- Proper selection of fonts and
- Clear and well-defined backgrounds and links that will direct the users to your business profile.
Well, when you use the social network of Instagram for your marketing purpose, you will need some of these aspects to keep in mind but with some restrictions. For example, Instagram has five fonts currently that you can choose from. That means you will need to do quite a bit of experimenting with all of these fonts to find out the best one among the five.
Just a professional like Stormlikes or any other, you will need to make sure that the font you choose complements with the background and choose the right colors. It must be reliable, relevant, and fits with your messaging.
Another useful feature of Instagram that you can use in your social media marketing efforts is the Instagram Stickers tool. These are square smiley faces, and you can insert these at the top of the screen of any story post. When you click on these Stickers, you will get a wide assortment of features such as:
- Clock
- Date
- Location
- Mention
- Temperature
- Poll,
- GIF
- Question
- Slider and
- Music.
The most significant thing about these Stickers is that these will be most effective in keeping your users engaged. They will stick to your page and will not move away.
Using hashtags for marketing
You, like all other business owners, may be aware of hashtags and how useful it can be to drive users and followers. Hashtags work well on Twitter and Facebook. These hashtags enable organizing a topic, and it also helps in connecting the messages with the users who are interested in reading them. The same principle is applicable to Instagram. This will ensure that you know your users and target them accordingly.
However, if you want to make the best results by using hashtags, you will need to choose the right ones so that it resonates best with the target audience. In order to determine the right hashtags, you will need to rely on different tools that Instagram provides you with to measure the impact. One of such tolls is Command, which is the all-in-one tool for tracking analytics. Other than that, there are several different social media management tools that you can use, such as:
- Sprout Social
- Keyhole
- Simply Measured Amd
- Iconsquare.
After you have selected the hashtags to use, you will now need to focus on creating a better marketing strategy.
Hashtag strategy to follow
Instagram will typically allow you to add up to 30 hashtags for each post, but that does not mean you will add 30 hashtags selected at random with your post. You will need to follow a specific two-fold strategy for it.
- You will need to do some research about it to determine how many posts are already associated with that particular hashtag that you have chosen.
- In order to make your hashtags more effective and result-driven another part of your hashtag strategy must involve combining these from different categories.
This strategy will ensure that your hashtags perform well and maximize its reach to your target audience.
Other tags to use
There are also a few other tags that you can choose to use which will once again need careful selection so that it performs just as well as your hashtags.
One such tag is the location tag. These tags are very helpful, especially for those businesses that are targeting an audience of a specific geo-location or just the local consumer base. These businesses include:
- Restaurants
- Hotels
- Retail stores
- Clinics and hospitals and other brick and mortar establishments.
The search algorithm of Instagram will use these location tags as references to populate content that will use and correspond to similar location-based businesses.
Though there are no conclusive reports and statistics existing that will quantify the number of searches on Instagram, but you will surely find a lot of success stories about businesses being easily found by the Instagram users which in turn leads to more sales, provided that business has the address set up through Instagram or Facebook.
Use analytics for Instagram business profile
When you are over and done with your hashtags selection, strategy creation and location tags ready, you will now need to make sure that all of these work in tandem and up to their optimal level of performances.
In order to know that you will need to get and review different analytics to get the real data regarding the impact created by these elements. You will know:
- Who are engaged
- When they are engaged and
- The source of your target audience.
There are lots of free analytics tools that will help you to get these valuable insights. Once you know these insights, it will be easy for you to link the elements with your business account. This will serve your business marketing efforts using social media in the best possible way.
