INSTAGRAM MARKETING TIPS
Instagram is one of the most important platforms to utilize for your marketing and branding. There are over 700M monthly users. Instagram is centered on storytelling, which has a greater appeal to people’s emotions and utilizes visual content. Visual posts produce 650% higher engagement than text-only posts. Here are some marketing tips.
1. Utilize your bio.
In this article, one thing that I’ll emphasize is to use a call to action at every opportunity. This goes with your bio, where you want to put the following:
- A brief introduction of yourself or brand
- Links to your website- you can make it known with your posts and comments that your link is in your bio.
- Other pages you want engagement with
- Promotional deals
- A good quote that explains who you are in terms of your values or mission.
2. Create visually appealing Content
According to NewsCred Insights, 92.6% of people affirm that visual dimension (color, space, design) is the most significant factor affecting purchasing decisions (over taste, smell, or other senses). Here are some ideas to make your posts engaging:
- Have a pattern for your posts instead of making it entirely random. For example, you can have one-third of your posts consisting of quotes, so you have a straight column of posts composed of quotes. You can also have an order by theme or color — anything to make it look interesting and orderly.
- Take interesting pictures. You don’t need fancy equipment. You can use any decent camera, such as an iPhone. For example, if you own a restaurant, you could take pictures of the vibrant food, satisfied customers, and the lively atmosphere.
- Use graphic design tools such as Canva. Canva is user-friendly and intuitive, meaning you don’t need graphic design skills to enjoy features like photoshop. It is made easy to create designs.
3. Use Brand Storytelling
Having a storyline is important for all platforms. Humans learn better by stories instead of just facts. Think about how much you probably forgot from high school. When teachers spout off facts from a textbook, it’s difficult to remember. A more effective technique is to present what you’re saying, like a story or movie. When a story gets presented well, it sticks in your mind better. As with all good stories, you have a hook at the beginning that grabs your attention. In the middle, you have the plot, and in the end, you have the resolution.
Someone who comes to mind that presents an overall story well around his brand is David Goggins. He has a story of enduring life’s greatest challenges, embracing pain, taking full responsibility, and overcoming the odds when they are stacked against you. His book, interviews, social media posts, and newly released clothing store, is centered around that theme.
Think about your brand’s story and its mission, values, purpose, and make that theme present in all of your content. Every story has a beginning, middle, and end. Let’s get into what that entails as part of your marketing.
In any advertising that you put out, you will apply the analogy of a story.
Your beginning is a hook. Like all good hooks to a story, they catch an audience’s attention or interrupt them. Examples given of hooks in the context of advertising are Headlines, headers, taglines, and slogans.
Your middle or plot is the bulk of your story and what you care about, anything informative, and where you expose your audience to an unsolved problem or unsatisfied desire.
The end is your resolution and can be a call to action. Not all content or posts need to be about pushing for a sale. Sometimes it can just be about adding to your brand story and increasing other forms of engagement. David Goggins’ Instagram posts are about encouraging people to get after it. The point is to have everything consistent with your brand story.
4. Utilize Calls To Action (CTA) for more engagement
Send out an invitation or call to action with your posts (but only if you put out something of value), and doing so comes in more forms than you may think. Here are examples:
- Have a giveaway contest that people enter into by liking your page and tagging three friends
- Having polls on your Instagram stories
- A simple invitation to comment
- Put out a question on your post or story that you want people to answer.
- Encourage people to share
- As mentioned earlier, have relevant links in your bio.
- Putting out advice to take action with, as David Goggins does
5. Engage back with your audience
It’s a simple philosophy that you must give in order to get. Gary Vaynerchuk and Lewis Howes are people who go out of their way and put effort into replying to as many comments and DM’s as they can even though they get thousands of them weekly. Here are some ways you can do that:
- Look for users following your competitors’ pages. When you find those people, like, and comment on their content. Don’t use bots to automate this process or put out anything spammy. Put in the effort for meaningful engagement.
- Frequently write back to your community, as mentioned above.
- Give shoutouts to your customers, employees, or other businesses. This can be done on posts and stories.
In summary, make the most of your bio, put out epic content, integrate everything as part of your brand story, give out calls to action and invitations, and give what you want to get. Make sure any landing pages you attach to your like are optimized for mobile phones because that is what 99% of Instagram’s audience uses.
