4 Tips for Successfully Marketing Your Brand on Instagram

Instagram is proving to be a powerful tool for advertising and brand-building. With over 1 billion monthly active users, Instagram is closely outstripping other social media giants like Twitter and Facebook. It’s also been found that Instagram has the highest engagement rate among other platforms, which makes it a very feasible platform for advertising and marketing.

Instagram for Business: 4 Tips for Successfully Marketing Your Brand

Many companies already profit from Instagram’s free business tools to improve their social media marketing efforts. Currently, there are 25 million Instagram Business profiles worldwide, with the bulk of this amount made up of small businesses.

If you’re wondering how to take advantage of Instagram, here are some quick tips on how to get started with Instagram Business:

1. Optimize Your Business Profile

Start by creating a winning Instagram business profile. Your profile should tell customers what your brand is about; it should also contain information on how they can easily reach you. Make sure you have the following elements to optimize your company profile:

• Profile photo – Your business’ logo should typically serve as your Instagram’s profile photo. Make sure that your logo is optimized specifically for Instagram. An image that’s  180 x 180 pixels in size is recommended.
• Profile bio – Highlight what makes your business stand out in your bio, or your profile description. Solid messaging will really help you here. Instagram only allows for 150 characters in the bio, so make sure to keep it short and to the point. Including target keywords in your bio is also a good idea; this will help customers to easily find your profile when they are searching for it. Lastly, choose a category that best describes what industry your business belongs to.
• Contact information – One of the features that is unique to Instagram Business profiles is that you can add contact information on your bio. Include your business address, email address, and phone number so that customers know where and how to reach you. Adding your address also helps in boosting your brand’s local reach.
• Link in bio – An important thing to note is that Instagram allows for only one area in your profile to add a clickable link: on your bio. That said, it’s important to make the most from the link. It’s not only a good place to promote your website link—the bio can be regularly rotated to feature a link that goes to a landing page of a new product, a new blog post, or whichever brings value to your business at that moment.

2. Regularly Post Valuable and Engaging Visual Content

As Instagram is essentially an image-sharing social platform, it’s crucial to invest time and effort in regularly creating high-quality visual content. These include not only photos on your feed, but also short creative videos and photos on your Stories. Here are some tips for creating valuable, engaging, and attractive content on your brand’s Instagram:

• Have a consistent style and quality – Cultivating a notable brand identity is key in Instagram marketing. The best business profiles often use a certain color scheme or a consistent filter and style in all of their photos; think of bright and sunny filters, calming blue hues, or vintage black and white. Whatever filter or style you choose, it should make sense to your brand identity.
• Showcase your products in your photos – It has been found that 65% of top-performing Instagram brand posts feature a product. Be creative when posting product photos on your Instagram; don’t stick with formal and plain product photography that’s typically used for eCommerce sites. Add a splash style and get creative; let your audience see your products in action.
• Create short behind-the-scenes videos – Many customers are curious and would love to know what happens behind the curtains of your brand. Instagram Stories is a great feature to share short clips of a typical day inside your office or brick-and-mortar store. You can also create short videos on how your products are made—just be sure, of course, to only show what you’re comfortable sharing with the public, as well as competitors.
• Highlight your company culture – Posting photos of your employees, company events, or whatnot is a good way to put a human element into your brand’s Instagram profile. Make your business relatable by highlighting your company culture; it’s also a way of showing your followers that you’re relatable..
• Post user-generated content – Research reveals that user-generated content has a 4.5% higher chance of conversion. Get your followers to engage with your brand by highlighting their own content on your profile. Repost photos of customers using your products and mention their username(s) in your posts. 

3. Use Hashtags Effectively

Hashtags make it easier for users to discover your posts from tag searches.  As such, they are essential in expanding your reach on Instagram—in fact, posts with at least one hashtag have 12.6% more engagement than those without a hashtag. Here’s how to properly use hashtags on your Instagram posts:

• Discover relevant hashtags – An easy way to discover relevant hashtags for your brand is through Instagram’s search tool; you can also use it to check the number of people who use them. To expand your reach, it’s important to choose popular, high-volume hashtags. You can also use your own branded, unique, or campaign-specific hashtags to increase the discoverability of your Instagram posts and build brand identity.
• Use 3 to 5 hashtags in your post – Instagram allows for up to 30 hashtags in a single post; however, if you’re still starting out or refocusing your Instagram marketing, it’s best to focus on 3 to 5 hashtags at a time and see which ones garner the best results. Instagram Business has built-in analytics tools for you to measure how your posts are performing in terms of engagement, impressions, and other useful marketing metrics.
• Consider how you add hashtags – Hashtags are helpful, but it could also be distracting if not used properly. Typically, hashtags should be placed at the end of your post so that people can focus on reading your caption. Hashtags can also be worked in a subtle way into the caption, or you can opt to add hashtags in a comment. 

4. Engage with Your Audience

With all the aforementioned tips, audience engagement is key for a successful social media strategy—whether you’re on Instagram or any other social media platform. 

When you take the time each day to address their concerns, reply to their comments, or even follow them back, your audience feels more in touch with your brand and are therefore more likely to convert. By regularly and actively engaging with your audience, you’re bringing to life the social element in social media.

Need Help with your Graphic Design, Photography, and Video Production?

Visual content is paramount for Instagram marketing. If you need help with your graphic design, photography, and video production needs, Ilfusion offers cost-effective solutions for brands of any size. 

Give us a call at 888-420-5115, or send us an email to [email protected] to learn more.

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