When it comes to social media marketing, Instagram continues to be one of the best platforms available to businesses. With around 700 million users and 60 million photos uploaded on a daily basis, the site has become a streamlined opportunity for brands to quickly send their messages, advertise themselves through photos and interact with their target audiences much faster and with considerable ease. It is no wonder there are 8 million businesses using Instagram business profiles and 1 million monthly active advertisers on the site.
As per the latest report published by a research firm known as L2, Instagram flaunts the most engagement and the highest level of conversion from browser to shop. But with a sea of users and so many brands using the social media platform, some better than others, it can be a little challenging to make your brand stand out. However, with the following 7 things you can learn from big brands, you will be on your way to dominating Instagram like some of the biggest brand names in the industry does nowadays.
Instagram: 7 Things You Can Learn From Big Brands
1. Share behind the scenes Content
One cool Instagram post idea you can learn from big brands is to show your followers a sneak peek of your company’s ‘behind the scenes’ processes. Building a brand is not only about showcasing the product, but also telling the story behind it. This helps drives more engagement and gives the business a chance to know their customers better, and vice versa.
2. Showcase Customers Using Your Products
One of the easiest ways to encourage business engagement is by appealing to people’s pride. Potential customers will automatically be more drawn to a buy a product that shows actual people using it instead of paid actors.
Benefit Cosmetics is a good example of a brand that sought the help of real people using their product. The business created a mosaic view of all the 11,900 plus selfies that were submitted to them by the general public on a responsive design micro site.
3. Run Contests/ Offer Rewards
Since Instagram is primarily a photo sharing platform, it is no surprise why photo contests would make a great option for creating brand visibility and awareness. Using a hashtag relevant to your contest will make collecting photos from your followers and target audience easier and quicker. Popular Instagram contests include encouraging your customers to share their photos using your product and using a related hashtag, and/or asking them to ‘Double tap & tag a friend’, etc. Create a campaign-relevant hashtag, such as #Ben&Jerry’sSummer2017 and get users to post their photos using this hashtag, and also tagging your business in the photo and caption. As a reward, you can offer those gifts, discounted coupons or even shout outs on Instagram. This hype and excitement that contests build up can help you quickly grow your social following.
4. Pre-Launch and Promote New Products
A simple way to ensure product success even before it launches is to create hype about it. Upload teasers, photos and relevant hashtags to not only create awareness about the product but also get the customers excited.
Using Instagram, you can also quickly share promotions and discounts related to pre-ordering, which will certainly help drive your business revenue up.
5. Hashtag Everything
The world of Instagram is a huge one, which is why it is easy to get overshadowed by all the posts and spam. Hashtags are an ideal way to bring the audience’s attention to your posts and also your brand. As per L2, around 80% of brand posts comprise of at least one hashtag, and a standard brand post has three.
The key to being successful at Instagram marketing is to use relevant and catchy hashtags in every single post. Like Gucci and Topshop, you should also encourage users to adopt your brand’s hashtags in their posts and soon you will start to notice the positive results.
6. Use Visual Variables
The present and future of marketing are all about the visuals. Sure, you don’t necessarily have to spend a fortune on your visual digital marketing, but making use of visual variables helps a lot. A University of Wisconsin study discovered that there were quite a few differences between the way people engaged with e-commerce Instagram posts and non-commercial posts. For instance, higher shopping rates were accomplished on unfiltered photos, photos with long captions that lacked exclamations or question marks, and photos sent in by famous Instagrammers.
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7. Team Up With Influencers
Influencer marketing is one of the top marketing trends of 2017 and generally huge on Instagram. If you are a devoted user, you may be aware of promoted posts from “tastemakers” with large followings. Small businesses often fail to take advantage of this form of Instagram marketing when attempting to build a customer base.
To properly utilize influencer marketing, you will need to carry out some research regarding big Instagram and famous personalities within your industry. You will then need to reach out to them in the hopes of creating a partnered post. This is quite a powerful Instagram marketing idea that will enable you to tap into those parts of your target market that you might otherwise fail to reach. Throwing in a discount to spice up the deal will yield you even greater returns.
Your prospects and customers expect you to have a slid prominent social media presence, and Instagram remains one of the best social media sites with millions of content creators where the possibility for brands to promote themselves isn’t the easiest. The never-ending amount of content that is posted on a daily basis makes it difficult to get noticed. However, incorporating the above mentioned Instagram Marketing secrets will help you score an edge over your competitors and also have a more favorable impact on your customers, thus boosting your business revenue.
See also: 10 Surprisingly Easy Ways to Grow a Strong Audience On Instagram
