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Are you using Instagram for your business marketing? With over 1 million active users on the social platform, that alone is a reason to start engaging with an audience that is hungry to hear from you!

Facebook is the largest of all the social networks, showing a monthly growth of users at around 3.14%. On the other hand, Instagram is growing at about 5% quarter to quarter – Instagram is the fast-growing network at the moment!

It’s important as with anything that you ensure your brand runs throughout everything you do, and that includes your Instagram images. If you take a look at an Instagram feed that is branded well, you’ll notice consistency and transparency throughout the posts.

So how can you use Instagram to grow your business? Take a look at our top 7 top tips (not in any particular order!):

Be creative

Instagram is all about the imagery – so instead of focusing on the products that you sell, which can be represented on other social platforms, focus on how you sell them or the solution that you provide.

It’s essential that you you grab the attention of a user on Instagram by being creative and inspiring. Get creative in how you present – if you’re a business that is out and about – showcase where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing.

Give your business a face for people to relate to.

Introduce the team or behind scenes in snaps of how the business is running.

Make it interesting and fun while portraying who you are and what your business represents.

Use your brand identity to show colour and life to your images. You can add text and quotes to your posts to make them more interesting – make them inspiring and attractive.

Add value

This is important across all your marketing efforts, you must add value in everything you do. Just because you’re dealing with pictures, doesn’t mean you have to lose the value aspect!

Your images can add value to your customers and look pretty at the same time. What your customers see has an impact on how your brand is represented and remembered. Show off your business culture and values, share how-to’s and your mission behind your business. Visuals are a valuable and excitable way to speak to your audience.

Plus your visuals need to speak to people’s emotions. They need to grab their attention and get to the heart of what they are searching for. By adding value in every post, you can assure your audience that you care and have something to give that is beneficial and worthwhile.

Create a great bio

Try not to focus on the number of characters available in your Instagram bio – focus on embedding your USP (unique selling point / unique selling proposition). This is what differentiates you from your competition and makes you stand out from the crowd, along with highlighting what you have to offer. 

Grow your business with Instagram. Check out our 7 top tips to build business on Instagram

Engagement

Engagement is key in any social platform and presenting ways for users to do that will encourage more people to engage with your brand. Always be courteous and reply to comments on posts, reply back to shares from your posts and thank people for kind words. Customer service goes a long way in attracting and retaining clients.

Create posts that encourage engagement – that means speaking directly to your audience and aligning what you’re delivering to what they’re wanting to see and hear. Make your posts memorable and shareable, and always keep the interaction going when it starts.

Even if you get some negative comments (of course we hope that you don’t) but even if you do, let the conversations roll as this will show the algorithm that it’s an engaging post – worthy of being seen.

Use your analytics

First of all, ensure that your page is set up as a business account which will enable you to use the insights function. If you’re not sure how to set up a business page, just give us a shout and we can run through that with you. But once you’re ready to go, you are able to keep an eye on the posts that are working – and the ones that are not so much. From here you can establish a pattern of posts that your audience likes to see and engage with – these are the types of posts that you want to create more of.

You can then also dig deeper into the insights of your posts and the interaction they are getting. Find out which day of the week or what time of day people are engaging most, their gender and where they are located. Tailoring your content to your insight results will give help encourage further engagement.

Collaborate

Working with influencers on Instagram will give your posts better chance of being noticed and will boost your brand awareness. Search for the top hashtags that relate to your business and find micro-influencers using those hashtags who have a large following. Once you’ve established a list of influencers, contact them and ask if they’d be interested in promoting your product on their feed. You can either offer a monetary reward or exchange their time for something you could do for them. The influencers already have a large following of their own which means that if your product is being shown to their audience, with their backing and enthusiasm, you’re more likely to grow your audience when people start to notice your products.

Big brands use influencers all the time by using celebrities to endorse their product – the same idea can be used on Instagram on a much smaller scale for your business. There is no harm in approaching people and asking, the more people you ask, the better chance of finding someone that will work with you.

Use Instagram stories

Everyday over 300 million people are creating Instagram stories – that’s a lot of stories! These are snaps or video sequences that disappear 24 hours after being posted. On average 1 in 5 businesses receive a direct message from their Instagram Stories. And those direct messages are leads.

There are different things you can do with stories, like go behind the scenes, share Q&A sessions, create tutorials. All of these will disappear after 24 hours but can be kept as highlights after that time to sit directly under your bio as the first thing a customer will see when they click through to your profile page.

Instagram stories give way to creativity and allow a business to showcase their attributes in a more dynamic way.

It’s always great to plan ahead and with the video function for stories, this is possible by utilising videos that you have created within the last 24 hours. Therefore, create your videos in advance and post them strategically when you know your audience will be watching.

Don’t forget to add a ‘call to action’ to your Story as this tells people where to go next. You don’t want to lose your potential lead by allowing them to go onto the next business / next Story, direct them to where you’d like them to go by swiping the page.

Instagram is fun, it’s enjoyable and best of all it’s where people are at-  so that’s where your business needs to be.

Create authentic good quality images that tell your story, show your value and provide solutions and you’ll grow your Instagram with ease.

If you’d like any further tips on getting started with Instagram or how to incorporate it into your online marketing plan, get in touch, we’d love to help.

 

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