A Step By Step Guide To Create A Successful Instagram Marketing Strategy

Instagram is one of the best channels as it offers many exciting features like partnering with influencers, galleries, stories, reels, shopping catalogues, and a lot more. That means Instagram’s marketing strategy is essential to establish every brand on Instagram. Businesses can make the best use of GIFs, creative photos, carousels posts, and videos to drive engagement rates.

Let us dive into how to make an effective marketing strategy that will build your business.

1.) Create An Instagram Profile And Optimize Your Bio:

The first and foremost step is to create an eye-catchy profile that best projects your business and targets the right audience. Design your profile not to be too formal; try to be social and friendly. Another vital aspect is to focus on writing up a clear, informative, and interesting bio. Your bio must convince the new audience that following your profile would enrich and add value to feeds. Make sure you add clickable links to your bio, as it is the only place you can have a link to your website to give more insights about your business to followers.

2.) Make Use Of Location Tags:

Over the years, Instagrammers have started using social media to look for local businesses. Just like hashtags, location tags make posts and stories searchable. Instagram location tags let bricks-and-mortar businesses be available on the map physically. If you want to be found by potential customers and stay out among the competition, you could consider adding geotags to in-feed posts and stories.

When you add an Instagram story or post, location tags act as a content library, garnering all content geotagged onto a particular page. Using location tags offers immense benefits to your business; it increases brand awareness, boosts engagement, and drives social evidence.

3.) Build An Aesthetic Feed To Match Brand’s Identity:

Constructing an aesthetic Instagram profile is an essential Instagram strategy. Posting outstanding product photos to Instagram feeds must reflect the brand’s personality, uniqueness, and purpose. Create content that pulls existing followers and new ones in and engages them. To get started, understand your target people love to see your brand, products, and services. And then, replicate the same on your Instagram posts.

Considering posting appealing stories, narrations with brand identity create an emotional bond the audience requires, adding essence to your brand and making it relevant. Also, when you don’t post often, it could generate a feeling of disconnection between you and the audience. Try to maintain a consistent tone, a unique style, be honest and human to make the audience trust your brand.

4.) Make Creative Captions:

You could be posting great photos and videos for your business on Instagram. Still, if you are not using suitable captions, then your brand could lose track of opportunities. Using creative captions could yield increased traffic, more followers, and improved sales.

Compelling captions can help build engagement at high rates; besides, you could also get automatic Instagram likes monthly for your business; more likes and comments let you get rewarded by the Instagram algorithm. A strong caption enables you to shape your brand’s culture and personality, helping your followers realize they love what you are selling.

Your caption writing must match the goals of your Instagram strategy. To write a compelling caption, make the most of it in the first sentence, include a call-to-action button or ask a question, maintain authenticity, use emojis, use relevant hashtags, and much more.

5.) Focus On Target Audience:

To post great content, you have to know what your followers like to see on their feeds.

Try to find out what makes your audience attracted to your brand and cultivate the same in Instagram feeds. The insights into your audience’s interests, preferences, and behaviour pave the way for a successful Instagram marketing strategy.

Garner competitive insights by looking at what kind of followers they possess, what type of content they share. That could give ideas on how your target audience must look. Apart from this, you can also look into your demographics data to know about your existing audience. Or, you can join hands with influencers to promote your brand.

Partnering with your influencers helps reach your target audience as they have great bonding with their followers. Never compromise on the quality of posts and texts; make the best use of Instagram to get your audience closer via conversations on shared content.

6.) Examine Your Competitors Strategies:

Studying your competitors on how they market their business on Instagram can help you discover new ways to reach your target audience. Like, do they rely on user-generated content? What kind of content do they post on Instagram? At what time in a day or week do they post? What hashtag strategies do they use? When you have a better understanding of the insights of your competitors, you find great ways to build your marketing strategy.

7.) Use Strategic Hashtags:

Searching for specific content on Instagram is pretty easy by using hashtags to find the path to the content. Use them wisely to make sure people find your content at the time of their search. Let’s take a look at some ways to make the best use of Instagram hashtags.

• Choose those hashtags that are simple and often searched for
• Incorporate relevant hashtags that attract the target audience
• Create branded hashtags in case of a campaign or brand-particular hashtags
• Make use of location-based hashtags to promote brands in a local place.
• Understand the best place to implement a hashtag either in the caption or in the first comment.

According to a survey, hashtags affect the performance of posts, where a bar with 7 to 30 hashtags acquired a great engagement rate. Users found that the number of hashtags, their placement, and visibility of hashtags differed from profiling sizes.

There could be some brands where hiding hashtags in captions is more effective. How to hide hashtags? Instagram confines the number of text to appear on feeds and wraps additional text into “show more” links. Your aim must be to put your hashtags to show after that link. Suppose you are keeping captions short and straightforward– a great trick to add texts to keep hashtags hidden is to add line breaks.

As Instagram wipes off any line break included with the character directly to the editor, it may sound hard. One good solution to this is to type in your caption with different text editors, then copy-paste. You have to type the text, add a line break, type in another character, then one more line break, and so on until five lines. Specify your hashtags beneath, and copy-paste the whole into the Instagram caption editor.

Look for famous hashtags relevant to your brand, those used by your influencers and competitor brands. Audiences interested in content similar to yours might encounter hashtags with your content in their search results, ensuring your content gets showcased to the target audience.

8.) Create Carousel Posts:

As Instagram is a visual platform, it draws brands and influencers to build their business. When you have too much content to share, posting just one picture is not enough. Instagram has introduced sharing multi images on a single move to your feeds. You may want to add some uniformity to your Instagram account, gain engagement or display new products; then, the Instagram carousel is the answer.

According to a survey, carousel posts tend to obtain massive impression rates on Instagram. It is an excellent way to build your reach further. Carousel lets you add up to ten photos or videos, making the best use of it to showcase your brand’s personality.

9.) Create Fantastic Instagram Stories:

Instagram Stories are a prominent feature on Instagram. Stories that you tell can significantly create a brand’s loyalty. Your Instagram feed must reflect the purpose and personality of your brand. Tailoring texts to followers’ needs and interests is essential as people get tired of the hard-sell approach.

You could consider adding GIFs and stickers to add a humour element, other style icons, or even have polls, quizzes, Q&As, hashtags, and your music to engage your audience. Hence, you could ask them opinions and post straightforward questions. That lets you build a brand while connecting them directly to your business.

10.) Analyze Your Instagram Posts:

Instagram Insights is a great tool that gives details on followers’ demographics and your content too. These details let you compare posts, analyze campaigns, and know the performance of the posts. Look onto insights to know which of your Instagram content is attractive to your audience.

To access Insight, you must have an Instagram business account. By converting your account to a business account, you would get to check the insights for content posted by you. If you switch back to a personal profile, you will lose your demographics data. Instagram allows one to see Insights data in three ways; for that, click on the bar icon on the top right corner of your profile homepage.

To see Insights for single posts, move onto the post and tap View Insights in the bottom left corner, or If you want to check story data, press the names at the bottom of the story.

As a business holder, always check analytics tools and understand the data that helps you strategize on how and when to post further. Engagement is the key to success on Instagram, so make the best use of your following that takes you on the right path.

Conclusion:

Eventually, you have to be clever and innovative. Experiment with new ways to reach your audience, do not hesitate. Since the Instagram algorithm keeps updating if something performed well last week, it might not work next week, so you must keep updated. Always bear in mind to produce content relevant to the brand, outstanding quality pictures, user-generated content, engaging posts, and trends. I hope the points said in this article would help you develop a successful Instagram marketing strategy.

About the Author:

Sarah James is a Content Writer at VoxCorp with more than 8 years of experience in Social Media Marketing. In her free time, she loves to talk with her friends about food, travel and ancient culture.