Owing to its popularity, a new digital marketing method has entered the realm of business – Instagram Marketing.
Ever since Instagram’s release in 2010, it has got people addicted to it.
It has become a part of people’s routine now, they check their Instagram feed as soon as they check their phone.
Therefore, we guess it’s safe to say that Instagram has taken the world by storm.
But is it worth it? Is it worth a brand’s investments of time and money? The answer, *drumroll*, yes! Here’s why:
- Instagram sees over one billion active monthly users and 500 million daily Instagram Stories.
- There are 130 million Instagram users in the U.S.
- Instagram is the second most accessed network behind Facebook. Users browse for an average of 53 minutes per day.
- There are at least 25 million business profiles on Instagram.
- 90% of Instagram users follow at least one business, and 83% of users say Instagram has helped them discover new products and services.
It’s clear that Instagram is no longer just for personal use–for you or your dog.
It’s now a global platform that enables brands to humanise their content, recruit new talent, exhibit products and inspire their audience.
In addition, users of Instagram are not only active – they are engaged.
Approximately 60% of active users of the platform visit the site daily, and 21% say that they check it weekly.
Instagram can also help you grow your brand awareness and introduce new products.
80% of Instagram users have made a purchase based on something they discovered on the platform.
Instagram enables you to promote your brand and product in a friendly, authentic way without having to sell hard to your clients.
Still unsure about how to get started? We have created the most powerful Instagram marketing guide you will ever need!
Types of Instagram Posts
Let’s start by talking about the different Instagram posts that we can make.
Images
An Image post is the most common post on Instagram.
Share an array of photos when posting images. Variety will show that your brand is diverse, and will involve your followers in various ways.
Example: Puma’s Instagram feed includes product photos, but the majority show real athletes, concerts, and other types of content that promote the Puma brand personality as a whole.
BTS (Behind The Scenes) Instagram Posts
These posts offer a glimpse into the part that people normally don’t see in your business.
For such posts, you need to focus on its authenticity. They need to look real or else, its purpose is destroyed.
Example: By showcasing its employees at work, Aeronaut Brewing provided an inside look at its corporate culture.
Reposts From Employees
Sometimes great content is right in front of your eyes on Instagram….or should we say, your employees’ Instagram.
We are not encouraging you to steal your employees’ content but to use them by giving them credit.
This way your business will be able to produce authentic content and humanize itself.
This will also further help in strengthening bonds with your employees.
Example: Fenway Park often reposts images shared by the grounds crew as they prepare the stadium.
Struggling with your Instagram marketing. Unable to reach your desired audience. We will help you out to reach your target audience and get desired results. Get in touch with us now.
Educational Posts
Educational posts offer snacky tips on how to master something.
Usually the photos or videos present the instructions in a manner that is quick and easy to follow.
These can of any of something that is related to the niche your business is in.
Take our Instagram for example, we often post tips and tricks on digital marketing.
Influencer Posts
Influencer posts use celebrity fame or well-known public figures to advance your brand. These posts often include an influencer visual using your product, or interacting with it.
One of the key benefits of influencer posts is getting another audience’s attention.
Example: Goal Zero shows famous rock climber and photographer Alex Honnold using one of its charging stations for solar power. Goal Zero not only reaches its own audience, but it also reaches the base of Alex’s 500,000-plus Instagram followers.
Motivational Posts
A motivational post combines a simple visual with a quote or an uplifting text overlaid.
These posts encourage your audience and enhance your values for the brand. Try posting these sparingly while effective to avoid looking cheesy.
Pro tip: Apps like Quipio and Typic can help you add text to photos in a way that’s consistent with your brand guidelines.
Let’s take the example of how Foundr does this.
Its posts are directed towards motivating entrepreneurs, small business owners and marketers.
User-Generated Content
Similar to reposts from employees, User-generated content (UGC) is curated by your fans and followers.
Your tagged posts and brand-hashtag posts are a great source for UGC.
Sharing photos of your fans and followers not only makes the original poster feel good, it also shows you are really caring about your customers.
Example: WeWork conducts an annual #DogsOfWeWork campaign, compiling together the best submissions into an annual calendar.
While WeWork does not repost every tagged image, their campaign is helping to create invaluable reach and commitment.
Newsjacking (Trending Holiday Posts)
There seems to be a “holiday” to all these days. Events such as National Sibling Day, and National Ice Cream Day generate a tonne of social media engagement.
Join the fun by participating in a trend at local , national, or world level.
A newsjacking post is a great way of posting humorous content related to light-hearted happenings.
Example: Corridor Brewing celebrated the Cubs’ Opening Day. Through this post, the American restaurant chain tapped into a popular American pastime.
Now that you know the different types of Instagram posts, let’s dig into the various tips for Instagram Marketing.
Powerful Instagram Marketing Tips
1. Switch to a business profile
You need to have a business account set up before you start making an Instagram Marketing plan.
Creating a business profile isn’t as complicated as you may think. 
All you need to do is head to your settings, and click on “Switch to Business Profile”.
There are a lot of benefits to having a business profile.
For starters, it gives your followers an easy CTA button to contact you.
A business profile allows you to create and publish Instagram ads without having to use the advertising tools provided by Facebook.
You can also access the Instagram analytics tools, called Insights, which provide statistics about your posts’ impressions and reach.
You need to start using them to track metrics and understand your audience once you have unlocked the free benefits that come with a business profile.
2. Using free Instagram tools
Business profiles on Instagram aren’t so different from business profiles on Facebook.
You can view statistics such as impressions, data on the engagement and more through Insights.
You can even get a breakdown of your followers’ demographics including their age , gender, location and most active hours.
Insights can also be used to gain information about your posts individual or to see what kind of posts performed exceptionally well.
The more you learn to use these free tools, they became priceless.
And we love that about them! Don’t you?
3. Posts that urge people to buy your product
Remember how we spoke about the concept of “Urgency and FOMO” in our older article?
Posting product teasers will help in creating urgency amongst people.
Instagram Marketing is a great medium for advertising your products. And if you do it smartly, you’re not going to annoy your followers by doing so.
If you’re too pushy, followers are going to go down like flies.
But product teaser posts are a simple way to talk about your product and increase the excitement without trying too hard to look like.
Let’s take an example of the leading e-commerce site, Myntra. They do not directly attempt to sell a product but offer a free app that allows users to shop all the inventory of the brand.
The posts are working, because they’re not pushy.
To download the app and shop around they tease users with the discount and product image.
That works for practically any industry.
Starbucks tease their audience by announcing sharp imagery on seasonal drinks and without attempting to force people to buy them.
They will be more likely to pull the trigger and actually buy something when you tease people about products they are interested in, and you don’t push them into buying anything.
If not, at least by liking it, commenting on it or sharing it with a friend, they’ll engage with your post.
So don’t worry about showing off the goods by posting photos of the product.
So don’t worry about showing off the goods by posting photos of the product.
But make sure you’re gentle with it.
This will also prove beneficial in creating sponsored ads.
4. Sponsored ads
Instagram ads have become one of the best digital marketing platforms.
The most exciting part about it is how much control you have over them.
By setting an ad budget you can control exactly how much you wish to spend on them.
With the carousel feature, you can display just one sponsored ad or multiple ads. This gives brands the ability to target their audience in a whole new way.
Before sponsored posts, only users following your account could see your updates and photos
Brands can now promote their photos to anyone who fits their target audience in order to increase their reach even further than ever.
Use content that is engaging for sponsored ads, while also appealing to the demographic target you want to place the ad in front of.
You can also turn existing posts into sponsored advertisements so keep an eye on your top posts.
You can later push these high-performance posts out in the form of sponsored ads to potential clients.
For this purpose, you can run posts to different sets of audiences at the same time for more engagement.
The following are the types of posts you can use for sponsored ads:
- Image
- Video
- Carousel/Dynamic Ad
- Stories
- Stories Canvas
Furthermore, Instagram Stories are a great platform to engage with your audience.
Web Bazooka provides end to end solutions, from designing your digital logo to website architecture, to social media pages and the required blog posts as per your requirements.
5. Upload Instagram Stories
Instagram stories enable you to generate more leads.
Instagram stories are presented in a smooth “slideshow” format which lasts for only 24 hours.
Sounds familiar? You must have seen this concept on Snapchat.
Instagram Stories appear in a small area above it, instead of appearing in the news feed.
There are a lot of benefits when it comes to Instagram stories.
They are displayed at the top, which is where the user would first see when they open the app.
Remember the “Behind-the-scenes posts” we spoke about earlier in the above section? Brands can use Instagram stories to make such posts in order to show their audience what they are up to.
And when it comes to stories, you don’t need to worry whether it aligns with the aesthetics of your feed as they just last for 24 hours!
Instagram also makes it easy to experiment with various types of content in the feature stories, such as photographs, short video, rewind video, live video, or boomerangs.
By using tools such as Canva, you can create engaging and attractive stories.
You can also tag other accounts in Stories, which is great if you’re collaborating with another brand or influencer.
Face filters, text, or stickers make it easy to edit images or create fun, eye-catching visuals.
Each photo and video you add will play in the same sequence you’ve added.
The amount of posts you can add to Stories is unlimited at any given time, and the feature is available to all businesses globally.
6. Using Instagram Influencer Marketing
Influencer Marketing is the fastest way to gain more audience.
Look for influencers who have already established a large following for themselves.
More and more people are buying services or products from the influential people they follow, based on what they see in their feed. More importantly, you trust them.
You can get your brand out in front of those users if you partner with the right industry influencer.
The first step is to try to identify a couple of influencers who have an audience relevant to your product or service.
Let’s take the example of how Gravity Blankets used influencer Jessi Smiles on its Instagram page to promote their product.
Notice the amount of likes on this post?
That is the power of Instagram Influencer Marketing.
The brand had followers less than 10,000 at that time. Owing to Jessi’s post, they were able to expose themselves to thousands of customers.
7. Create a unique branded hashtag
Using interactive hashtags are a great way to increase engagement.
For example, Redbull used a branded hashtag and ranked up over 431,000 posts with it.
This can also help customers to use it for their user-generated content.
It also allows you to search easily through images which you might want to consider re-posting on your own page.
It’s essentially free advertising to create a hashtag that your company (and other users) can seek out.
Every time someone posts a photo using the tag they are exposing their followers to your company.
You can also use a popular slogan of your brand for this purpose.
Like how Coco-Cola does it by using #ShareACoke.
8. Using user-submitted photos
You might wonder to yourself whether there is a way to distribute great content without any hard work.
There is!
By using user-submitted photos, you can leverage your audience to generate great content for you.
And your followers are likely to enjoy content generated by users even more than they enjoy yours because it is authentic and unpredictable.
Cosmetics brand MAC uses tonnes of user-generated content that they promote to show off products on their Instagram page. Here’s a photo posted by one of their users who then added it to their Instagram page.
Notice how they used the #regram hashtag, and tagged the user in the image.
The key is here is again, to not be pushy.
Just let your audience know that you will tag them if at all you end up choosing a picture of their’s.
Or, you could launch a campaign for it. Like how Apple does it with their hashtag “ShotoniPhone”.
Remember to wisely select the pictures you want to post.
This can be difficult but when considering a winner, try to remember these things:
- Does the photo fit with the image of the brand that you have already created or are trying to create? Or does it go against it?
- How big of a following is the person you want to share a photo with?
- Is the photo suitable for your present audience and to follow?
When you run a business you must be sure that everything you post is in tune with the message (and audience) from your brand.
If someone shares a user-generated image with a large following, it is likely that those followers will also be interested in checking out your page.
9. Know when to post and avoid over-posting
If there is anything that will make you lose your followers, it’s over-posting.
Nobody likes to be spammed, right?
If all they see on their news feed is your brand, they will probably unfollow you as quickly as possible.
But you want to post consistently so you stay feeding regularly into their news.
One of the best ways to do that is to post only when your followers are online during peak days and hours.
According to SimplyMeasured, the worst days to post on Instagram are Wednesdays and Sundays, while Mondays and Thursdays are the best days to post
.
The best times to post on Instagram are between 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM and 2:00 AM as well, according to CoSchedule.
But to be honest, it works differently for different people.
For this, you might want to check the insights section of your Instagram to figure out what times are the best for your brand. 
10. Track the right metrics
You can not improve and optimise your Instagram performance unless you know how well your webpage and posts perform (or are underperforming).
You will know exactly what works and what doesn’t if you have measurable results.
Start by tracking your followers growth rate.
The total number of followers you have is generally considered a vanity metric.
But your follower growth rate isn’t.
When you keep a track of your followers growth, you will be able to determine what kind of content your audience love consuming the most and what type of content isn’t working out so well.
You can check this under the insights section as well. 
The next thing you would want to measure is your engagement rate – the amount of likes, comments and views (for videos only) you get.
Start by finding out the average engagement percentage of your total followers as well as the average engagement rate of each post to get a clear picture of how your page is performing.
Here’s what your rates should look like based on your follower count:
And lastly, you need to track your URL click-through-rate.
(If you haven’t already put up your website’s URL in your IG bio, do it now!)
The average CTR on Instagram is 0.94%, according to Conversion XL.
The more effective your marketing techniques for Instagram are for your audience, the higher your CTR will be.
If it is low, then work to improve your approach.
A tool like Sprout Social will measure just how many clicks your link is getting in comparison to impressions and engagements.
In this era of globalization and digitalisation, it’s necessary to have your presence in the digital sphere. We believe that a business with a great digital team have no bounds and can reach out to every nook and corner of the world effectively and at optimum costs.
Web Bazooka provides end to end solutions, from designing your digital logo to website architecture, to social media pages and the required blog posts as per your requirements.
Get in touch with us now: Web Bazooka – India’s leading Digital Marketing and Advertising agency.