Growing on Instagram is an essential part of marketing for any business to try and master. When you grow, you’re increasing the number of people who know about your brand and business. This increases your chances to sell, generating greater awareness and the cycle will continue. It’s basic business.
However, mastering the art of growing on Instagram is no easy feat. If it was, then everybody would be doing it! While there is a ton of trial and error that goes into figuring out the tactics and techniques that work for you and your business, there are some need-to-know tips that can help you get started.
This is exactly what I’m going to talk you through today. In the post below, we’re going to explore seven of the most important Instagram marketing tips you need to be thinking about. We’ll be covering all the basics you need to grow, improve your engagement, and ultimately scale as a modern-day business.
1. You Must Engage with Followers
If someone is taking the time out of their day to comment on your posts, you need to be taking the time to reply to them. It only takes a couple of seconds, especially if you’re just saying thank you. Engagement can be so simple and low-effort, but it’s a great way to make your followers feel valued.
Engaging and interacting with your followers is a great way to build loyalty because people will know you value them. Replying makes them feel connected to you and special. The more creative or personal you can be with your replies and interactions, the better the result will be.
2. Create High-Quality Content
This tip should really go without saying, but when you head over to Instagram and scroll down your Explore tab, you’ll start to notice that there are so many businesses and pages that simply aren’t putting the time into making high-quality content.
There’s no denying that Instagram is a visual platform, and that means you need to be visual with the content you’re creating. Use high-quality images without watermarks and make the content as visually appealing as possible.
This means spending time finding nice fonts and backgrounds to use and taking the time to write nice captions. One study found that 93% of online purchasing decisions are based on the visual appearance of the product alone.
Furthermore, it’s important to make sure you choose a consistent overall theme for your page and then stick with it. This theme will cover your posts’ overall styles, your hashtags, and even the language you use to word your the captions.
3. Use Free Instagram Tools
It doesn’t matter what aspect of your Instagram marketing strategy you’re looking at: there are plenty of tools out there that require no investment whatsoever that can help you improve, automate, and create assets that work. We’re not even talking about third-party applications.
Within Instagram itself, Facebook has been steadily rolling out free marketing tools to help your business’ IG profile succeed. This includes things like the huge contact call-to-action button you can host on your profile. This allows users to instantly get in touch with you any way you want them too.
If you’re not using these free features on your page, you’re seriously missing out on the opportunities that they provide. Coupled with these free add-ons, Instagram offers a full range of analytics tools to help you measure the success of your content strategy.
Once you’ve converted your Instagram page to a business Instagram page—which we highly recommend you to do right now—you’ll be able to see all kinds of additional information about your page. You can see who your followers are, where they come from, what kind of interests they have, what times of the day they’re most active, which posts are your highest performing posts, and much more.
Using this information, you’ll be able to narrow down exactly what your Instagram audience likes and doesn’t like, enabling you to zero in on the content that makes you successful and then doubling down on it. Over time, this helps you target posts that are likely to succeed, rather than just uploading randomly and hoping for the best.
4. Network with Other Accounts
This point may seem counter-productive, but if you’re not working with other Instagram accounts to grow, then you’re going to fall behind. This doesn’t mean directly working with your competitors. It does mean working with influencers and curation pages to share each other’s content, getting you access to new audiences.
By sharing content and working together on curating posts in a series, holding giveaways or other competitions, or simply communicating with each other, you get to expand your chances to reach viewers, some of whom will come over and join your audience as well.
There are more than enough opportunities for success to go around. However, when connecting with other Instagram pages and brands, you need to make sure you’re focusing on choosing the right pages to work with. This means looking for pages with a good audience and a good reputation.
You should aim to connect with brands and pages within your own industry, since this way you can confirm that you’re actually going to share followers and their audience is going to be interested in what you have to say and post.
5. Share User Generated Content
People love getting their own content recognized and valued, so make sure you’re interacting with content that your followers create pertaining your business. No, I’m not saying head over to their profiles and like all their personal content. We’re talking about getting users to taking pictures and videos with your products, for instance, then share what they’ve made.
“For example, let’s say you have a clothing company and you want people to take photos wearing your new clothes. They do and tag their photos under a hashtag you’ve created for your brand (another need-to-know tip you should be following) and then share their photos on your page,” shares Henry Hasiuk, a content writer at Essay Roo and State of Writing.
This is a great way to get people excited about your brand because, of course, they’re going to share their exposure with their friends and on their Instagram stories. You can do this casually or run a competition where you’re getting people to create content for you. You then have a backlog of content you can post on your page or story!
Make sure you credit your fans, though!
6. Find the Right Balance of Posting Consistency
It can be tempting to try and post all the time on your page. When you scroll through your own feed, chances are that you’ll see the same pages all the time, making it look as though they must always be posting. However, in truth, it’s all about finding the right posting consistency that works for you.
You don’t want to post so infrequently that your followers keep forgetting about you and aren’t really interested. On the other hand, you don’t want to post all the time and bombard your followers with content to the point that they end up unfollowing you.
As a rule of thumb, start posting once or twice a day if possible, and then work from there. Sometimes you can post more, maybe two or three times a day, or maybe you just need to post once every other day. It’s about finding what works for you.
7. Repurpose Other Content You Have
Hand in hand with the point above, you may be thinking, hold on; I need to be posting three or four times a day? How are you supposed to produce enough content for that? Well, it’s easy. You just repurpose your content from elsewhere.
“If you have a blog with a ton of content, you can take out ideas and quotes from your blog and turn them easily into Instagram posts. If you have video or podcast content, you can take snippets of this content to create standalone posts, or highlight reels that will thrive on Instagram, especially with the latest Reels feature,” explains Mark Denning, a marketing blogger at Australian Help and Paper Fellows.
You can also repurpose content from other accounts, as long as you making sure you’re crediting the original poster and their content. There are plenty of third-party apps out there that can help you do just that with the tap of a button.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are endless ways you can assist your efforts in successfully growing and expanding your business’s Instagram page. Of course, what works for one business may not work for yours, so make sure you’re proactive in experimenting and figuring out what works and what doesn’t. Just keep these tips in mind to help you get there!
Thank you so much for reading 7 Instagram Marketing Tips Every Business Needs to Know to Succeed. We really appreciate it! If you have any questions about our article, or can suggest any other topics you think we should explore, feel free to let us know.
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