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Posted by on February 10, 2019

Need a strategy that will kick start your Instagram marketing? Follow these 9 steps…

Source: socialtradia

With over 8 million business profiles on Instagram, the app is a hub for brands and so Instagram marketing is a necessity in any social media strategy. But with all that noise, how can you be sure your company will be heard? The answer is with a killer Instagram marketing strategy!

This article will help guide you through the process of making a winning Instagram marketing strategy, and ensure you reach your business objectives through the app…

Contents:

  1. Audience 👥

  2. Objectives 📊

  3. Competitors📱

  4. Content Strategy 📸

  5. Editorial Calendar 🗓

  6. Schedule Content

  7. Plan Captions

  8. Brand Guidelines 📋

  9. Track Progress 📈

1. Determine Your Audience 👥

First thing’s first, who are you trying to reach with Instagram marketing? Are you certain your audience are using the app? For example, it’s good to know that 68% of Instagram users are female and that the majority of users are under 30. Carrying out market research into your target demographic is vital before you start putting out content. Determine the age, gender, location, interests (even diets) of your ideal audience so that you can ensure you’re catering your content appropriately!

Once you have that demographic in mind, go a step further to determine other behaviour:

  • What kind of hashtags are they using?

  • What locations do they hang out at?

  • What other brands are they interested in?

  • Who do they follow on Instagram?

This audience research does not take long, and is an important first step in focusing your Instagram marketing and creating a strategy!

2. Determine Your Objectives 📊

What do you want your Instagram marketing to achieve?

When creating an Instagram marketing strategy, it’s important to keep tangible business objectives at the forefront to avoid wasting time and resources. Write a list of targets that you’re aiming to hit through Instagram marketing. These will naturally vary depending on business and industry, but could be anything from growing an engaged community, to increasing brand awareness, to driving conversions!

Each of these objectives will have different KPIs and metrics to track, and will require different forms of content. If you can narrow these down early in your Instagram marketing strategy, it will help you and your team stay on track – especially because it’s easy to get carried away making content!

Plan & schedule Instagram posts ahead of time.

Video, gallery, image & text only posts

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3. Analyse Competitor Content 📱

As important as market research is for determining your audience, it’s also very beneficial for analysing your competition! When creating an Instagram marketing strategy, identify big players in your industry on Instagram and see what they’re doing well, and what you think you could do better. Remember that their target audience is also your target audience, so here are some things to consider:

  • What is their engagement rate? (likes + comments ÷ no. of followers x 100)

  • Do they respond to comments?

  • What kind of questions are their followers asking?

  • Which hashtags are they using?

  • What form of content are they predominantly using?

  • What is their call to action?

Running an audit check like this on your main competitors is useful for learning about the space, finding what works best, and getting to know your Instagram audience better!

When creating an Instagram marketing strategy, identify big players in your industry and see what they’re doing well on the app, and what you think you could do better!CLICK TO TWEET

To take your Instagram marketing to the next level, check out:

#️⃣ All-In-One Guide To Instagram Hashtags #️⃣

4. Create A Content Strategy 📸

Potentially the most crucial part of your Instagram marketing strategy is deciding what to post in order to best showcase your brand AND reach your business objectives. Content creation uses a huge amount of resources in a company, so you want to be getting it right. This stage of strategising involves weighing up the following forms of content for your audience:

And then considering other Instagram marketing techniques such as:

  • Contests/Giveaways

  • Influencer marketing

  • Gallery posts

  • Collaborations/Takeovers

Based on your audience and competitor research, you probably already have a good idea about the form of content that will work best for your Instagram marketing. For example, if you sell a product which is photographable, naturally your product will be the foundation for your content. Whereas if you sell an online or in-person service, it might be that you share useful information or updates in the form of text posts, or document your company lifestyle with behind-the-scenes insights.

Take a look at these very different examples of Instagram marketing side by side. As a product-based brand, GATO use their Instagram account to display their desserts in a creative and attractive way. Whereas SaaS brand Slack uses theirs to share business announcements and company culture. Both are valid Instagram marketing strategies for very different brands and audiences!

Instagram marketing: Product vs. Software

Click here for in-depth tips on producing great Instagram content for your business!

5. Creating A Content Calendar 🗓

Hand in hand with a content strategy comes a content calendar. Now you know what you’re posting, the next step in your Instagram marketing strategy is deciding when and how often it should be published. You don’t want to end up scraping the barrel for last minute content, so having an editorial calendar will enable you to be organised and plan your feed around upcoming events, announcements, or relevant trends!

Source: here

The content calendar planner on Hopper HQ – visually manage what posts are going out when, and easily drag and drop to change their scheduled date!

Using a calendar to manage your Instagram marketing will also help to see the gaps in your content plan to ensure you’re posting consistently. Consistency is more important than frequency on Instagram to help build a reliable relationship with your audience! The Instagram algorithm will also favour an account who posts twice a day every day, than one that posts 6 times on a Monday and then not again til the weekend.

The best tactic for choosing how regularly you post is looking at when your followers are most active during the week! You can connect your business Instagram account to our free Best Time To Post On Instagram tool to access this data – and then plan your content calendar accordingly!

Source: here

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