I can say with 100% confidence that Instagram is winning for favorite social platform among the humans I know. But why do people love Instagram so much?
The most common response I hear when asking my friends, family, and acquaintances this question is, “The pictures!” In 2017, digital asset management company Webdam noted that visual social media platforms were growing fasterthan text-based ones.
Instagram makes it easy for people to beautify their photos with filters and editing tools. People are naturally attracted to these beautified photos and crave more – not to mention the psychology that goes behind receiving “likes” on your own photos, as well as the element of FOMO present when falling behind on your friends’ posts. All of this makes Instagram slightly addictive.
So what do the stats say? Well, currently there are over 1 billion Instagram accounts active every single month, with 80 percent of those accounts following at least 1 business! Furthermore, 60 percent of people report discovering new products on Instagram. These stats alone should be a hint to business owners that if they are not on Instagram, they absolutely should be.
Assuming you have already caught on to the Instagram trend, you may be wondering what more you can do, and what effect your Instagram posts are having on the bottom line of your business? This is where we can help.
In this guide, you’ll learn the basics you need to define an Instagram marketing strategy. We’ll cover:
Having a clearly defined Instagram marketing strategy is key to accomplishing your social media and business goals. The first step in the process is to define your goals.
Now that you are ready to take your Instagram account down a more strategic route, it is time to define why you are posting content there in the first place. Are you hoping to raise brand awareness, collect new leads, convert warm leads, or perhaps connect with customers to build brand ambassadors?
Perhaps your account was created to do more than one of these things, but having a clear goal in mind before you create each post will help your account stay focused on what you are ultimately trying to achieve.
Your primary goal will inform your Instagram strategy. For instance, you may be trying to raise brand awareness with a larger budget; your strategy will then likely be to run ads that target a large net of relevant individuals to increase exposure to your brand.
On the other hand, if your primary goal is to strengthen customer loyalty, your Instagram marketing strategy should likely include running some customer contests to increase engagement, as well as providing educational material (such as video tutorials and interactive posts linking to additional resources) to help your customers enhance their use of your products and/or services.
Once your goals are set, it’s time to refine your audience. If you’ve had experience with Facebook’s Ad Manager in the past, this step should be pretty easy – you’ll be using the same platform, but for Instagram.
Ads Manager will allow you to highly customize your audience based on parameters from age range and location to detailed demographic, interest, and behavioral targeting. You can also make a custom or lookalike audience to upload a list of people who have already interacted with your business.
For example, let’s say you want to target middle-aged women, who have graduated from Harvard Medical School, are interested in baking, and have had an anniversary within 61-90 days. You can do just that!
Image source: Socialtradia.com
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