Instagram Marketing
What is Instagram Marketing?
Instagram marketing is a type of social media marketing, which involves promoting a brand on Instagram. This social media platform helps brands connect with an enormous audience, increase brand awareness, and boost sales.
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| Instagram marketing |
Why is Instagram marketing important for businesses?
Instagram is the perfect channel to reach a huge audience - more than 1 billion monthly active users. Users spend an average of 53 minutes a day on Instagram, making the platform the second most visited social network after Facebook.
Instagram makes it easy to maintain your relationships with customers and prospects. People enjoy connecting with brands through this network – 90% of users follow at least one company on Instagram.
Another point to consider is Instagram's opportunities to drive sales. According to Facebook research in 2019, 65% of people surveyed visited a brand's website or app after seeing it on Instagram. 46% of respondents bought from the brand online or offline.
Access to a wide audience that actively communicates with brands and wants to buy from them is the main advantage of Instagram marketing. However, this social network has a handful of other advantages.
Benefits of Instagram for Business
Over the past few years, Instagram has evolved from a place for bending fortunes or success to a useful platform for business purposes. There are four ways Instagram can positively impact your business.
Brand strengthening
Instagram marketing does wonders for brand awareness. 83% of users admit that this social network helps them discover new products or services. Even better, people show more trust in brands featured on Instagram.
74% of users consider brands with Instagram accounts relevant and 78% perceive them as popular. Conversely, brands that don't have an Instagram account are likely to be avoided by potential customers.
Improved engagement
Social media is one of the best channels for maintaining customer relationships. They allow you to get feedback from your audience through likes or comments, engage them with compelling content, alert them to special offers, and more.
In turn, Instagram works even better for customer engagement than other social platforms. Typically, an Instagram photo gets 23% more engagement than a Facebook post, even though the latter platform has twice as many active users.
Enlarged sales
We already know that the Instagram audience is a willing shopper. This shopping audience is huge – 11% of social media users in the US shop on Instagram.
Knowing this particularity, Instagram allows businesses to make the most of their platform. Instagram offers a robust set of tools that allow users to shop directly from Instagram. These include links in Instagram Stories, shopping tags, ads, and more. Consider reading the full list on the Instagram site.
Audience growth opportunities
Instagram increases the reach of your business by allowing you to precisely define your target audience. This opportunity is available in the Instagram Ads Manager thanks to the targeting options. You can use them to determine the most appropriate audience based on demographics, interests, behaviors and more.
Even better, Instagram Ads Manager gives you robust retargeting options. Combined targeting and retargeting allows you to not only get more qualified leads on Instagram, but also effectively move leads from other channels down the sales funnel.
Instagram's analytics tool allows you to measure the performance of your ads. You can track reach, total campaign spend, number of purchases, cost per purchase, conversions and more.
To summarize, Instagram marketing strengthens your brand, brings you an audience willing to buy and keeps them engaged with your business. If you want to get the most value out of this channel, read on. In the next part, we will find out how to set up an Instagram marketing strategy.
Instagram Marketing Strategy:
- Set your goals
- Define your target audience
- Analyze your competitors
- Get a business account
- Design your content
- Build a consistent aesthetic
- Configure an editorial calendar
- Grow your follower base
- Turn followers into customers
Every marketing channel needs a well-designed strategy to ensure amazing results for your business. Follow our step-by-step guide to create an Instagram marketing strategy.
Set your goals:
Start creating your Instagram marketing strategy by setting goals. Goals will underpin everything you do on Instagram, from defining content formats to using advertising mechanisms. Popular goals that brands are looking to leverage through Instagram are increasing brand awareness, reputation management, community building, sales acceleration, customer and market intelligence, and more.
Your goals should correlate with your business needs. If your financial results are more or less good, there is probably no need to increase sales through Instagram. Try focusing on customer acquisition or market intelligence instead.
To be more effective, make sure your goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely. They can read something like "We need to achieve a 20% increase in sales through Instagram in 5 years."
Define your target audience:
Determining your audience is a crucial step; miss it and all your efforts to achieve your business goals will fail. A pro tip is to create a buyer persona. Find out who your typical customer is, their age, gender, occupation, location, income level, etc. The better you know your customers, the better your results will be.
The main mistake to avoid here is creating a fake persona. Use a data-driven approach instead of guesswork. To get information about your potential customers, you can research Instagram hashtags related to your business. For example, if you are selling a stock agency, you might explore #eventplanner, #events or #eventstyling.
Take a closer look at the profiles that use these hashtags. Then try to learn more about the people who work with these accounts - what reactions they share, what comments they write, what they love and hate about their profiles. To learn more about customer profiling and other techniques, follow our comprehensive guide.
Analyze your competitors:
To get a handle on Instagram marketing, research your competitors' profiles. Find out who they are, what kind of content they post, how they interact with their audience and other brands or influencers. You can also research your competitors' branded hashtags to get an indication of how popular they are.
Try to focus not only on successful tactics, but also on things that your competitors may be missing. This will help you come up with effective and unusual tactics to promote your brand. Imagine you are selling a psychology practice through Instagram. Typical doctors post static images on Instagram with instructions to diagnose mental conditions. To stand out, you can entertain your audience and post videos with interesting psychological experiments.
Researching your competitors through Instagram is hard work. Fortunately, you can partially mitigate this with social listening services or CRM systems. For example, Sprout Social can automatically compile competitor research. For more information, follow our compilation of great CRM systems.
Get a business account:
Instagram offers its users two types of accounts: personal and business. The latter gives you many more benefits and opportunities. For example, you can track your performance in real time, learn more about your followers' behavior, add information about your company, and more.
To switch to a business account, follow our step-by-step guide, then come back here for some non-technical marketing tips for setting up your profile. There are:
Create the perfect resume. Describe your business in 150 characters and focus on what makes it stand out.
Optimize your profile photo. It should be recognizable and reflect your business. You can opt for a logo, but remember that Instagram displays it as a 110 x 110 pixel photo.
Link to your website. This is crucial for lead generation – your profile description is the only place you can add a link besides Stories.
Take advantage of business opportunities. In business mode, you can add category, contact information and calls to action. Don't neglect this opportunity to connect with customers.
Here is an excellent example of an Instagram bio from Beautyblender. The brand squeezes every bit of value out of this section of the account.
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Create bio |
Design your content:
Content is king anywhere on social media, and especially on Instagram—users are picky about both visuals and text. Thus, the platform provides a wide range of content formats and audience acquisition opportunities.
Start by coming up with the main theme and message you want to convey. You can choose to showcase your products, focus on your company culture, or entertain your customers.
The next step is deciding which content formats to use to achieve your goals. With IGTV, you can use still images, galleries, short videos or longer video formats. Note that images get 27.55% more likes than videos, but both get almost the same amount of comments. However, it might not work the same for you, so play around with different formats and track your engagement stats.
Build a consistent aesthetic:
No matter what type of content you choose, keep it beautiful, engaging and high quality. To guide you in the best visual style, we have selected some statistics of popular images on Instagram:
- Light tones generate 24% more likes than dark ones;
- Blue images get 29% more likes than red ones;
- Users like images with a high level of texture 79% more.
Avoid using this data thoughtlessly; Remember that your visuals should correlate with your brand personality. You can stick to your brand colors and guidelines – making you recognizable from platform to platform.
Another point to consider is your visual consistency. The pictures on your Instagram profile should have a unified impression. You can achieve this by using certain Instagram filters or preferences. See how Hootsuite uses its branding style for Instagram and creates consistency with visuals.
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Oakandfort Instagram profiles |
Configure an editorial calendar:
Consistent content delivery is essential to your Instagram success. Your audience expects you to post regular updates. On average, brands publish content 1.5 times a day. To keep up this pace without going crazy, create an editorial calendar.
For greater efficiency, keep your calendar in special post scheduling services. They allow you to not only know what to post and when, but also to have visuals, posts and hashtags at hand. Better yet, these tools automate your submissions, provide useful insights on when to submit, help you get in-depth analytics, and more. Read our list of planning and other social media tools to learn more.
Grow your follower base:
Take the time to grow your audience and keep them engaged. One organic way to do this is to follow relevant influencers. For example, if you sell kitchenware, it's a good idea to follow food bloggers, kitchen interior designers, and so on. Don't forget to engage with their content - like their posts, leave meaningful comments, share their stories.
Another option is to use hashtags to help you reach your target audience, attract followers and increase engagement. Be careful here – not all hashtags are useful for your business. The most popular ones are used in millions of posts. So rather go for niche hashtags. You can find them on the accounts of your followers, competitors and market leaders.
In addition, you can take advantage of paid promotion options such as influencer marketing or Instagram advertising campaigns. Here's a guide to the ad formats and mechanisms Instagram offers businesses.
Turn followers into customers:
Increasing vanity metrics like likes and comments is good, but it doesn't directly impact your sales. So take care of converting your followers into customers. Publish promotional posts, showcase your new products, launch trailers, offer deals and discounts. Be sure to include calls to action in your promotional posts. While you can't add a link to your call to action in a post, you can always invite subscribers to click on the link in your bio.
You can use the SendPulse drag and drop tool to create a link page for your Instagram bio. It provides options to create a page from scratch or use a pre-designed template and design it to your liking. You don't need any technical skills and a lot of time — it takes 15 minutes to create a responsive website. Add buttons, links, useful resources, subscription widgets and integrate with a payment system to convert leads into customers. The service is completely free. Follow this step-by-step guide to get started.
Use the different shopping post formats that Instagram has created for you. They allow the user to start the sales journey directly from a specific post and move the path to purchase, resulting in higher conversion rates. Check out Instagram's guide to shopping formats and opportunities.
Once your Instagram marketing strategy is ready, start using it and track its effectiveness day by day. Performance monitoring helps you make timely changes and adopt new techniques to increase your KPIs. We will discuss some tricks in the next section.
5 Instagram Marketing Tips:
- Embrace user-generated content
- Share your Instagram posts on Facebook
- Use stories and highlights
- Collaborate with influencers
- Launch an Instagram shop
Using off-the-shelf tactics is better than reinventing the wheel; saving you and your marketing team valuable time and effort. Master the following techniques to take your Instagram marketing to the next level.
Embrace user-generated content:
User Generated Content (UGC) is the magic wand for Instagram marketing. It helps you post images and videos without lifting a finger. Even better, UGC has a positive effect on Instagram promotion. Drives 4.5% higher conversion rate, increases engagement, improves CPC and CTR metrics for paid ads.
This is because UGC works similarly to word-of-mouth and social proof. People trust referrals from other customers much more than paid advertising. To get UGC for your account, encourage your audience to share their photos and videos with your branded hashtag. Repost the best bits, but avoid overusing UGC – it works better in combination with original branded content.
Learn how to work with user-generated content from Benefit Cosmetics. The brand encourages people to use its hashtag #benefit, which will be highlighted on the brand account. For better results, the company not only shares the content of its users, but also adds shopping tags to the products used to create makeup.
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User-generated content on the Benefit drinks account |
Share your Instagram posts on Facebook:
It's not exactly Instagram marketing, but this tip will help you boost your overall social media performance. Instagram allows you to instantly share photos and videos on your Facebook. All you need is to turn on Facebook's slider in the "Post Also" section while publishing content.
This feature is not only convenient and time-saving, but also great for your performance. According to Buzzsumo, images posted on Facebook get 23% more engagement over Instagram.
GoPro uses this trick to achieve amazing results. In the example below, a brand posted a teaser for a new product simultaneously on Instagram and Facebook. In total, the company received over 1.5 million views, 13.7 thousand comments and roughly 260 thousand likes on both channels.
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A GoPro post shared on Instagram and Facebook |
Use stories and highlights:
It's easy to underestimate the importance of Instagram Stories because they disappear 24 hours after they're posted. However, this format is too good for your marketing to leave on the table. According to Instagram data, 62% of people said they became more interested in a brand or product after seeing it in Stories.
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Topshop Story |
Stories are the perfect way to create an emotional connection with your customers. While your feed should be flawless, stories are best for unedited, realistic content such as behind-the-scenes and behind-the-scenes content. They are also a format for posting detailed product reviews with shopping links. The cherry on top is that you can keep your stories forever. All you have to do is add them to a special section on your page called Highlights.
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Topshop Highlights |
Topshop provides an excellent example of how to make the most of stories and highlights. The company uses Stories to gain interest in new items on its website. First, the brand announces a discount on their new clothes and then shows off some of them. Each story includes a link to a new outfit web section.
Highlights keep the story pack divided into several categories. In Topshop's 'New' highlight, visitors can see new items by linking to a specific section of the site. The "On the Blog" highlight features the best posts on the company's blog and guides viewers there.
Collaborate with influencers:
79% of marketers consider Instagram to be the most important channel for their influencer marketing campaigns. The thing is, businesses earn $5.20 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing. To create an effective influencer marketing campaign, follow a few rules:
Choose an influencer whose audience is similar to yours. Otherwise, your marketing efforts will fail – people will not be interested in what you have to offer.
Check the audience - there should be no bots or fake subscribers. Make sure followers are in touch with the influencers you work with. To check this, use special tools like trendHERO.
Determine audience sentiment about the influencer. Some bloggers with huge fan bases generate more hate than love. Promoting through them will not get you new subscribers or sales, so check the comments section carefully.
Dior used influencer marketing to promote its Spring/Summer 21 fashion show. The brand's choice fell on Jisoo, a Dior ambassador and blogger with over 20 million followers. Jisoo announced the show on her Stories and went live several times during the event to share her thoughts on it. This tactic not only attracts the audience but also keeps them engaged with the show.
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Screenshots from Jisoo’s Stories before and during the Dior fashion show |
Launch an Instagram shop:
In 2020, Instagram increased sales opportunities and launched a new format. The Instagram Store is a separate section of the account that resembles a website storefront. People can get there through their feed or stories, explore products and shop without ever leaving Instagram.
Using this tool, businesses can create product catalogs, craft collections, and customize products into themes that tell their brand story. Follow the instructions on Instagram to set up your store. If you need a dose of inspiration for arranging your products, check out the Etsy profile. The company not only showcases some of its best products, but also collects recently viewed items into a separate category. This step provides users with easy access to the products they have liked.
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Instagram shop |
The above tactics have proven to be effective for improving brand presence on Instagram, growing your follower base, engaging your audience and increasing sales. If you're looking for more inspiration, check out this guide to Instagram marketing for ecommerce brands on the Incense blog.
Read on to see some interesting examples of Instagram marketing.
3 Instagram Marketing Ideas and Examples:
Instagram marketing is a long journey with many pitfalls and rapidly changing conditions. So promoting your brand through this platform requires all your creativity. To spark your imagination, check out some of the techniques that brands are using successfully on Instagram.
Starbucks – promotional hashtags:
Coffee chain Starbucks knows a thing or two about promoting via Instagram hashtags. The company uses user-generated content for half of its posts and delivers amazing results. On average, such publications have 28% higher engagement compared to standard company posts.
To promote UGC, Starbucks constantly runs campaigns using several branded hashtags. The latter helps the company inspire followers and promote new products. For example, Starbucks used #icedcaramelmacchiato, #IcedCoconutMilkMochaMacchiato and #pinkdrink to market their new drinks. People have added these hashtags to a total of almost 500 thousand publications.
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Posts with the #coldcofe hashtag on Instagram |
IMAX – Instagram ads:
IMAX Entertainment took a creative approach to marketing The Rise of Skywalker with Instagram ads. The brand turned regular passively watched sponsored stories into an interactive space. To that end, IMAX added voting stickers to its ads; allowed viewers to choose one of two answers.
The company has created three different versions of similar posts, two of which include a poll. Polled versions asked viewers if they would join the dark side or use the Force for an IMAX ticket. At the end of the ad, people could tap the Book CTA to buy movie tickets. It turned out that this version scored 12 points higher ad engagement than their stories without the survey sticker.
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IMAX - ad image source Instagram |
Lord&Taylor – Influencer marketing:
Although clothing retailer Lord&Taylor has gone out of business, it has left us with an inspiring Instagram campaign. The brand collaborated with 50 fashionistas and challenged them to style the same dress in different ways. The idea behind this challenge was to get followers to puzzle over why their favorite bloggers are dressed the same.
The campaign produced stunning results. The dresses from the photos sold out by the end of the weekend. Even better, Lord&Taylor generated interest in its Design Lab collection, which was the real purpose of the campaign.
Instagram marketing can provide excellent results for your brand awareness, customer loyalty, sales and lead generation. To increase ROI and nurture leads, combine Instagram promotions with email and messenger marketing, web push notifications and SMS.
Saves your time:
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