Instagram is not just another name in the social media apps list. It’s upbeat, quick, and has an amazing user interface that makes it just about perfect for your business. Today it is a go-to app for many small businesses that use Instagram for business tools that the app rolls out to help in their business growth.

Cut to 2019, Instagram is anything but a photo sharing platform. It has now developed itself into a full marketing channel. 2018 saw tons of helpful tools that have been super helpful for businesses- advanced business analytics, shoppable posts, IGTV, and generating traffic and leads from Instagram stories.

But Instagram can now provide you leads or sales closure. It is the currently fastest evolving social platform with 800 million users to a whopping 1000 million users within a year. Also, it has more than 25 million active business profiles.

Moreover, Instagram engagement is about ten times higher than it is on Facebook!

Now with this increased user base, we see new brands coming into the picture. There is an ample amount of opportunity for brands and businesses to target prospective audiences who can relate to their products and services.

So if you haven’t yet started your business on Instagram, now is the right time to do.

Here is how you can start using Instagram for business-

Optimize your account for a great first impression

Revamp your business profile by making it seem relevant, credible, and catchy. If your bio, profile image, and the posts don’t go along together you’re not very likely to convince your prospective leads. So after you’re done with setting up your business profile on Instagram, work on leveling up your first impression.

Firstly, you’d want to look for your business profile name as your username as that will what will show up in the searches. Also, the profile image has to be crisp. Add your logo in an image that’s at least 320 pixels square. Make sure that your picture shows the business logo clearly.

Another important thing is the website. That’s where you can add the URL of your website, your latest blog, or anywhere you want to redirect your target audience.

Set Your Target Audience

Choosing a target audience group is a must before you apply any Instagram marketing strategy. It is when you decide who is going to see your posts and stories. It’s not a grueling task but a crucial one. How to define the target group for your business?

Most of the Instagram users fall under the age of 35 with not much difference in the male and female users. Determine the demographic that you want to target for your business. That way you can decide what they are going to like and plan your posts accordingly.

The best way is to take a look at your usual customer base and you’ll get an idea about your target audience’s demographics. Taking a look at the audience age group on other platforms is a great place to start with as well.

Make an Instagram Marketing Campaign

Before you set your Instagram strategy, you need to chalk out some business goals that you want to attain within some time frame. When your goals are set you can decide every other element of your Instagram marketing strategy and harness all your resources to attain that goal.

Here is a checklist that you can try before you churn your ideas to formulate a marketing strategy.

Aim

Before you start your Instagram marketing campaign, set an aim that you can achieve through the campaign. You could be aiming at Sales, Brand awareness, redirecting the audience to your business website, and so on.

Depending on your aim you can strategize your Instagram campaign, the Tactic you’ll apply, the kind of posts you’ll create, the frequency of postings, etc. If your aim is to increase your brand awareness, you can try a lot of strategies. However, you have to be careful and crafty if your intent is to have turnover through your Instagram marketing campaign.

You can’t use the same strategy for creating more user engagements as you’d use to direct leads to your sales page. Without a goal, you won’t know what strategy to use, what tactics to apply, for how long and what to spend on your Instagram marketing campaign.

Tactic

There are many tactics you can apply for a dynamic Insta campaign. You can try the word of mouth a.k.a. Influencer Marketing tactics as one of your marketing strategies.

Influencer Marketing is one of the digital marketing trends that you want to try in 2019. You can decide whether you want to run sponsor posts with the Influencers or run campaigns with other businesses.

If you think you need some experts for making your Insta marketing tactics, then do get in touch with us. Team StickyPins can help you build your business and get massive leads faster. With years of digital marketing experience rolled under our hood, we know SMM like the back of our hands. For increasing your brand awareness, social engagement, generating and converting links, and a lot of other perks, get in touch with us today.

Timeline

Add an end date to your Instagram marketing Strategies and Campaign so that you can drive yourself and your team to make it through by then. Without a set deadline, you will have a vague picture of your Insta campaign and no proper sight of where your resources are going.

Total Spend

If you have never run a marketing campaign before, then try with a small amount. Run a small campaign and see how it goes. Planning a budget will give you an framework within which you can chalk out a great marketing strategy.

Moving on to the final step- Instagram Advertising

“Instagram Advertising is a method of paying to post sponsored content on the platform to reach a larger and more targeted audience.”

This type of advertising helps in gaining more followers, more engagement towards your posts, website traffic, and closing leads.

To get started with Marketing for your Instagram for business, firstly go to Facebook’s Ads Manager. There is no separate Ads Manager for Advertising on Insta. Advertising is managed through Facebook’s Ads Manager UI.

The whole campaign can be created through Facebook itself. Moreover, it is helpful because then you don’t have to create two separate campaigns. One Ad set can do the work for both Insta and Facebook. Also, for Ads specifically for Insta,  we can edit the placement to Insta only and remove Facebook.

Deciding how often you’ll post

After you figured out the 4 essential steps in making your Insta marketing campaign, decide how often you want to post. It is super important to figure out how much you should post per day as per your marketing aim, marketing tactics, budget, timeline and target audience.

It is true that after some point you followers will expect to see stories from you. But there are downsides to posting too much especially when you are to use Instagram for business. It is necessary to figure out when most of your target audience is online and make your post. While it is necessary to post regularly, adding too many stories can have the opposite effect of what you want.

When in doubt, insta it!

Instagram is already a big thing in digital marketing and business have started implementing it in their strategies. Instagram strategies are all about how your viewers are reacting to your activities and how you can modify that to get the result you want. If you haven’t started Instagram for business already, then start now!

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