Ultimate Guide To Instagram Marketing

Why Use Instagram For Marketing?

Instagram is one of the many tactics business use in their marketing strategies, and it’s for a good reason! There are over 1 billion monthly users on Instagram with many options for advertising and promotion. Instagram marketing helps you gain exposure to your brand, build trust, and get high engagement with your followers. 

How To Start Instagram Marketing Instantly

To begin your Instagram marketing strategy, you will have to shift gears into the Instagram marketing mindset. If you’re worried that you may be behind, here are some things you can do right now:

Switch To A Business Profile 

Switch your profile from a private account to a business one. This is super easy, all you have to do is go to your settings and click on “account.” From there, you can ‘switch to a professional account*

Use The Analytics Tools

Once your profile is considered a professional account, you now have access to analytics that you didn’t before. By going to “insights,” you can see the content you’re posting and the promotions you’ve put out as well as data on how much you’ve posted in the week. You can also view (under activity) graphs that show your week’s worth of reach and influence. This feature also includes data for profile visits, impressions, and information on your audience as you build your following. You can start to use these tools to gauge the kind of people you are reaching and understand how to better market your brand.

Get To Know Your Audience 

So you’ve made your account a business profile, and you understand how to access analytics, now what? You will want to start getting to know your audience and what they like and don’t like. You try posting different types of content to see what gets the best engagement.

Consider International 

If you have the resources to offer services or send content and products abroad, then Instagram is the perfect place! 89% of Instagram’s users are outside of the U.S, meaning that 890 million users live outside of the United States. It’s the perfect opportunity to reach customers of different backgrounds if you can.

Instagram Marekting Statistics

There are over 25 million businesses on Instagram. Concerning traction, over 200 million Instagram users visit at least one business profile a day. This puts the potential advertising reach at 849.3 Million people for a business on the site- AND if you’re considering starting to use stories to promote, you might be in luck, 1/3 of the most viewed stories are posted from businesses.

Besides being second for most monthly active users, Instagram is also the second most downloaded free app in the AppStore (only after YouTube- which can ALSO be used as a marketing tool.)

Monthly Active Users

Instagram has over 1 BILLION monthly active users. 500 Million Instagram users are using Stories daily. All this action puts Instagram in second place (for all traditional network sites) for most active users, only after Facebook.

Daily Interaction

Of all of Instagram’s users, 63% log in at least once a day, with 42% checking several times a day. Only 16% of all users log in less than once a week. Keeping this in mind, people generally spend about 53 minutes a day on the site.

3 Tips For Your Instagram Marketing Strategy

1. Stories

With half a billion people using Stories DAILY and 1/3 of the most viewed stories being from businesses, you definitely have to take advantage of your Stories. Post new content or discounts for your followers to get excited about while they’re scrolling through their daily feeds.

2. Ads 

According to EMarketer, Instagram is moving quicker than other sites (even including Facebook) so it makes sense that Ads are becoming more and more crucial to promotion. Instagram’s ad revenues in the US will grow by 46.8% this year. Facebook is only predicted to grow by 11.2% this year.

3. Posts With Links

Once verified you can start adding direct links to your stories and posts. This way people can click directly from your posts to your site. However, until then, consider adding your webpage URL to your bio so it’s easy for people to go straight to your hub of information from your Insta profile!

Instagram Marketing Tactics

Using Instagram in your marketing strategy can be very beneficial. Here are a couple of Instagram marketing tactics you can implement to help you get started.  

Keyword Opt-Ins

Tell anyone who comes to your Instagram profile to message you a *keyword* to receive an offer. They don’t have to be following you, and it sparks curiosity in anyone who sees your bio!

Story Mentions + Hashtags 

Have people hashtag or tag you in their stories while at your conferences and events, which then allows you to respond to their story and say “thanks for the share, head over to this booth for a t-shirt” or “we’ve entered you into a raffle, head over to this booth at this time to hear the announced winners!” This allows you to have that personal connection to the people at events with you, then you can get into conversations. Fitness programs and post-purchase use this a lot!

Automation / Human Interaction Balance

“Automation is very important for business’ scalability but you still need human interaction.” -Jeff MacPherson. Recognize the difference between how much people engage with you and want to be a part of your business, then alter messages to fit that so that you aren’t just blasting the same message for everyone. The bot is great to reach out initially, and then connect them to the right person.

Combat Shiny Syndrome

People don’t want to wait a long time for an offer, they want it now. Create a story that will stop them in their tracks from all the daily noise of social media. Allow them a calender-drop through DMs immediately or give them an offer right away before they move on and have to return to it!

Consider Using An Instagram Management Platform

Now, we’ve explained where to start if you’re still in the beginning phase of Instagram Marketing. However, once you’ve got an idea of all the possibilities for the platform it might seem a little bit daunting. But we have good news, there are platforms designed specifically to help businesses manage Instagram marketing that can take your brand the extra mile. In our recent podcast with Jeff MacPherson and Billy Bateman, they go into detail about Jeff’s own Instagram managing platform- Direct Heroes (@direct.heros). Considered the “ManyChat” of Instagram, his business is designed to help your marketing on Instagram really transform.

What Is The Future Of Instagram Marketing?

It’s predicted that the number of users on Instagram will be 1.2 billion monthly active users, with more and more opportunities for ad promotion and incredible ways to reach out to followers. The future of Instagram Marketing is bright! Whether you choose to tackle the beast on your own or with a little promotional help, you can change your business marketing to stay up to date on all the social media platforms people are on!