With over 500 million daily active users and over 1 billion monthly active users (Statista.com), it has emerged as a great marketing platform for small and large businesses alike. With such a high potential reach, there is no doubt that your business can succeed immensely if you build trust and appeal to your target audience.
With the right marketing strategies in place, and some help from growth services like https://www.simplygram.com/instagram-growth/, businesses can grow their followers, leads, and prospective customers. However, they need to optimize their marketing strategy for Instagram as the competition is cut-throat. Here we will discuss how to use Instagram for business growthand success in 2021.
Creating a business account
Since you will be getting engaged on Instagram for promoting and marketing your business, you need to start a business profile. Two ways are there in which you can make your account business:
· By creating a new business accounting representing your business
· Converting your personal account into a business profile
The main reason to use a business profile is that you will have more exposure in terms of the target audience. In addition, you will be able to access Instagram analytics, which is not available in a personal account.
Optimizing your Insta user profile and account
The next task is to optimize the business profile you have created. For optimizing the account:
· Choose a catchy and user-friendly account name/ Instagram handle for your business.
· Use the business logo or a multi-grid collage image as the profile picture.
· Ensure that the bio is well-written.
· Provide a tracking link to know how many visitors you got from Insta.
· If possible, add locations for better audience targeting.
· Update profile image matching ongoing campaign.
Focusing efforts on your target audience
Instagram has more than 1 billion users, but this isn't the number your business needs. Rather, your business needs to target only a particular section of the audience that will bring effective traffic to your website.
As it's not easy to understand and target the audience perfectly in one go, make sure you make efforts constantly.
· Use available tools for defining the target audience.
· See what your audience is discussing or talking about.
· You can also use Instagram Polls wisely to know them better and engage them.
· Using the right hashtags is another way to reach your audience.
· Location tagging is another smart way to be visible to your audience.
· Outsource the Insta marketing to service like this.
Scheduling Insta posts and stories
On Instagram, your business will face quite a terrific competition, which is why you need to keep your followers engaged constantly, preferably on a daily basis. And the best way to do so is by scheduling interesting posts and/or stories regularly.
When scheduling your posts, you also need to figure out when your target audience becomes active on Instagram. For example, if you want to target US teens and high school students, they will be active either early morning or in the afternoon. Similarly, if you need to target working people, they will become active on Insta usually after the regular office times.
Based on this timing, you need to schedule your social media posts.
Connecting with your community
The whole idea of Instagram marketing is to make your potential followers and current followers stay connected and feel like a community. Adding human touch by talking to your target audience helps to connect and build trust. This helps in the long run by increasing loyal users. There are various ways to have a conversation.
· Always respond to queries and comments.
· Simply like a comment or send an emoji to respond.
· Try to respond in a suitable tone fun, light-hearted or professional.
· Use easy language while responding.
· You can also do Direct Messaging for private conversations.
· Draft answers to FAQs in advance. Use the Quick Reply feature.
Conclusion
Instagram has become an important channel for business marketing today. Follow the best practices discussed above to leverage Instagram for your business growth.
