Instagram happens to be the second-largest social media platform after Facebook, with as much as 1 billion monthly active users logging on the platform.
In one sense, this social network offers you a platform to showcase your business offers and try to communicate with your target audience. You can also use Instagram to increase and improve your brand awareness. But in the other sense, the competition is stiff.
First of all, you’re competing with at least 100’s of millions of people who also come on this platform to post their pictures, videos, and communicate with other Instagrammers. Secondly, hundreds of thousands of other small businesses, like yours, are jumping onto Instagram in order to market their products & services.
With all of this, it’s already apparent that you can’t just put out a post or upload a picture of your product and miraculously expect that it will get enough attention to drive sales for you consistently. With the amount of competition you’re faced with on this platform, you have to work hard to stand out.
1. Be Active On Instagram
The first rule to success on Instagram of any social media marketing strategy is to actively participate on the social platform. There’s no doubt that your target audience is on Instagram, but if you are not consistently appearing on this platform, they won’t find you. Your success on this platform will not come from just posting your content and not getting involved with anything that’s going on within the platform or with your target audience.
Some of the things that you have to do to be active on this platform are:
- Follow other brands, people, and influencers on Instagram
- How to Promote Your Small Business on Instagram. It builds your relationship with them better. Don’t just leave the comments unattended to.
- Comment on the posts of other people, brands, influencers, and celebrities. This makes you more visible on the platform and gives your brand a more human feel.
- Publish friendly content from your prospective customers, and don’t forget to @mention them when you do. This also strengthens the relationship between your brand and its prospects.
2. Connect Your Instagram with Other Socials
To be really successful with your social media marketing strategy as a small business, you can’t use one platform independently of the others. Social media is known to help drive and improve traffic on websites, so you can take advantage of this for yourself. You can see this as a chance to promote your website and expose it to more people. That’s what the link in your bio is there for.
Another effective way to use the Instagram bio link feature is to add your other social media account. This is even more effective if you make most of your sales from other platforms. You can add other social media links to your bio. But it goes both ways too. If you’re already doing well on other social media platforms such as Facebook, or twitter, then you should promote your Instagram page on those platforms too. Since you’re well-known on those platforms, Instagram is a more visual platform, allowing them to see more of what you offer and convince them better.
3. Optimize your bio, username, & display name on Instagram
This might sound very simple, and it’s easy to think that it’s not a big deal. But your display name and username on Instagram can play a crucial role in your brand’s visibility on Instagram. Optimizing your name for your business makes it easy for people to find youduring Instagram searches. Your display name and username should include the keywords of your business.
For instance, if you’re a restaurant with an Instagram page, your business’s keyword is “restaurant,” which has to be included in both names and bio. So, when people search for the word “restaurant” on Instagram, your page will appear as one of the suggestions to them, making you more visible on Instagram.
This “little” optimization can make a huge difference in promoting your small business on Instagram. So you shouldn’t overlook it.
4. Use your Instagram Story More Efficiently
Your business on Instagram depends a lot on your engagement rate & activity of your community. Thankfully, Instagram has a (not so) secret weapon that can help you to skyrocket your Instagram engagement, and this is the Instagram story.
It is easy for your content to get lost on the Instagram feed among thousands of others that people are open to, so you get very little engagement from it. But with Instagram’s story, you have a more effective means to put out your content and market your brand. Some people don’t go through their feed but prefer to check through different Instagram stories. The story’s location just at the top of the feed is also obvious enough for people to want to check it out. So, you have a high chance of your Instagram stories. All you need, according to an essay writer, to do is to be creative with it.
Don’t be shy to try out different stickers and filters to make it more entertaining for your followers. The more entertaining it is, the more of your stories they check out. Do you know what that means? They get to see more of your brand and brand product. There are also many Instagram story features such as quizzes, polls, countdowns, emoji sliders, etc. that you can creatively use while marketing your product
5. Partner with an Influencer
Influencer marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach out to more people on social media, especially on Instagram. So, it won’t be a bad idea to partner with an influencer and start an influencer marketing campaign.
It doesn’t matter the kind of business that you’re into. There are always influencers that you can use to promote your business and your page to people. The problem is the kind of budget that you have for this. Influencers with many followers tend to charge very high for this service. But thankfully, there are different types of influencers. So, if you can’t work with the macro-influencers (with many followers), then there are other micro-influencers that you can work with. With a modest budget, you will get an influencer to work with for this campaign.
In reality, it’s more effective to work with a micro-influencer because they produce better content, engage their audience better, will have more time to pay attention to you, etc. the fact that you also run a small business would make it easier for them to reach out to a more localized audience for you.
Conclusion
Promoting your business on Instagram is very important for your business growth. Thankfully, however, it isn’t as difficult as it might sound. The steps mentioned in this article are some of the steps you can take to accomplish this.
Justin Osborne is an essay writer ( https://uk.bestessays.com/ ), he loves to share his thoughts and opinions about education, writing, and blogging with other people on different blogs and forums. Currently, he is working as a content marketer at bestessays.com.