Having a successful Instagram marketing plan will undoubtedly aid in your business’s rapid growth. However, I’ve seen that many people claim that their IG account doesn’t produce any results with their advertisements on various forums and social media platform groups. 

So, in my opinion, you couldn’t obtain much better results with Instagram advertising strategy because you used the wrong approaches. So I’m going to discuss how we should go about doing this. Regardless of whether you run a small or large company, you should verify these measures before launching a campaign.

1. The fundamentals of Instagram Marketing Strategies

You will have a basic understanding of how the platform works. You’re undoubtedly familiar with the know-hows. Here’s the gist if you’re not familiar: Users take and publish photos or videos with captions, and their followers can interact with the post by loving it, commenting on it, or sharing it.

Now, understand this leading digital social media platform: In the past, there was no sharing algorithm in Instagram news feed. This meant that when a user checked in, he/she would be able to see all of the shared content from the profiles he/she was following. Then, IG launched an algorithm-driven change that supplanted the traditional oldest-to-newest news feed.

In other words, it has become more difficult now to reach the audience. This has increased the importance of encouraging your followers to like and comment on your posts so that your brand remains at the top of your audience’s feed. When consumers actively engage with your brand, the algorithm receives a user experience signal, which keeps your content showing up in your audience’s feeds.

2. Planning of Instagram calendar

Getting people to interact with your content is a difficult task. That’s why, schedule the posts and reels that complement your digital marketing strategies and objectives. It must be aligned with complementing your content, email marketing, and other related social media activities. 

Start by reviewing your company’s marketing schedule and developing appropriate Instagram content strategy for each initiative. As an example, for the launch of an event, make pre-planning of teases to announcements to collaborations. Initiate perfect content for each step of the process. You may create a calendar on a whiteboard, spreadsheet, or collaborative platform that works for your team. Incrementors provide the best on-page optimization for your digital marketing services.

Make a note of the goal for each article as you add content ideas to your marketing calendar. That way, it is in line with your marketing objectives. For instance, your objectives could be:

• Increasing the number of people who know about your company or what you have to offer
• Clicks to your website from your bio or reels
• Using your shop or website to sell things

As you gain experience, you can refine your Instagram posting schedule. Should you post every day, a few times every day, or once or twice a week? It’s vital to make your posting frequency right. You obviously want to post enough content to get results without overloading your audience or receiving bad feedback.

According to latest research, the appropriate posting frequency is determined by the size of your account. In general, tiny accounts should post a couple of times each day, whereas large accounts with 250,000 or more followers should update roughly once per week.

It’s also important to consider when you post your content. When you publish content while your audience is online, it’s more likely that they’ll see it and interact with it. You can do A/B testing to decide such time frames. Click on total followers to check who is online. To check what day of the week and time of day your followers are most active, go to the bottom of the page. Then, as part of your usual posting routine, including those times.

3. With Instagram ads, you may reach a wider audience

Ads can help you obtain more followers, leads, likes, conversions, and other benefits. The Facebook Advertising Manager, which can also be used to create ads, offers a variety of targeting choices based on interactions, interests, purchasing history, and more. It also offers a variety of choices, including image and video ads, story ads, collection ads, and much more.

You can also go for paid Instagram influencer marketing. It might look expensive, but think of it as an investment in the array of Instagram marketing strategies and plan. It will reach to the people who were untapped with your organic reach. You never know, these can become your customers. 

You can start with a small amount, like say $3 per day also. Do check and understand the analytics and engagement metrics. It will guide you regarding your positive and negative areas. Keep on working on these until your digital marketing campaign becomes completely optimized. 

4. Use the right hashtags in your posts

Hashtags is inextricably linked with this social media platform. On a negative side, doing ‘too much’ is not good. Limit to 30 hashtags only per post.

Hashtags not only help new followers find your content but also inspire others to share posts that are relevant to your business. For any business, a brand-specific hashtag is a must-have. Also, take a precaution that you don’t always put 30 hashtags, it will look like keyword stuffing. Make it a pointer of your Instagram content strategy. Big brands must avoid it. In general, you’ll observe that prominent brands adhere to the “less is more” philosophy. Experiment with tags and, if possible, take on at least one that isn’t your branded tag.

Check hashtags of your competitors and add them in your list. By this way, you can also target their customers and reach. You should make a dedicated excel sheet with various combination and permutation as per the ‘genre of the post’. It might look like a tedious task, but this systematic approach will give a great number of followers and reach in a long term.

5. Instagram Stories can help you make money

Instagram Stories are currently the most popular sort of content on the platform. Stories are no longer a novelty for eCommerce companies and retailers, with over 500 million daily users. In terms of product promotion, stories give marketers a lot of creative leeway. It gives you a vertical and full screen image/video post. Such experience gives a clutter free amazing viewing experience. IG stories are becoming one of the most preferred Instagram marketing strategies now-a-days.

You can apply various effects, stickers, polls, text contents on it to make it more lively and engaging. It puts your brand front and center in your followers’ feeds. These are more better marketing tool in contrast to your hard selling. It is because you focus more on emotion, not on the product. One more thing, you can also show behind the scenes in IG stories. They are hugely famous and entertaining.

The best part is that you don’t need to go to any other application to make IG story. The social media tool itself gives you all the options to make it. So, there is no hassle for import and export. So, it becomes quick and handy to create more and more engaging visual contents. The IG stories disappears after 24 hours.

6. Clickable link in Instagram Stories

It’s a major thing that has been recently added – the option to add links to Instagram Stories. It’s the first time users have been able to post a link to somewhere apart from bio! 

The option to send your followers to certain landing pages from your stories is obviously quite valuable thing. You may use this tool to drive traffic to any type of relevant landing page, whether it’s a product page or a fresh blog post! It saves a long hustle to go to bio and click link from there.

As per the new update, even if you don’t have 10K followers, you can use this feature via link sticker tool. You can put the link at anywhere, with different color and gradient options. It is an amazing CAT (call to action) for users.

7. Get verified on Instagram

That blue tick on your profile is the silver bullet for digital marketing.

Verified Instagram accounts builds authority and trust. It makes you stand apart from crowd. If you are running an online business through IG, it becomes your holy grail for the success. Such verified badge is very hard to earn. The said platform make sure to give it to worthy accounts only. Out of the 2 billion active monthly users, only 1% accounts are verified. 

If you get this blue tick, you will see in instant jump in your sales and overall brand positioning. Plus, you also get an access to some exclusive features of this platform to help you redefining in Instagram advertising strategy.

Conclusion:

Now that you’ve learned about all of the different Instagram marketing strategies and how to use them, it’s time to narrow down key performance indicators (KPIs) as per your business model and follow them rigorously. A key performance indicator (KPI) is a metric that you choose to quantify the success of your content or campaign.

As previously said, the KPIs you set for your account are ultimately determined by your business goals. You can also use Instagram influencer marketing to achieve your goals fast.

Author bio:

Shiv Gupta is the Founder and Head of Growth at Incrementors. Incrementors is an Award-Winning Digital Marketing Agency that helps clients to grow their business online by generating more traffic, leads, and sales. Incrementors specializes in providing customized, tailored online marketing solutions highly specific to the needs of the clients.