Promoting Your Brand and Driving Sales through Instagram

It is the desire of every business person to have their brand and products seen by as many people as possible and grow a huge following of customers who can personally relate to his brand. This is the magic wand that Instagram brings to the table. Currently, Instagram has over 300 million monthly users which by all standards is greater than what Twitter has.

By learning to interact with the Instagram community, you can earn personally invested customers who will keep on coming back for more. Instagrammers are serious shoppers as one study done in 2015 reveals. According to the study, 70{bf2adae1551c4a09b79a165ab6d55319a8ac932c8e3b3f0cee72a593e1c7ac96} of Instagram users repot of having already looked up a brand on the social platform while 62{bf2adae1551c4a09b79a165ab6d55319a8ac932c8e3b3f0cee72a593e1c7ac96} of users confess to following a brand just because they love being associated with it.

The following are some of the tips to start you off and solidify your Instagram world so that you can convert passive shoppers into active and confident customers.

Setup an Optimised Instagram Account for Your Business

Instagram has separate accounts setups for personal and business dealings. For customer appeal, remember to include a link to your site so as to boost traffic. Instagram gives you only one opportunity on your bio to place a clickable link to your website. Target the link either to your landing page or online shop. Also, stay recognisable by choosing a name related or same as your business name and keep your profile image consistent.

Create Popular Posts

Your audience love hearing from you, but your posts must be catchy if you want to hook these customers. Because Instagram is image-centric, ensure your posts contain an image and a little text and a link. Since 90{bf2adae1551c4a09b79a165ab6d55319a8ac932c8e3b3f0cee72a593e1c7ac96} of information transmitted to the brain system is visual, Instagram is the best platform to capitalise on that. Do not hard sell but rather use the power of creativity and professional images to promote your products.

You can harmonise your Instagram postings with your Facebook PPC campaign so that whatever visitors see across the board is sort of thematic and familiar.

Your photos should be professionally sized because blurred or awkward cropped images can make your photos convey the wrong message and put your professionalism on the line. The best approach is to use Instagram editing tools so as to give your photos the visual advantage to stand in front of the over 70 million photos posted everyday on Instagram.

Target a Larger Following on Instagram

Posting awesome images is not enough unless you have a strategy in place to get people to see them and follow you. In order to show off your brand to potential fans and grow your followers list, you should include hashtags for enhanced discoverability. Instagram feeds just like Twitter tends to change fast and sooner than later your content may get buried. Hashtags help in increasing the shelf life of your posts. They essentially lump your posts together by help of a keyword to make them discoverable forever. You can either create your own hashtag or collect a mix of trending and popular hashtags.

Also invite Instagram ambassadors to help share your brand. Research shows that over 78{bf2adae1551c4a09b79a165ab6d55319a8ac932c8e3b3f0cee72a593e1c7ac96} of consumers’ purchases are influenced by the social media of a brand. Thus, the higher the number of people praising and sharing your brand, the more opportunities you have to influence buy decisions. Where you can, share tagged photos of your followers on your own profile.

Boost Engagement to Strengthen Your Customer Relationships

If your content is up, your following is growing steadily and now you want to solidify that following into paying and loyal customers, the secret card is engagement. To maximise your engagement, write inviting and active captions. These captions should be brief and to the point while at the same time interesting enough to hook your customers. Also, organising contests can increase engagement and give you an opportunity to reward your loyal consumers.

Measure Your Success on Instagram

The secret to Instagram success is to keep on attracting new customers. Never allow your campaigns to rest on a plateau because this is a dangerous point and can easily translate into a plunge. Analyse your successes carefully, research your audience and duplicate what’s working while discarding what is not. Track your reciprocity in order to find loyal fans, track your density so as to optimise your posting schedule and be consistent in putting up posts.

Instagram yields real results that can skyrocket your business productivity and successes to new heights especially when combined with other social campaigns such as Facebook PPC. However, you must get the tabs right and the above tips can start you off.