With 1 billion people on Instagram each month, Instagram is an effective platform to use in order to market your business. But with the increasing popularity of the platform, Instagram has also become competitive. If you want to beat the algorithm and take your business to the next level with Instagram marketing, here are 8 steps to begin.
Create a strong visual brand
Considering Instagram is an extremely visual platform, you’ll need a strong aesthetic to engage your audience. Use a tool like Pinterest to create a mood board to be inspired by the content you’ll create, or use one like Canva to create a consistent color palette for your brand.
Switch to a business profile and monitor your analytics
Using a business profile will allow you to reveal what type of business you are to your followers, set up your contact information, allow you to create your own products, in addition to providing your account analytics to schedule your posts for the times your audience is most engaged.
Use Stories to engage your audience
Stories have become the most popular feature on Instagram, and one of Instagram’s features where it is still acceptable to post multiple times a day. Considering the quality expectation for using stories is lower than posting on your feed, using gifs, stickers, and behind the scenes footage can help you interact with your audience in a personal way.
Get on the ground floor of the Live and IGTV trends
Instagram Live and IGTV are still relatively newer features to the platform and are great tools to cultivating a niche audience and offering exclusive content. Not to mention, IGTV previews are beginning to appear in the main Instagram feed, so if you jump on the bandwagon early enough, your content could rank higher.
Use relevant hashtags
Hashtags are still an excellent resource to help promote your content on Instagram. Using a hashtag strategy helps users find you, considering many users will click, search, or follow hashtags they’re interested in.
Use a scheduling tool like Later
Later, Buffer, and Loomly are simply some of the few platforms to help you manage your content. Instead of waiting to simply schedule posts at the optimal time to post, you can review your analytics and plan out your posts and hashtags in advance.