How To Use Instagram To Promote Your Brand

With Instagram, you have to remember that it’s truly all about visuals. Your images need to be sharp, clear and well-made for sharing on Instagram. The users on Instagram expect a higher quality, sharper, upgraded experience with the content they view and engage with on Instagram. If you want to build your brand on Instagram, you’ll need to keep that in mind.

Six Easy Steps To A Successful Instagram Branding Strategy

According to Instagram, 60% of people say they discover new products on the platform, and 20% of users visit a business profile every single day.

1. Create Amazing Visuals – This is time to up your photography game or outsource the creation of the content that you want to share. You can use software like Photoshop, or Gimp to help you improve upon your images for use on Instagram. You can also hire people on platforms like Upwork.com or Fiverr.com.
2. How to Find Your Voice – One way to build your brand on Instagram is to find your voice. Who are you? What personality do you want to project to users? Fun, formal, irreverent – are all ways you can be seen on Instagram. Find a way to match your voice with your brand and the story you’re wanting to tell over time to your followers.
3. Paid & Unpaid Shout Outs – You can pay people to make a shout out with your user name, which is a very effective way to start to build up your followers fast. If you ask someone with a large following for a shout out you want to be sure to have more to offer than just paying them. You also want to provide excellent content for your audience.
4. Strategic Partnerships – You can form strategic partnerships with companies and even other Instagrammers who have a large following. You can pay for these partnerships and you can be paid for them, depending on the situation. The best way is to contact them and make an offer or find a way to attract their attention so they may you an offer. If you have someone specific in mind, you can analyze their profile performance analytics and evaluate the potential cost for the collaboration. Follow this link if you need more information about post costs on Instagram.
5. It’s all in the Bio – Because Instagram doesn’t allow links in photo descriptions, you’ll need to focus greatly on your bio to convert. You can change and update your bio based on what your goals are. If you want people to subscribe to your email newsletter, you can use one link there to send people to your sign up form. If you want them to buy something, you can link to a sales page.
6. Cross promote Instagram posts: Post across all over your other social media profiles — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Invite your Facebook and Twitter followers to follow your Instagram profile. Since they are already following you on social media, they may accept your invitation and follow your brand on Instagram.

Building a brand requires a lot of study into your audience, your niche, and yourself. You need to know what story you’re telling over the long haul so you can keep it going. You need to know what sort of feelings you want to evoke in your audience and what type of action you want them to take and how to get them to do what you want. That takes the study of the audience and a great understanding of your niche and the type of business you want to build.

Analytics & Metrics

When it comes to getting Instagram right, you need to eventually start looking at the numbers.

As they say, “nothing is done until the paperwork is done”. This is true when it comes to growing a loyal audience on Instagram, too. If you want to convert, you need to attract the right followers, engage with them, and know if what you’re doing is working. The only way to do that is to study the metrics available to you.

1. Followers – How many followers are you getting each period? Do you notice which types of shares get the most followers? When you cross promote, which social media cross posts work to help you get more followers?
2. Top Followers – Who are your top followers, and how can you engage them more and get them to promote you more? When you know how those top influencers and engagers are, you can use them to your advantage by sharing more content that they’d like with them, and by shouting out to them on occasion.
3. Engagement – Which followers engage with you most, who are their friends and what type of content do you share to get more engagement? You should notice a pattern in your study of the metrics that you can use to reproduce the results that you want to do.
4. Posting History – You can see all the posts you’ve ever liked, see the posts your friends have liked, and so on. There is a lot of information that will help you with your analytics within posting history for yourself, those you’ve followed, and those with whom you want to engage.
5. Website Traffic: Instagram is more limiting than other social platforms in driving traffic to your site. It prevents you to add clickable links to each post. It only allows a link in bio. Brands over 10k followers can add swipe-up links to their stories. You can track the number of website visitors from Instagram with the help of Google Analytics, which segments your traffic into default channel groupings—one of which is “social.”

Studying your analytics and metrics will help you improve upon your interactions on Instagram so that everything you do is effective in building that loyal and responsive audience.