Instagram – you know it’s one of the most popular social networking sites, but it’s more than that. A platform that provides countless opportunities to make you go toe to toe with your business competitors. Yes, you may run a small business, but the features Instagram offers are no less than that large business spends for their digital marketing campaigns. There are some ways to use the features effectively in a way to take your small business to the next level.
But why Instagram?
Alright, features are all cool, but why should one prefer Instagram for their business marketing? Because it’s a platform with a billion active monthly users and millions of interactions happening on the posts daily. This is where you can have a chance to change the viewers into potential customers. Moreover, you also can find your target set of audience depending on the nature of your business and work specifically to reach them.
Ok now let’s get into 13 tricks that will help you,
1. Build Your Profile
The first step of everything in social media is to set up your profile. You should change it into a business profile. Because Instagram offers many features exclusively for business profiles.
Having a clear bio and information about your business is important, and you also need to keep it short. You can add your location and contact information to your profile, which increases your credibility for your followers. Instagram offers a call to action feature for business profiles, which is quite useful since it makes the effort to reach you easier for your followers.
For your Business profile, you can embed an Instagram feed on the website.
2. Link in Bio
A successful marketing strategy should make the viewers push towards the landing page of your business. So it’s obvious to you to add a link in bio, which directs towards the product or service page you wanted. You can often see the posts mentioning links in bio where people use creative ways to make the viewers click it. The thing is, you can add only one link to your profile bio. So it’s advisable to change it according to your needs. Some tools can help you add multiple links into a single link by adding them into that tool profile.
3. Add location in posts
It is important for you to let viewers know where you are located. But also you need to reach a wider audience, not limited only to your location. This is where location tags come to the rescue. You can add a location to the posts so that Instagram will list your post among the posts tagged with that location. This will make your post visible to a new audience since Instagram can let users search the posts using location.
And also adding your shop or business location frequently could feature your posts up in the explore page of users in that location. This brings more reach among the users who don’t follow you.
4. Save Posts
This might look silly, but this could actually improve your marketing skills in the long term. That is saving posts. Instagram has a feature that allows you to save posts. Those posts will be saved in a folder that will be available in your profile, and you can view them whenever you want to.
Ok, how does it help your small business?
Let’s assume you run a photography business. Once while scrolling Instagram you come across a beautiful picture that is posted by a competitor or a big account in your field. You liked the idea behind the photo at that instance, but you may forget after some time amidst your works. This is where the save option plays its role. You could save that picture and you can also create a folder called ‘ideas’, and save such posts for your future reference.
Likewise, it offers you many useful insights in the long run. You can also save posts that have
- Customer reviews
- Good captions
- Inspirational posts
- Competitors posts
- Post ideas
And much more. This will improve your posting techniques and help you keep up with or even better your competitors.
5. Make the best out of highlights
Instagram has an excellent feature in the name of Highlights, in which you can save your best-disappeared stories forever to grace your profile. Highlights will attract the viewers and also act as an extended bio.
In a business way, you can use the best out of the highlights in some ways
- You can add a quick overview of your business in attractive slides and make it as highlights.
- Adding your best works in highlights is one of the best ways to impress the viewers.
- Content about the services or products you offer and price details of them can be added to make things easily accessible for the viewers.
- Customer reviews and comments play a huge role in increasing the credibility of your account and business. So by adding them into highlights, you have a chance to convert viewers into customers.
- You can also add the answers to the frequently asked questions so that the viewers can get a clear idea before approaching you.
6. Engagement
There is no point in running a marketing campaign on social media for your business when there is no user engagement. The main motive for every business user is to create engagement in their posts. Likes, comments, and mentions are the factors that make your account relevant to the Instagram algorithm that gets your posts in the feeds of the users. There are many techniques available to acquire automatic likes for your Instagram posts and other engagement opportunities if you play your cards wisely. Posting content that leads to interactions among the users and with you increases the chance of growing your audience circle. Creative input as well as the quality of the post gives you more engagement.
7. Post Stories Regularly
Instagram stories are a blessing in disguise for users who want to promote their business and even themselves. Sitting at the top of the feed, they enjoy more clicks from the users as they are easier than scrolling. Posting stories regularly will give you a front seat on the story row of your followers. This will make them keep up with your content and updates.
Adding links to the stories is another easy way to drive people to your target site. This also will be easily accessible for the users who want to know about the services and products you offer.
There are lots of engagement creating stickers available in the stories such as ask a question, quiz, poll, countdown, and more. With these, you can do meaningful interactions with your audience and can know about them.
8. Go live
The next thing you could do to improve your small business is to go live frequently. Many brands use their live feature effectively in many ways.
A simple but interesting fact about going live is, it alerts your followers with the notification. This will denote to them that you are active and register your brand name in their mind.
You may ask what should you do during life, you can do.
BTS – no, not that famous South Korean boy band, it’s behind the scenes. You could show your viewers some captivating background processes of your business.
PRODUCT REVEAL – Many brands unveil their products live. Giving notification about the launch and including teasers before going live will drive more viewers. As a small business account, you can invite any of the big accounts in your field or any famous personalities, which will actually give good reach since the followers of the invited account also can watch you live.
Q/A – Having a Q/A session live will bring more interaction and it’s one of the organic ways to market your product. It will increase your credibility and also know what the audience expects.
9. Do Exclusive Sale
You might have seen this term frequently these days. Many brands do this because it is a prime marketing technique that can help any scale of business. So how can you do this on Instagram?
You can offer a “followers-only” sale. A product or service that is given exclusively to your followers will make them feel special and make them support you in the long run. And also this will bring you, new followers, to your account, which is a win for you.
10. Giveaway
Hurray! Giveaways are always great. I mean who doesn’t love free stuff? It’s one of the very best marketing techniques that bear fruits for both you and your followers. But the thing is, you have to organize it in a specific way that brings more engagement opportunities for you. Some common way of organizing a giveaway is
- Selecting the giveaway product or service that should be useful to users and also in the medium pricing segment.
- Announcing the giveaway with a few sets of rules like asking the users to share your page, follow it or ask them to like and comment on the posts.
- Maintain transparency in choosing the winner. This is an important step that some people fail to follow. This will create good impressions among the followers, and so it will help your future endeavors.
11. Reply users frequently
The connection between you and your customers is the base of sales. Community building is a process that should happen forever. An effective way of building connections is through communicating. Responding to the customers through DM will actually make yourself approachable to them. Asking about the satisfaction of the product or answering their questions on posts are also a part of it.
12. Impress with Captions
Adding captions to your post can attract users significantly. It can grab the attention of the viewers who are scrolling in the feed. You can pour your creativity down here and add keywords to it. You can also add hashtags, which are mandatory in social media marketing. Using the most used hashtags can give your posts more reach.
13. Keep the track
Whatever you do you have to analyze and keep track of your records. Instagram business accounts offer you enough statistics about your posts, reach, and users. You can use that data which helps you to set your goals and analyze them. There are tools that provide detailed analytics about your account that will give you a clear picture of your marketing campaign.
By following these tricks regularly, you can attain growth slowly but also organically. It will allow your small business to reach higher levels and to better your competitors. Now go and market your brand to the world.
