10 Powerful Tips on Instagram Marketing to Increase Engagement
The common denominator for sunsets, perfect breakfasts, selfies and airplanes? Instagram, of course! Since Instagram launched in 2010, it has been an obvious choice when using images to convey a message and engage followers in social media. According to American research company Forrester, Instagram’s engagement is 10 times higher than Facebook and 84 times higher than on Twitter. This is one of the reasons that there is a great marketing potential for many companies on the Instagram, if used correctly. So one of the questions that many marketers put in place is what can we do to increase our engagement on Instagram? In this article, we have put together 10 tips that will take your Instagram marketing to new heights!
1. Just do it!
First of all, just do it! No matter what strategies you have, it all boils down to actually pick up the phone / camera and working to actively using Instagram. You will never generate any marketing results by simply thinking about generating marketing results on the platform. Snap a photo, write a caption, and upload your first photo. The first step is to actually just start. Not so difficult, huh?
2. Plan for Instagram Marketing!
Perhaps sounds like a contradiction to the previous point but in order to be spontaneous and have time to create content, planning is required. This is like all marketing efforts. In order to succeed, you need to strategically plan. Succeeding on Instagram marketing does not happen by chance. It demands hard but fun work, consistently. It also demands great patience. So be sure to set aside time to plan the coming days or weeks and review which items fit your stream and for your marketing purpose. This will also help to provide you with a continuity in your presence. Something like this in the long run will both give you more instagram followers and increased credibility.
3. Go from General to Relevant!
To stand out from the crowd and cut through the mouse, you need clear and relevant messages. Think about your target audience, the recipient rather than an anonymous mass. Based on this, you can easily develop your unique tone in terms of imagery, and thus speak to your audience.
4. Take Help from Your Network!
Lift your eyesight from your own desk and look around for employees who can help create multifaceted content that is interesting and speaks to your target audience. Use your colleagues both inside and outside the marketing department and as a bonus you will have a brilliant team feeling in the office! You can also seek social media marketing service.
5. Provide Your Instagram Followers Value
Make sure your pictures and text conveys something of value, something that your followers actually appreciate. Before posting a post, it is good to ask the question what your followers follow after reading and posting the post. Perhaps it’s inspiration, entertainment, a good tip or new knowledge. You are sure to have a lot of good experiences that your followers can enjoy! A good benchmark is 80/20. This means that 80% will be relevant content and for the remaining 20% of your content, you can talk about yourself and focus more on self-promotion, however, do this without being too sales as you might risk pushing your followers away from you.
6. Create High-Quality Visual Content
Put a lot of thought and effort into creating high-quality images for Instagram marketing. Instagram is a visually-drive platform, so it is all about visual content, mainly photos. Your images don’t have to be taken with a professional camera, but make sure the subject is in focus and that it isn’t blurry or low-quality.
Create a more consistent and appealing flow by always editing the image, selecting a filter etc. to create a consistent visual theme to make your posts more coherent. Also dare to try to film. An image says more than a thousand words, but one minute worth of video is said to correspond to 1.8 million words!
There are a ton of video opportunities on Instagram marketing. Boomerang, backward, live, slow motion, and so on. Try it out, experiment with the different features, and see what works for you.
According to statistics, videos that are 15 seconds or less tend to drive the best results. So try not to make long films, then it’s better to split the video into shorter clips.
It is also important to remember to include subtitles to capture attention because many people look without the sound turned on.
7. Interact with Your Instagram Followers!
In connection with Instagram’s algorithm changes, engagement has decreased compared to the first years. The time we can only rely on the organic reach has been over for a long time, and in order to drive return on investment (ROI), it is no longer possible to simply share post after post and wait for the results to roll in. Therefore, it is not possible to take shortcuts and only drive one-way communication. Your followers will appreciate if you are active and listen, like, and comment on others’ posts and using Instagram to build relationships with your followers and audience.
Pro Tip: You can run instagram contest to increase engagement.
8. Repost Customer Images
You have to ask for permission before sharing photos that customers have taken of your business, products, etc. Also known as user-generated content, this is a very effective way to get new angles of your posts, communicate with your followers and build loyalty. It is also easier to find the pictures after it became possible to monitor hashtags on Instagram. Another good tip is to sneak from yourself, take a little time back in time and reuse a successful post.
9. Use the Right Hashtags!
Choose hashtags with care. Be sure to use a few but relevant hashtags in each post. Add them in a comment below your picture. As we mentioned in the above paragraph, since 2017 there has been a nice feature that allows you to follow different hashtags.
10. Measure Results
Last but certainly not least! There are many different parameters to analyzing to draw conclusions about how your Instagram strategy will look. By finding out who your most successful posts are, it becomes easier to learn what performs well and then create new posts that are more likely to give you greater commitment.
