10 years old in 2020 with upwards of a cool 1 billion active reported users; Instagram is a far cry from its early days as an app for posting pretty pictures. You know it’s maturing when aunts, uncles and parents make an appearance too!
The go-to platform for influencer and e-commerce marketing; it allows for high-end content creation and income generation. Features like the Explore Page, IGTV, Instagram Reels, Stories and Shopping are constantly evolving to be more engaging and made to ‘reel’ (pun intended) you in.
This post is a compilation of the most useful reads before you start crafting an organic (no ads) Instagram strategy for your business. It points you to answers to your most pressing questions about marketing on Instagram. FAQs included in the Creative & Content section too.
Tempted to TL;DR? There’s a lot to get through in one go, so don’t be afraid to do it at your own pace. Be sure to bookmark this post to revisit and save time - beats having to Google each topic or sort through multiple bookmarks. I’ll do my best to keep this post updated for you.
Excluded from this piece are creator accounts, how to go about influencer partnerships and advertising - to be covered at a later date. Let’s dive in.
Marketing on Instagram: is it worth it for small business?
Short answer - yes! If done right with considerable thought, time, and effort put into it. Instagram can be a good way for small businesses to showcase themselves, be creative, build and engage with their community. Here are 44 Instagram stats you need to know to assess whether marketing on Instagram is right for you.
An effective model for small businesses requires groundwork on the following fronts - strategy, branding, content and creative, community and engagement, analysis and evaluation. First up, strategy.
Strategy
Know Your Audience: Every social media consultancy worth its salt would advocate the same. At the very heart of your marketing on Instagram is your audience. You need to know them well. Under 34s account for more than half the platform’s user base, split almost equally between genders.
It’s essential to loop back to the various buyer personas you identified during your business planning phase. Are these personas likely to use Instagram? If yes, Instagram is for you. If not, that’s ok too. There are plenty of social media services for small businesses to choose from. Time spent to figure which ones your audience hang out at is time well spent.
Creator or Business account: Fantastic, you’ve decided to move ahead with Instagram. Now to set up the right kind of account. There are two choices available to you once you download Instagram for free – a creator account and a business account.
A creator account is for content producers, influencers, artists and public figures. You can use your real or stage name. The cool bit about this account is you get to brand yourself how you want and choose a label most apt to your niche. Not so with a business account - you have to pick a category from a list of suggestions. A creator account comes with a whole host of features and insights.
We’ll be focusing on a business account.
A business account is for the rest of us as
marketers or business owners. It’s packed with features like insights, shopping, ads, profile contact information/ call-to-action and primary/ general message inboxes. Scroll to the analysis and evaluation section for more.
Goal Setting: Every business has key goals and it’s important that your Instagram marketing strategy targets specific ones that align with your overarching goals. Outcomes from marketing on Instagram can range from establishing your business’ online presence, increasing brand awareness, generating leads, selling directly etc.
How you prioritise these goals depend on your business needs and can vary from business to business. Goal setting directly impacts the content you post, so it’s vital you don’t skip this step. Use a popular goal framework like S.M.A.R.T or Google’s OKR.
Branding
Optimise your profile: Your profile needs to pack a punch of personality and entice people to follow you and engage. Convey your brand promise, include a relevant hashtag and maybe even an emoji or two (if it’s not too cutesy for your brand), use custom fonts, line breaks, special characters and spacing to make it pop.
You only get up to 150 characters for your bio, 30 for your name and 30 for your handle or username - so, make it count. Both your name and handle are included in search so try to include a keyword. Be sure to include a category for your business, a clickable link to your website, contact information and a call-to-action. You can update this information based on promotional offers or as your business grows. Your contact details and button are not included in your limited character count (yay!).
Check this out for examples on how to get that perfect Insta bio.
Pick your profile pic wisely: Thought this deserved to be addressed separately as we know how serious profile pictures are, don’t we? This is typically where your business’ logo goes. Pay special attention to how it displays - the image will be cropped to a circle with a diameter of 110 pixels. If your logo includes a shape like a triangle, square etc., you may need to place it on a background and zoom out, so it appears fully within the circle.
Get your brand a ‘look’: This app is visually driven, so your brand needs to meet it by building its own powerful set of unified visual assets. This style guide could include brand colours and schemes, custom or select fonts, templates and filters. Design tools like Canva are a dream as are apps Adobe Lightroom and VSCO for filters and editing.
You don’t need to be a fancy photographer with a fancy camera. Smartphone cameras can produce truly insta-worthy shots. Before your first post, read this piece on Phone Photography 101. You can kick your shots up a notch quickly in terms of design and use templates! Check out this comprehensive resource on slick Instagram post and story templates that make life a little easier.
‘Sound’ unique, literally: Music is known to help with brand awareness and recall. With so many of Instagram’s features (Stories, Reels, IGTV) revolving around video, a unique 2-3 second audio intro could really make you stand out.
🧐 Keep an eye out for trends and features at all times
Before we proceed further; stop and take a look at this great infographic on the latest Instagram trends. Let it guide you as you create plans for content and audience engagement. Trends of particular note – the Explore tab, the social cause feature for fundraising, the popularity of Gif, TikTok and Twitter content, and the use of branded AR filters.
Content & Creative
Zero-in on your pillars of content: What kind of content will get you closer to the goals you set? Think of topics related to your business you are passionate about and can go on about for days. Create a series of posts based on these broad topics.
Businesses with a purpose are increasingly valued. Your stand as a business on important issues matters. Create content that showcases you care. Tell a story. Feature user-generated content your customers create while using your top products or services. Answer your audience’s most frequently asked questions. Bottom line, whatever content you create should be of value to your customer.
Construct your content calendar: So important to break down the seemingly impossible work that goes into the creation of social media updates, blog posts, charts, case studies, e-books, infographics etc. Calendars help plan content around important dates, holidays and launches too.
Collaboration tools like Trello and CoSchedule can be a great option. For maximum customisation, opt for a Google spreadsheet. Aim to populate your calendar with content for two weeks at a time. Be agile with topics, jump on trends and bounce off what’s in the news to stay relevant. Mark tentative deadlines for research on topics that require you to dive deep and note ideas.
Plot these out on the calendar with a yearly timeline.
Post regularly & determine cadence:
Your brand needs to post, post, post to keep its followers engaged. We have short attention spans and millions of brands fighting to get a few seconds of it. Recommendations on how often to post vary widely based on market and industry.
When you’re doing it all yourself, it can be hard to churn out content daily. Set a cadence you are comfortable with and stick to it. When you get to a stage you can hire someone to stay on top of it all the time, then up the frequency. Don’t be a one-hit-wonder with a post every now and then!
Conduct research on hashtag and captions: Hashtags are essential to growing a small brand so do your research. Use around 5 hashtags relevant to your niche on each post either in the caption or your first comment. You can go as high as 30 but it can be seen as #spammy. Up your hashtag game with this post. This one here lists the top 50 hashtags of 2021 too.
Captions can make a post even go viral. Certain posts do well with a snappy caption or emoji while others require more words and a story to build interest, a connection and engagement. Here’s a great resource on the best caption length for 2021.
Uplevel creative with Instagram apps:
The beauty of these apps is that you can take decent static visuals and video to a whole other level. Play around with Boomerang, Hyperlapse, Layout, Threads and many more Instagram apps for your business. If you post a lot of pre-recorded video or like to shoot as you go, be sure to check out the Threads app to add auto-captions.
💎 FAQ
What should my first Instagram be?
Here are some ideas for what to post on Instagram as a business along with a brutal report card on a few celebs’ first Insta posts years ago.
What should you not post on Instagram?
Great pointers on what NOT to do on Instagram – don’t steal people’s content, don’t post too many selfies, don’t use Google images. All valid.
Is it ok to post every day on Instagram? How often should a small business post on Instagram?
The verdict on this varies significantly as highlighted earlier. Many big brands post once a day on Instagram. If this doesn’t work for you, pick your cadence and stick with it. Ramp up when ready.
What is the best time to post on Instagram?
This very detailed analysis based on 12 million posts should help you figure out the best times for your business to post on Instagram.
Community & Engagement
To grow a community on any social platform, you need to be social daily. Always reply to comments on your Instagram posts, answer questions in your DMs, pin popular comments to connect with your audience and followers.
Tell ‘stories’ to connect and strike up a conversation: Most businesses and influencers love stories because it’s a way to instantly engage current customers/ followers. Stories offer exciting fun features to play around with like the question sticker, gift card sticker/ button, countdown sticker. Great material is available on how to get creative with content for stories and IGTV (long-form video content searchable through ‘Explore’) and how to make the most of various Instagram story apps.
Since stories disappear after 24 hours and are considerable work; highlight the ones you are proud of and pin them under your bio. You can also brand these story albums with custom covers using an app like Canva. Dimensions are 1080 px (width) by 1920 px (height) using a 9:16 aspect ratio.
Great news! You can now save stories in drafts to use later.
Follow GaryVee’s $1.80 Instagram strategy to grow: While it’s important to engage your current followers; you also need to be social with new audiences to grow! This strategy basically requires you to leave your 2 cents via a comment or DM (if you want to connect), on the 9 top posts, under each of the 10 most relevant hashtags for your business. Make sure your 2 cents count and are positive, valuable and authentic. 9*10*0.02 = $1.80 worth of engagement daily.
Create shareable, saveable content: Make sure it’s authentic and favours video. Post with longer captions and the aptest hashtags to increase engagement on Instagram in 2021.
Instagram guides (now available on business accounts) is the platform’s latest feature and can be effective for marketing using already published content. Tap into these 10 great ideas on how to make an Instagram guide. In the spirit of guides, click through to find out how to make the most of the following features - Go Live, Live Rooms (Zoom-esque - upto 4), Instagram Shop, Reels and Shop within Reels!
Analysis & Evaluation
Track your metrics: This may be tempting to put off if you are new to the world of data and analytics but it’s important. Especially when you start to reap the benefits of recognising patterns and trends in your content’s performance.
Instagram Insights provides you with information on comments, likes, saves, shares and interactions with stories and so on. Over time, you will identify the types of content that resonate best and when. It’ll highlight the formats that work in your favour and why. You’ll be able to up your content game and get creative strategically with your audience in mind.
Top 8 metrics to track in 2021 and a quick video lesson by Hootsuite Academy on what each metric means, why to track them consistently, and set benchmarks to compare results over time.
Track your traffic: If marketing on Instagram is a way to drive traffic off the platform and to your website, consider using Google Analytics and its free campaign URL builder tool. Shorten long unseemly URLs in your bio using a service like Bitly.
Tweak that strategy: Remember what works now may not later. It’s important to stay current and tap into the latest trends while always providing value and staying true to your brand. Say it with me, ‘analyse, evaluate and optimise’ is our mantra. Track, track, tweak!
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