Instagram Marketing: The best Ideas, Strategies, and Tools one can look for

Instagram is growing at a tremendous pace. As of now, Instagram has surpassed 1 billion monthly active users (Source).

Image Source: Statista

You can expect the growth to continue over the period. Facebook took over Instagram by striking $1 billion deal in 2012. It got a lot of criticism for this decision. However, it proved to be one of the best choices for the company. Instagram is now worth $100 billion (Source).

As a digital marketer, you can no longer ignore the potential of Instagram. Many companies have taken their businesses to the next level via Instagram marketing.

The latest example of a massive return on investment is Kylie Jenner. She became the youngest self-made billionaire, and Instagram played a critical role in her success. Besides here, we can see plenty of other influencers that are creating a fortune with Instagram.

Getting the Most Out of Your Campaigns

Before moving to strategies, let’s discuss the tools that can help you achieve more significant results with your campaigns. These tools will not only help you automate your marketing activities but also help you with strategy formation.

The starting step is to get some best marketing automation software and the first word comes in my mind is HubSpot. The best marketing software tool out on the market that can take care of your social media updates, monitor your followers’ behavior, and more. It is the all-in-one business automation tool.

Image Source: HubSpot

Besides HubSpot tools and Facebook Power Editor, there are some other tools that you can leverage to get the most out of your marketing campaigns:

• Sprout Social

Sprout Social allows you to get the most out of your efforts and followers. You can manage multiple accounts, queue your posts, measure your profiles’ performance, and more.

2. Hashtags for Likes

Hashtags let you discover plenty of new audiences and will give you a hint about trends, your potential customers’ taste, and preference. Hashtags for Likes app allows you to cut through the noise for finding out popular hashtags in your niche.

3. Crowdfire

You must continually try to increase true and authentic followers. One way of doing that is consistently publishing valuable posts. However, that alone will not help you unlock the real potential of your brand.

Crowdfire is a tool that allows you to track your competitors’ followers. What this will do is it will let you get their followers interested in your offering.

4. VSCO

Millions of images are uploaded on Instagram every single day. Your image will not have an impact if you do not put any effort into standing out. VSCO is a powerful image editor that will increase your chance of standing out amid the crowd by drastically improving the sharpness and clarity of your image.

Image Source: Pinterest

5. Ink361

According to the study, location information can increase engagement by 79%. Ink361 allows you to geo-target by linking your content to the appropriate geographical location.

After having the right tools in your arsenal, you are fully ready to cut through the competition. Here are some of the dominant ideas and strategies that can enhance the effectiveness of your Instagram campaign.

• Do not use a private account for your marketing

It is essential to put aside your personal life from your professional life. If you want to use Instagram to promote your products and services, switch to business account immediately. Changing to a business account is easy. All you need to do is head over to settings and select “Switch to Business Profile.”

There are plenty of advantages to running your marketing campaigns from a business account. Your followers can contact you via the contact button without needing to leave Instagram. Secondly, there is no need for you to use the Facebook Power Editor to run advertising campaigns.

Furthermore, you can also get access to useful metrics, insights, and statistics if you use an Instagram business account. This information will help you improve and update your current strategies and will save you from unnecessary advertising costs.

2. Set your priority right

One must be clear about their priority before spending money on advertisements. You need to set clear reasons for using Instagram marketing. Is it for increasing leads, brand awareness, increasing sales, or some other ideas? Establishing a clear goal will help you come up with the right kinds of posts that will let you get the most out of your budget.

In addition to having the right goals, you also need to set an appropriate marketing budget. After that, do some research about your target audience. The Facebook Audience Insights can give you a clear insight about your audience like age, gender, interest, and so on. You can check out the followers of some well-known brands in your industry.

Click on Audience Insights on Plan section to get information about your audience.

3. Do not jump right into selling

Do not be pushy when promoting your product/service. Instagram is a great place to promote your offers, but no one likes to deal with sleazy sales posts.

The best way to get the attention of your followers is by publishing product teasers. Demonstrate some of the cool features of your product without being too pushy. It will allow your followers to come and interact with your posts.

You should also do some research on the right time to posts and the frequency of posting to get the best outcome.

Image Source: Sprout Social

4. Join hands with micro influencers

One study found that social media influencers have more authority over their followers than celebrities. Partnering with micro-influencers in your niche can significantly increase your reach and boost your following and sales.

It does not take a lot of money to partner with them. Partner with some micro-influencers, those with around 5-10k followers, and offer them commission, free products, or cash per posts. You can announce discounts, give away free samples, and so on via their profile.

5. Fully harness the power of Instagram stories

Instagram stories come in the form of a slide, and it only lasts for 24 hours. It helps to create urgency among your followers. You can capture behind the scenes and upload it to your story or publish some cool features of your product on the story section.

However, one can store it to check it out later. Utilizing the power of stories can do a lot of good for your brand.

6. Spend smartly

You can scale your business to a new level via Instagram advertising. You can either give a single post advertisement or multiple carousel type advertisement on Instagram.

It is possible for you to reach out to a new audience, even those who are not following you, that meets the criteria with advertisements. However, it is not smart to spend all your money on a single Instagram ad.

Try multiple types of posts and run various campaigns. Increase your budget on the ad sets that are performing and stop the non-performing advertisements.  

Over to You

There are plenty of success stories, but there are also a lot of people who have not been able to get any return on their Instagram investment. Plenty of factors play a role in determining your return on investment.

At first, you must have clear goals and strategies in place. Furthermore, you should also leverage tools that are available to you. If you integrate the ideas, strategies, and software that I have mentioned, you are more likely to get success on your advertising campaigns. With that said, you can find plenty of other strategies that could work for your campaigns.

I hope the information in this article was useful for you. If you want to add any more tips and tricks, feel free to leave your thoughts below.