Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms out there. It’s a great place to build brand awareness and connect with customers.
With more than 1 billion active monthly Instagram users and 90% following at least one business, it is clear that Instagram is not just for personal use anymore. Instead, it has become a worldwide platform that allows businesses to relate to their customer base by humanising content, showcasing products and creating inspiration.
If you’re looking to start Instagram marketing for your business, there are a few key things you need to focus on.
In this blog post, we will discuss the most important aspects of using Instagram to increase your turnover and sales.
Instagram Should be Used as a Communication Channel
For a lot of businesses, using social media as a marketing tool is still a relatively new concept and is often not leveraged as well as it could. I find that most business marketing strategies treat Instagram the same they would with a billboard advertisement. Instead, they should be using it as a communication channel.
And that means two ways of communication.
Most businesses simply post content but don’t engage – which is the number one way of losing your audience. Instead, the content you create and share on Instagram should drive your audience to your website or prompt them to enquire.
But it shouldn’t end there. You need to see Instagram as a place to build connections and to move people through their buying journey.
Because social media gives your business a way to directly interact with your target audience through comments and direct messages, you can engage potential clients to continue to nurture your relationship with them. In other words, it’s a great way to “talk” to potential clients and build trust and expertise before they enquire.
Formulate a Marketing Strategy that Focuses Less on Luck and More on Certainty
The traditional thought process behind Instagram marketing is to sell ads to reach your target audience. While this has worked for many businesses before, unless you have a limitless budget, relying only on ad sales could get expensive fast.
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Beyond that, you’ll have to hope that the combination of interest targets, images, copy, and landing page converts a small percentage of the people into potential leads and continue optimising from there.
I prefer to choose a marketing strategy that focuses less on luck and more on certainty. After all, Instagram is all about sharing your narrative through images and videos. So there are several ways you can engage your clients without paying for ads.
By creating different content assets to help answer clients’ search queries, pain points and knowledge gaps, you’re essentially building trust, authority and expertise. The goal is to be found by your targeted (potential) clients so that you can build trust and drive them to the next action you wish for them to take.
Rather than using “push” marketing tactics such as in advertising, content marketing expands on “pull” tactics to build captivation and trust. By doing so, you can grow an engaged audience, which will help increase leads, provide valuable customer insights and create advocates for your brand and service.
Instagram is a great place to bring your business’s story to life through a combination of appealing content.
Key Takeaways
As you can see, there are many ways to use Instagram for your business. Whether it’s creating value by telling the story of your company or using it as a marketing tool to drive leads and conversions, we hope this article has given you some ideas on how to get started with the platform so that you can grow an engaged audience who will help increase sales and create advocates for your brand.
By Kan Huang – Director & Head of Strategy at Social Wave
About the Author:
Kan is a demand generation expert who helps service-based businesses build their brand, generate leads and ultimately grow their businesses.
He believes that marketing today is too reliant on marketing technology to measure the success of marketing campaigns and that the timeline that businesses and marketers measure the effectiveness of their campaigns are too short. He advocates for building a brand and an audience and that performance marketing (advertising) is overrated.
At the height of the pandemic in March 2020, he established Social Wave. In 18 months, he grew Social Wave to a 7-figure agency, helping 50+ businesses grow and now works with businesses ranging from Coca Cola to local plumbers.
