Instagram Marketing: Supercharge Instagram for Business Features

This blog is intended for people and businesses wanting to delve deeper into the capabilities of Instagram. Here are our top Instagram Marketing tips to help you become successful on Instagram with your business profile.

Instagram is a versatile and widely used social media platform that boasts an advertising audience of more than 1.16 billion people.

• Set up an Instagram Shop

It is a simple, easy, and straight forward process to set up an Instagram shop. Having an Instagram shop majorly grows the potential to increase sales and revenue to your business.

It is a feature that is only available to business accounts and is incredibly user friendly for both business and average Instagram users. Fans of your business profile are able to easily tap through to your shop without having to view a specific post via the “View Shop” tab visible on your profile page.

To further increase your chances of click-through to your Instagram shop, the Explore page has a tab specifically for “Shop” which is where all users of Instagram can search for goods, services, or brands that they follow. Using key words and hashtags in your post’s caption, and tagging other collaborative companies allows you to take advantage of this feature and grow your reach.

• Focus on posting videos

With the popularity of Tik Tok, Instagram is changing their algorithm to make videos, especially reels, the focal point of the social media app. There are many ways you can share your videos through Instagram, and these include:

• Reels
  • Reels are fun, short, and creative videos that give you an opportunity to capture and engage followers or new viewers to draw them into looking at your profile.
• Instagram stories
  • These only stay present on your profile for 24 hours and can be quite interactive with your followers by using polls,
• Instagram Lives
  • Going Live on Instagram means that you can speak to your followers live, any of your followers can join at any point after receiving a push notification. This can allow you to connect with your online community, share information, answer Q&A’s or a mountain of other creative ideas!
• IGTV
  • This type of video content is good for exploring a topic more deeply as there aren’t crazy short time restrictions as compared to doing a short reel or video
• Posting Videos instead of Photos
  • By doing this, engagement can increase along with stronger relationships with your followers as they get to know you and your business better

• Post at optimal times for your audience

This is a bit of a tricky one as each industry has their own optimal post time. To get a true answer for your specific business it is important to go through a trial-and-error process. Make sure you record all the different patterns used to analyse and determine the most ideal post time specific to your followers.

Using a scheduling tool like Hootsuite can help you schedule posts, record your attempts, and analyse the results. Hootsuite has analysed more than 250,000 posts from 11 industries to find the most optimal post times. This list is a good place to start when trialling your own optimal post time!

The best advice for this tip is to do your own testing

• Explore free Instagram tools

Tracking your success on social media and analysing the results is one of the best ways to become successful. With the use of Instagram insights, you will be able to see what strategies work and how your followers respond.

It is ideal to check Instagram Insights, or Analytics once a month to keep on top of important metrics:

• Saves
• Shared
• Comments
• Reach
• Follows
• Website Clicks

By analysing Instagram metrics, you can gauge the level of engagement your content is producing, the effectiveness of your hashtag strategy, the posts that engage users for the longest period, and the content that encourages users to leave Instagram to check out your business.

Some free Instagram tools that could help you on your road to Instagram success include:

• Social Blade
• This site gives you access to growth data on any Instagram profile to keep on top of your competitors growth and activity
• Canva
• A great tool to create high quality and high impact images, infographics, posters, videos for your profile
• Caption Writer for Instagram
• Formats your captions on your posts for maximum impact

• Try a partnership with an influencer

There are many types of influencers, some have hundreds of thousands of followers, but there are also micro influencers who may have only 2000 followers. By working with an influencer, you may be able to capitalise on their popularity and the loyalty and trust they have cultivated from their followers.

Instagram has a daily user rate of 500 million users, one in two Instagram users have purchased a product or service because of the recommendation of an influencer. To put it in other words, half of the daily users, or 250 million Instagram users have been influenced to purchase a product because of influencers!

There are two main ways to partner with an influencer

Pay for an influencer to post about your product, service, or brand on their profile. The price of this exercise shouldn’t be more than USD$1,000 with the average price of a sponsored post being USD$271.

2. Host an Instagram takeover

Invite an influencer to take over your Instagram account for a specific period where they will post through your account onto your newsfeed and onto stories.

If you are considering a partnership with an influencer, then make sure you understand their audience and think about whether they align with your target audience.

• Pay for Ads

Spending a bit of money to grow your audience through Instagram ads is a simple way to increase your success.

Instagram can target a very specific audience of your choosing based on factors such as

• Location (Country, state, city),
• Demographic (age, language, gender),
• Interests (type of accounts followed, apps used, ads clicked on), and
• Behaviours (on and off Instagram).

Social media have collected an abundance of information from their users which allows businesses to target their own custom and very specific audience to advertise to through these platforms.

• Be Consistent

Keep your presence on Instagram consistent, try new strategies, experiment with different styles and types of content, and record & analyse your findings.

Always update your profile, using the tools, tips and techniques spoken about above you are sure to find a strategy that works for you.

Don’t know where to start? 

Book a meeting with our team and we'll generate a digital marketing report to explore your businesses' digital presence. We'll also help you to identify marketing opportunities and potential threats from competitors in your space.

In your digital marketing report you'll get: 

• 12-month review of your company’s digital marketing activity
• Competitor review
• Market traffic insights to identify opportunities to develop your content strategy
• Keyword benchmarking report
• Trending content themes and ideas
• Recommendations based on your company’s digital strengths and weaknesses.