Pam Moore, CEO of Marketing Nutz and a popular social media speaker, said “You can never go wrong by investing in communities and the human beings within them”, which is perfectly applicable on Instagram marketing. With your Instagram posts, you can convey your message in a much more effective manner as compared to verbal communication. It is an image-centric platform and rendered some new features in the last couple of years, which are perfect for online marketers.
In addition to this, Instagram marketing needs a preplanned strategy. It should be efficient enough to approach the right audiences.
1. Use Instagram’s Carousel Feature
Instagram launched multiple image feature known as “carousel” at the beginning of 2017. It allows you to post up to 10 pictures in a slideshow, album or Instagram carousel. It is a brilliant tool for maximizing users’ engagements and refining storytelling. Moreover, it beautifies your feeds and optimizes ad placement.
This feature is helpful for Instagram marketing in a number of ways. First, it allows the entrepreneurs to create a virtual catalog. The carousel feature facilitates you to add a scrollable catalog. Besides, you also tell the sequential stories with the help of feature. The non-business users use this feature for adding the pictures for showcasing their birthday parties and many other events.
For the Instagram marketing purpose for your business, you can add the sequence of your products, events occurred occasionally in your company and many other things that interest the users. Carousel feature also allows you to add 10 videos in a single post.
2. Upload Shoot Square Pictures
The effectiveness of an image is a major aspect that influences the users. One such way is shoot square picture. This feature is available in many of the smartphones. Another way is to use apps like SmugMug, which is available for both iPhone and Android users.
This feature allows you to save the time of cropping and it retains the essential elements in pictures to present them in an effective way.
3. Use Instagram Stories Feature
Instagram stories come in the slideshow format, and they are different from regular Instagram posts. The stories stay only for 24 hours but they can be saved in any of the devices and can be reused at any point in time. This feature is identical to Snapchat and Facebook stories.
There are numerous benefits of stories for the Instagram marketers, some of which can be read as under.
- For the beginners, stories are displayed at the top, which catches the immediate attention of the users.
- They can be used by the brands to capture behind-the-scenes insider posts, which may not be suitable for regular posts.
- The stories also allow you to experiment with different kinds of content. Some examples include live videos, rewind videos, short videos, boomerangs and different types of pictures.
- Other accounts can also be tagged in stories, which is very helpful in case if you are collaborating with some other brand or influencer.
4. User Instagram Stickers for Users’ Engagement
Social media marketing is very much based on the fact how much you can engage the users into your posts. The two-way communication is always perfect for marketing purposes. Understanding this fact, Instagram has launched sticker feature in its stories section. Of course, commenting below your post is also a way, through which users can engage with you, but the stickers provide a new and much interactive method of two-way communication.
There are ten types of stickers available in Instagram stories.
- Clickable Hashtag stickers are for promoting your own stories or help you reach more users.
- Mention stickers allow you to tag other users to your story and notify them that you have tagged them.
- Location stickers are for tagging a location in your story to expand your reach.
- Question stickers allow you to add open-ended questions to crowdsource ideas, feedbacks, and responses from your audiences.
- In Poll stickers, you can ask audiences to choose from two options. By default, you get “yes” or “no”, which you can change according to your question.
- Products stickers are for the business accounts, and they are available via the Shopping on Instagram Integration. Users can tap to see the product name, description and price and can tap again to buy the products.
- Emoji slider stickers of meant for asking questions from users that they can answer in the slider from scale 1 to 10. For example, you can ask the rating of your product from 1 to 10. You can select an emoji to represent their response.
- GIF stickers are looping graphics, which can be added to the stories
- Date stickers are meant for showing the date of photo, video, and story when it was created.
- Music stickers add background music to your image or video and let you select a soundtrack from Spotify.
5. Make Strategy for Your Bio Links
When you have to use Instagram as a marketing tool, you need to be strategic in your posts. Most of the successful brands on Instagram, such as Nordstrom, Starbucks etc., make the planning of their posts in advance.
By planning, you can create a great presence on Instagram even if you have a start-up company or even if you have a one-man show.
6. Get Full Benefit of Trending Hashtags
The Instagram Explore Feature is available now for the users to find the posts that are related to trending hashtags such as #FullMoon #Halloween etc. You can add these hashtags if they are relevant to your products or posts.
Now, Instagram has also introduced the feature to search by emoji. If emojis suit your brand strategy, you should consider them as they can be one of the best ways.
7. Do Partnership with Influencers
You can find the influencers within your specific vertical, who can showcase your products in a much creative way. According to some experts, there are around 40,000 influencers on Instagram who cover all niches such as health, beauty, wellness fashion, food, home décor and more.
The Instagram influencers have a large follower base, and they are trusted for their opinions on the latest trends and products.
To Sum Up
Points mentioned above are a few methods of Instagram marketing through which you can give a boom to your business. Apart from them, there are a number of more strategies, which you can explore for the best Instagram marketing. This is one of the ideal modern day marketing strategies without any second thought.