In today’s competitive business environment, visual content has become a powerful force in marketing products and services. This has led to many business leaders wondering how to use Instagram to promote their brands. The platform is impacting both traditional and online marketing models as they shift to more effectively promote visual content that speaks to their target audience.
Traditionally, social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn have been the go-to platforms for businesses who engaged in DIY marketing. As the demand for visual content rises, it is fast becoming a necessity for businesses and brands to engage on more visually stimulating platforms. While Facebook and LinkedIn use both visual and written content, businesses and brands should start using Instagram which is centered on visual content.
Instagram boasts over 150 million users. It is the best and most-used photo sharing platform. It allows savvy marketers to share photos and short videos with their brand’s followers. And it’s only becoming more popular. According to Mind Jumpers, the photo-sharing app is used to post over 55 million photos and videos every day!
The key benefits of learning how to use Instagram for marketing.
There are lots of perks to using Instagram for your business and brand. The following is a detailed breakdown of these benefits, which will absolutely help you brand your company more effectively.
Increased Engagement on Instagram
We are leading increasingly hectic lives – especially in the digital world. It is easy for potential customers to miss your branded messages on platforms like Facebook and Twitter as they scroll endlessly through their feeds. This fact doesn’t apply to Instagram as the users will need to interact with the post before moving on to the next one.
As with any social media marketing, posting useful and interesting content can increase your engagement numbers. Looking at the fact and figures, Instagram is the best at engagement when compared to Twitter and Facebook. A detailed social media study by Forrester Research center showed that visual content on Instagram generates fifty times more engagement based on followers than Facebook. This number passed the hundred mark when compared to Twitter.
Building trust and personality with Instagram
Using branded content is best for establishing engagement with your followers. By using Instagram, your business or brand will be able to establish a trust relationship with your followers and customers. People will be more inclined to buy your products after seeing them on Instagram. And, if you engage with your audience effectively on Instagram, you can establish an emotional connection with your target group.
This is because they will follow your page and hopefully share it with their friends. They will also see how you interact with other customers. This is done by sharing the day-to-day experiences of your business in an informal and casual way. This will establish a deep connection with your audience and create a more personal feel to your business.
If you are a business focused in a certain market, sharing behind the scenes photos and videos tends to rank well on Instagram. Also, sharing employee photos tends to attract more customers and followers. Seeing the people behind the brand helps make your company more attractive and trustworthy in the followers’ and customers’ eyes. Implementing these strategies can have a positive impact on your company’s bottom line.
Increase website traffic with Instagram
Adding a clickable link to every social media post your company/brand publishes is pretty standard advice. It helps increase your website’s traffic volume. The real magic happens when you create high-quality links across multiple social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. This will lead to your business creating and maintaining a strong company profile that could play a huge part in bettering your site’s visibility rankings.
Use Instagram to gain a competitive advantage
As I mentioned earlier, most businesses are overly focused on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. This means that there is far less competition to overcome on Instagram. According to American Express, only five percent of startups and small businesses have embraced Instagram. This gives them an advantage over their competitors as the Instagram market is less saturated when compared to the other social media platforms.
If you can successfully enlist the help of influencers and famous social media personalities like King Bach to come up with viral loop content, you can create a strong magnet for customers with relatively little investment. When you incorporate influencer marketing on Instagram into your marketing strategy, you will increase the intensity and number of customer interactions in an easier manner than Facebook and Twitter where the competition is more fierce.
Reaching your target market with Instagram.
If your business targets millennials, then Instagram is the platform for you. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have a diverse reach within all age groups and generations. Instagram is a favorite place where brands regularly engage and connect with millennials. For this reason alone, forward thinking brands should focus on promoting visual content on Instagram. Creating branded content for the other social media platforms is rather easy after you’ve established yourself on Instagram. You can slightly alter and recycle visual collateral used on Instagram to also interact with the diverse target audience of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Free and paid advertising on Instagram.
Using these social media platforms counts as advertising. They provide free advertising by allowing you to showcase your products and services in a way that instantly connects with millennial audiences. Instagram can give your business and brand huge exposure and streamlined customer interaction. Because it is so visual, Instagram is a platform that shows off more of what your business and brand has to offer.
You can also increase the level of exposure and customer interaction by paying for promotion. All social media platforms, including Instagram will promote your pages and posts for a fee. The best part is that, because social media is a fancy data suck, they can be more accurate in targeting your content to the audience that is most likely to engage with it.
Based on the points outlined above, we can see that social media platforms are the innovative and fresh way to promote your business online. And Instagram is just the latest in a collection of powerful social branding tools that your company needs to focus on.
