Instagram is the most used as a point of contact by consumers to follow brands, as it is no longer limited to publishing distinctive images and videos to achieve brand success.
However, successful marketing on Instagram requires building a smart strategy to communicate a clear brand identity by creating creative content, community and audience participation and interaction with them, and providing outstanding customer service.
We will show the most important steps that will help you build a successful strategy for your brand through the article.
- Set your goals.
- Define your target audience.
- Create a winning plan for your content.
- Build your own content calendar and develop a flexible publishing plan.
- Provide customer service and boost engagement.
- Analyze the results and apply them to improve your strategy.
Let us dig deeper…
Set your goals on Instagram:
Before embarking on the Instagram branding process, you must define the purpose or goal of it to direct your strategy in the right direction.
And you can define a set of smart goals that you seek to reach by relying on the “Smart” rule, that is, to be:
- Specific: For example, the goal is to increase traffic to your website by increasing the rate of content publishing.
- Measurable: that is, increasing the traffic by a certain percentage, for example 15%.
- Realistic: Here you have to ask yourself, has anyone ever achieved this goal?
- Related to the main goal that you seek to achieve in the end: Assuming your primary goal was to spread awareness of your brand and increase the percentage of sales, will the increase in traffic contribute to achieving this?
- Defined by a clear time period: for example, you want to reach this goal after two months of developing the plan.
The smart goal here, according to the “Smart” rule, is: to achieve a 15% increase in traffic in a maximum period of two months, by increasing the number of times the content is published.
On the other hand, there are some goals that must be taken into consideration, such as:
- Promote the brand’s products and services.
- Activating community participation.
- Attracting potential clients and converting them into actual customers.
- Provide customer service.
- Monitor and understand competitors.
It is important to keep in mind some matters related to Instagram, as it does not allow, to include links in posts, but you can put a link in the resume, so users often bounce from the post to your profile for linking, and then finally go to the website, and this is what makes users’ experience somewhat distinctive.
It is a good idea to give priority on Instagram to creating interactive content, rather than content that tries to increase traffic to the web.
In order to ensure the achievement of all the previous objectives, some key performance indicators should be taken into consideration:
- Impressions, hits, and followers.
- Customer service in terms of response time, decision rate, and brand perception.
- Interact with comments, likes, number of clicks, and overall engagement rate.
- Conversion, which includes link clicks, social traffic, and product button in shopping content.
For a complete list of metrics for each stage of the customer journey, use the social media metrics map.
Determine your target audience on Instagram:
To begin, you must build the customer’s personality, that is, imagine his interests and way of thinking in order to make a decision, and what he might see as a problem or gap, and the value he will see in your products and services.
To get all this information, ask yourself some questions that will help you find it:
- Where do they live?
- What is their age group?
- What are their interests?
- Male or female?
- What is their educational level?
- What are they following on the Internet?
- What is their income?
- What will motivate them to buy the product?
- What do they worry about when buying a service or product?
Fortunately for you, Instagram provides you with many answers, data, social analysis, and listening tools.
For example, the age group that is most present on Instagram is 25-34 years old.
The percentage of females is 57% of the total Instagram users, and 43% of the males.
You can also know the average time you spend on Instagram per day.
Create a successful plan for your content:
After you have defined your target audience, it is time to create your own content, which is the basis of your presence on Instagram.
Before embarking on your content creation journey, ask yourself these questions:
- What stories do you want to tell on Instagram?
- What formats would you add to your content to better support your goals?
- How would you like your brand profile to appear?
- What can you share in a way that is distinct and visually enjoyable?
- What does Instagram give you that you cannot find on other platforms?
The answer to the last question specifically motivates you to start creating unique and distinctive content, as Instagram offers many content options available to brands, from regular posts, Reels, live broadcasts, stories, and IGTV, to shopping content.
If you’re starting from scratch on Instagram, be sure to do a competitive analysis to discover how other brands in your field are dealing with Instagram content.
Then use your results as inspiration and planning to stand out in the display of your brand’s content, and pay attention to the balance between content formats that will work best with the resources you own and the engagement you seek with your audience.
Several content management and SEO tools, such as Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, and others, give you the ability to see what content your audience is searching for and interacting with.
The major brands rely on Instagram to build their content strategy, an exciting mix of images, videos, graphics, and stories.
The static images that Instagram started still carry high value and importance in any content strategy,
As long as these images are perfect, varied, and with high accuracy, and reveal clear details of your products and customers, the nature of your business, what you hide behind the scenes, and all the moments that will display the value of your brand in front of your audience.
As for videos, they receive a 49% higher participation rate than static images on Instagram, especially those that display a compelling story about your product, service, or customers.
Standard video publishes are only 60 seconds long, making it a fast and flexible way to show your content to followers and customers.
Instagram allows you to feature IGTV or long videos of up to 15 minutes, and in verified accounts up to 60 minutes, its importance lies in creating educational programs, short seminars, demos about the products you offer and many more.
You can also choose not to post the video or only allocate it to specific campaigns or promotions if you do not have the time or skills.
And Instagram Reels gives you the ability to record multiple videos that you can edit up to 30 seconds, with the use of audio and visual effects and multiple creative tools.
Instagram stories feature currently has the highest participation rate compared to other formats, as smartphones give the Instagram application the ability to capture quick moments of stories, which gives followers real opportunities to interact with your brand in a more flexible and spontaneous way.
Build your content calendar and create a flexible publishing plan:
Once you have decided on the type and nature of the content you want to post on Instagram, work on developing the content calendar through your own themes and main campaigns.
To ensure your constant reach to your target audience, you have to post on Instagram frequently, and despite the different branding styles, the common rule of thumb is to share a brief post 1 to 3 times a day and create stories 2 to 5 times a day.
While creating your content calendar, you should keep a few things in mind in every post that you want to publish:
- Add hashtags related to your content so that non-followers can find your content.
- Include a site tag if you own it.
- Rate the best time to post.
- Define tags in posts so that you can better inform the content attributes and formats with which your audience interacts.
Provide customer service and enhance participation:
Developing a good publishing plan is not enough to get an opportunity to develop your followers and strengthen your relationship with them.
As it is required to provide distinctive service to customers and enhance participation through Instagram by interacting with their posts and comments, Reels and IGTV, and responding to their interaction with your stories, in addition to asking questions and listening to their opinions and ideas.
Direct messaging on Instagram is one of the most important aspects that marketers should feel comfortable using, and Instagram DMs allow individual communication between brands, followers, customers, influencers, and others, as responding to direct messages is an important part of any customer service strategy.
And if your brand is one of the brands that have transformed their business profile into a digital storefront using Instagram Shopping, it is important to provide customer service via direct messaging and give them the privacy they want from the start of their journey on your own store until its end.
Once you have connected your Sprout Social Instagram business profile, the Smart Inbox will facilitate sharing by collecting mentions, comments, meta tags, and direct messages in one place, in addition to making it easier for collaborative work and having your entire teamwork on the same page to answer questions.
Analyze results and use them to improve your strategy:
Tracking the performance of your content and the way it has grown over time according to your Instagram marketing strategy, helps you develop it, offer more to your target audience, and improve your plans for future campaigns.
For example, if you announce to host a contest on Instagram that requires followers to like your posts, follow your brand and tag two friends as a condition to participate in the competition
And when you look at the data you notice the likes, but the comments are fewer and the growth of followers is not enough, here you must review the content of your competition post and discover if it is Visually appealing, clear-headed, or does it have a clear value that motivates users to follow your branding after the contest ends.
After the evaluation, you will be able to take a new approach, such as adding more excitement, revealing a new creative method, or removing the follow requirement and mutual promotion of the contest on your stories throughout the subscription period.
Conclusion:
To gain more followers and customers, be sure to build a distinctive marketing strategy for your brand on Instagram, while continuing to develop it according to the developments that occur to it or its competitors.
