We hosted an Instagram workshop at the CIM Northern conference about making your brand “Insta famous” and thank you very much to everyone who participated! Here are the highlights and key insights to take from the event, if you were unable to attend.
What do you want to achieve?
With over 500 millions users, Instagram has become the leading platform to grow followers, where 60% are using the platform to discover a new product. But how do you market on Instagram and engage with the right audience?
The first thing you need to do before you create your account, is to set your objectives and key performance indicators (KPI). It’s quite simple. If you want a result you need to know what you want to achieve. It could be to create awareness of your brand, sell products directly from the platform or generate leads to your website. Once you have established what you want to gain from your Instagram account, you need to set your KPIs, which are the micro-goals you need enable to achieve your objective. KPIs can depend on what your objectives are, so if you want to create more brand awareness, your KPIs should be concerned around your follower growth, user-generated content (which you could re-post!) and users mentioning your brand in hashtags. However, to make it all happen, you need to have a clear overview of your Critical Success Factors (CSFs), which are the people, software, online features etc. you need, to achieve your objectives or KPIs.
The many ways to engage with your audience!
Hashtags
Think about your hashtags as keywords, like you do for search engine optimisation. Your potential customers may search via hashtags for brands, services or products, so you need to make sure you have a clear hashtag strategy. Think about what hashtags your competitors are using or jump on the popular seasonality hashtags related to specific events like #Coachella2018. There are several tools you can use for hashtag research: Focalmark, Iconosquare, Sprout Social, keyhole.io.
Instagram stories
300 million Instagram users spend around 25-30 minutes on Instagram a day. At the moment, Instagram does not allow an account with less than10,000 followers to add links to their stories. However, Instagram stories is a quick way to engage with your audience and reach a high number of people in a short time. You can run a poll to ask your audience for an opinion, check in with an image, add a hashtag or use filters and GIFs to add a fun element to your story. If you have a new product to launch or just want to save an important story, then add them to your bio! It’s an efficient way for users who visit your profile to get a glimpse of who you are or what products you sell.
The Visuals
Make sure your images are visually pleasing! Instagram is built on good visuals, colour, grid and creativity. The first thing your followers or potential new followers see is the picture. If it is not appealing, then you can be certain that they won’t engage with it, visit your profile or react to any call to action you may have added.
Once you have your objectives, KPIs and CSFs in place, you can produce your content calendar to outline key events, hashtags and creative content. Remember! Instagram is an efficient platform to be creative no matter how creative your brand or products/services are. Have fun!
Do you want us to help you grow your business digitally? Get in touch with us now on 07811 430 730 or email Tanya@WeDisrupt.co.uk
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