4 Essentials For Improving Your Instagram Marketing

Visuals are the future of marketing.

Whilst many marketers are leveraging the power of traditional social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, an increasing number are also turning to visual platforms including Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube capitalise on the demand for images and videos by online consumers.

In particular, Instagram attracts 15 times more engagement than Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus.

Why are these numbers important? Instagram, a mainly mobile photo-sharing platform is no longer a millennial fad—it is a viable channel for marketers who are looking to engage with their audiences through powerful visual content.

Here’s how to add Instagram into your marketing mix and to make the most of the demand for visual content among your customers:

Not Just a Hashtag, a Branded Hashtag

Hashtags are to social media what keywords are to Google—they not only make it easy for people to locate conversations and topics of interest; they also help to increase visibility for your images and videos.

Your followers and customers could use a number of different hashtags to describe your content or to refer to your brand. However, too many hashtags are not effective at creating a synchronized image and message for your brand. This means that you need to create an official hashtag that followers and customers can identify you with.

Undoubtedly, you can utilize more than one hashtags for your various campaigns but what’s really important is for you to stay in charge of the process of creating visibility for your brand by always creating an official hashtag and asking followers to use it when referring to your brand or participating in your campaigns.

Leveraging the impact of big Instagrammers

Instagram users are the most active and the most responsive compared to Facebook and Twitter users. As such, it is possible to gain a lot of followers and exposure especially when an influencer on Instagram mentions your brand name to their followers.

Partnering with influencers on Instagram, just like on other platforms, does not guarantee success with your brand. The most important thing to do is to work with influencers who are passionate about your products and who are willing to take time to create content around your product.

A good place to start is to check out the profiles of the potential influencers and see whether they are promoting any products. Some influencers already express their openness to partner with businesses for paid endorsements allowing you to contact them if you want a brand mention.

Collaborating with large Instagram users is not just a strategy for big brands. Small marketers can also find influencers who would be ready to co-create content with them at an agreed upon fee.

Piggyback on trends to make your brand visual

Trends are extremely popular on social media and they receive a lot of viewership and engagement. Instagram is no different.

The smartest marketers have found that a great way to make the most of these trends is to associate their products or service to a trend that is relevant to their brand. So for example, during large sporting events such as the World Cup or Olympics, you could find a way to distribute images and short videos about your products, services and offers and relate these to the prevailing sporting event.

Piggybacking on events and trends has proven to be effective especially on Twitter but the same applies for Instagram too where there can be more than 100 trends at any given time. The main advantage of aligning your brand with relevant trends is that this strategy earns you followers; but more importantly, it provides remarkable visibility for your brand at no cost at all.

Utilize the combined power of Facebook and Instagram

The combination of Facebook and Instagram is a potent one. Both platforms are largely popular across social demographics with millenials and older generations using Facebook and Instagram almost equally.

Using both Instagram and Facebook in your marketing strategy allows you to make the best of both worlds. For example, you can create videos on Instagram and then share them on Facebook where you can pay to sponsor them on the News Feed.

Sponsoring your Instagram videos on Facebook could mean more brand exposure as you each out to both your Facebook and Instagram users.

Instagram Success

Although other online marketing tools are important to your marketing mix, the use of visual tools such as Instagram catapults your marketing efforts tenfold. You would be surprised how capturing the moment and sharing it with the world can create greater visibility, awareness and interest in your product or service offering.