Be it your neighbour, their business or their dog, it seems like everyone has made it to the gram today. But is Instagram worth adding to your next marketing strategy and should your business be on it, too?
With over 1 billion monthly and more than 500 million daily active users, Instagram has become one of the most popular social media platforms. According to the statistics by Instagram, over 200 million users visit at least one business profile daily and about 60% of people discover new products. With the ever growing numbers, it has become a popular tool to built brand awareness, connect with new audiences and influence the purchase journey by targeting a highly engaged audience.
Wonder what does Instagram do?
Instagram lets users take and share photos or videos along with a caption, to which their followers can interact by liking, commenting or re-gramming.
It offers three types of accounts i.e. Personal, Creator and Business. For creating a business profile, switch to a professional account. A Facebook page of your business is mandatory for an Instagram business profile. Set up an account with a profile picture showcasing your brand and add a concise bio to tell your audience about your business and its services. The business tool features make it easy for users to contact you while it also provides insights about your followers and real time metrics on how your posts and stories perform throughout the day.
Now that you have created an account, how do you start leveraging the benefits?
Benefits of Instagram
Content Marketing
Instagram is entirely a visual platform. Creativity and quality of the content is the key to attract audience and build engagement whilst promoting the brand and its services by various social media campaigns. Uploaded photos, videos or IGTV (longer videos) remain on your feed while stories stay for 24 hours. Features such as location tagging, account mentions, hashtags, shoppable tags, stickers, comments and reposts, etc. increase the visibility and allow brands to interact one-on-one with their audience.
Advertisements
Sponsored or Promoted posts are the ads to reach out to the target audience. Ads range from stories, photos and video ads to carousels, collections and ads in explore along with the availability of CTA buttons. You can buy, run and track ads within the application, through ads manager or Instagram partners.
Shopping
Instagram helps decide 80% of the audience to buy a product or service as the shopping features tap into people’s behaviour and turn your account into a shoppable storefront.
With all these features and a lot more, Instagram has largely influenced the landscape of visual marketing. However, uploading a few posts with captions is not going to bring quantifiable results for your business. Like any other online marketing platform, it takes consistency and a well devised strategy to engage the audience and achieve results.
What started as a photo sharing application nearly a decade ago has now emerged as an important tool that any digital marketer can’t afford to ignore anymore!