Learn how to build up a level of trust and familiarity with your audience to push your brand forward

Instagram has blossomed into the most powerful platform for creating visual content for your business by allowing you to present a certain side of who you are in a more interactive manner. But where exactly do you start and how do you stay updated?

We’ve put together 10 Instagram strategies for your business with ideas of how to use them to your advantage during 2019.

1. More of your audience are on Instagram

Connecting with your customers has never been so easy.

Share a photo of a new product and ask them what they think, or give them a sneak peek of a new project and see if they have any input. The more likes and comments you get, the more visible your company becomes with your customers.

Instagram is also a great platform for discovering what your audience likes and dislikes, which can help inform your marketing strategy. For example, a person can share a photo of their favourite food and tag their location. With your marketing cap on, you will gain insight into what your customers like to eat and where. This type of information is valuable to a restaurant owner who is redesigning his/her menu and can use Instagram posts to influence his/her menu offering.

2. Reach new audiences with hashtags

When someone includes a hashtag in a post on Instagram, a link is created for you to view all of the photos that have been shared using that specific hashtag.

As a business, you can use this to create new content by discovering what people are currently hashtagging and showing off what they like and what they find interesting to share, and therefore you can alter your marketing strategy to be tailored to the interests of your audience.

3. Fuel your other marketing channels

By far one of the greatest parts about the content you create in Instagram is that you can easily share it across all of your different marketing channels, increasing your exposure further. This not only saves you a lot of time but also doubles, if not triples, your chances of reaching and engaging with more people.

Head to your Instagram settings and enable social sharing to Facebook and Twitter so that your photos will share automatically when you post them to Instagram.

4. Any size business can thrive, especially the smaller ones

Even though larger companies have multiple managers, they become disconnected here and there in the day-to-day running of their operation and engagement with their audience.

Whereas for smaller businesses, you know your company inside out and live it every day. This essentially means that you can quickly share meaningful and attractive photos of the things that matter to you, your business and your customers.

For a smaller business, you have a greater chance of making your audience feel important when you are giving them extra value, and engage with them. Consistency in doing so will create loyalty from them when they follow what you post, helping you to elevate and make your brand and business a memorable and successful one.

5. You can make money directly from Instagram

Shoppable posts now allow you to add tags to the products in your photos with links that include your product description, pricing and the ability to ‘shop now’ which directly leads your users to the shop online store.

Instagram shoppable posts allow you to sell your products with minimal effort and provides an easy way for consumers to purchase.

6. Stories make your business more relatable

Instagram stories are a great way to show potential customers that you are more than just a faceless corporation and that there is a human side to your business.  If consumers see you as more than just a company looking to take their money, then they may be more trusting of your brand.

You can use it to show the behind the scenes insights into your company and the people who work for you. Using videos you can show off how your products are made, how your employees interact with each other on a daily basis and also allows you to ask questions between you and your audience. This can give your followers an exclusive peek into life at your company and make them feel a part of your brand.

7. Partnering with influencers

Influencers are considered online celebrities who will often promote a brand or product and lead it to become the new trend that’s happening. Collaborating with influencers has made marketing on a tight budget 10 times easier for business.

Influencers have become the new face of brands as their followers watch and copy what they do, how they do it and why. Influencers have become the new ‘recommenders’ to audiences, and boy do those audiences listen.

A dependable influencer can bring your business’ sales to a whole new level through increased return on investment and access to demographics that you wouldn’t normally reach.

8. You can keep an eye on your competition

Another benefit of Instagram is that you can keep an eye on the competition that surrounds your business. You can watch how they use the platform to market themselves, how they interact with their audience, what they are posting and how often they post. You can use the information to alter and better define your own marketing strategy.

Your competition more than likely has the exact same audience on Instagram that your business has. Use this!! Follow who your competition follows and your likely to attract the attention of their followers to your site.

9. Inspires creativity

The benefit of this photo-sharing app is that it allows you to go wild with coming up with new creative ways to draw attention to your business and in return increases your followers and new customers.

You can show your audience that your brand has a personality by hosting contests, shoutouts, vivid images and interactive videos.

10. It’s an ad platform that gives you access to the most advanced social media advertising targeting options

You can advertise efficiently by using the free tools available on Instagram to target your audience by age, interests, behavior, and location. This means that you can hone in on your specific target audience out of the millions who are online and likely to purchase.

You can create custom retargeting towards your audience based around your business’ Instagram post engagement, customer email lists, Instagram video views and more. This allows you to take your Instagram marketing strategy to the next level and implement a specific sales funnel with your ads to achieve better results.

Over to you

To start the new financial year off proactively, let us know what top 3 Instagram strategies are the most important to you.

Kirsty McBain

Kirsty McBain is passionate about branding, design and digital marketing. Working as a digital marketing creative for Ignite Media, Kirsty is involved in research, content creation and the application of digital marketing principals and strategies to ensure maximum results for Ignite Media's clients.