If you’ve ever tried to advertise on Instagram, you may have quickly learned that it can be challenging. There’s a huge amount of competition, and it’s all too easy for someone to swipe past your post. So, what’s the best way to advertise your business on Instagram? Today we’ll go over some of our top tips to help you create an Instagram marketing strategy and grow your business online. We should mention, if you think these strategies won’t work because your company is B2B, that’s not true! Over 36% of B2B decision-makers research new products or services on Instagram!
Use Instagram Business
If your Instagram profile is currently at the default setting, you’ll want to switch over to a business account. It comes with many features that personal Instagram accounts don’t have, and it’s completely free! You’ll have access to follower analytics, ads, shopping, and much more. You’ll be able to add a call-to-action button and your contact information to your bio, making it easy for customers to learn about your business and contact you. There’s also the option to switch to a creator account that has benefits for influencers, but you’ll want to set up a business account in most cases.
How to set it up:
- Click on the three lines in the top right corner of your profile
- Tap on “Settings”
- Tap on “Account”
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on “Switch to Professional Account”
Know Your Target Audience
One of the biggest factors in your social media advertising success is marketing to the right audience. Before creating content, reaching out to influencers, or running ads, you can spend some time researching your ideal customer. What are their interests? What companies do they buy from? Do they follow any pages similar to yours? What words or phrases do they use? Once you have some notes, you can begin to tailor your content around what your audience relates to and what will catch their attention. Plus, you’ll need this information when it comes time to running paid ads!
Create Compelling and Shareable Content
You want your posts to be visually appealing and interesting enough to make someone stop scrolling. Instagram is a visual platform, so your content should be visually appealing as well. Don’t worry; you don’t have to go out and hire a professional photographer! There are many stock photo websites out there that don’t look overly staged, and you can create graphics or animations using a platform like Canva. You want to develop content that gets a reaction from viewers, whether it’s storytelling, humor, inspiration, or anything else that evokes emotion. They’ll be much more likely to engage with your post and may even share it to their story!
While Facebook has a share button that easily puts your content in front of a whole new audience, Instagram doesn’t have this. The closest option is when people share your post to their story. So you want to create interesting content that someone can’t help but share with their friends and followers.
Don’t Forget to Write Great Captions
While Instagram is a visual platform, your text is still as important as ever. A well-thought-out image or video paired with unrelated or thoughtless text can quickly cause the viewer to lose interest. As we briefly mentioned earlier, you can look at the exact wording and verbiage your customers use and sprinkle this into your posts. You want to make it feel like your posts are speaking directly to the viewer.
Don’t be afraid of experimenting with different caption lengths and strategies! You can try out short, medium, and long captions to see how your audience reacts. Remember, if you’re going with long captions, break it up into paragraphs to make it easier to read. When someone is scrolling through their feed, they see the first 125 characters of the caption before they have to tap on the “More” button. Use these first 125 characters (around two sentences) to capture their attention. Emojis, facts, and questions are great ways to grab someone’s interest.
Set Up Instagram Shop
Now that you have an Instagram business profile, you can set up Instagram Shop. This feature allows you to create your own online store within Instagram. Instagram makes it easily accessible for customers by adding a “View Shop” button below your bio and a shopping tab to the bottom navigation bar (currently in beta testing). The tab allows users to search for products, filter results, and purchase items, all on Instagram. You can even tag your products in your posts and stories, sending people directly to your shop.
Run Instagram Ads
Now that you have a great foundation, you can start running some Instagram ads! It’s one of the best ways to get your posts in front of a new audience. You can target your audience based on location, age, gender, interests, and behaviors. With the notes you have from researching your audience, you can use this to target your ideal customer. Targeted ads are much more likely to perform than non-targeted ads since your content and products are likely tailored to a specific niche. You can even upload custom audiences of people who have already interacted with your brand (ex. past customers) and use this to create a lookalike audience. A lookalike audience is where Instagram will find people who closely resemble your custom audience, which provides you with the most accurate targeting.
Fotex Labs Is Here To Help
We hope our blog has helped show you what the best way to advertise your business on Instagram is; we understand it can be frustrating at times! If you’re not getting the results you hoped for, it likely means your audience, messaging, or product/service needs to be adjusted. If you need any help creating content or running ads, we’re here to help! The team at Fotex Labs has helped businesses utilize social media to grow their business, generate leads, make sales, and much more! If you’d like to learn more about social media marketing and get your free proposal, you can reach us at (858) 228-7697 or fill out the form on our website.
