Traditional business practices of old still hold some weight in today’s modern world, but you need to have more strings to your bow too, thanks to a little thing called modern technology and – more specifically – social media. If you aren’t on a social media platform of some sort in 2020, then you’re definitely in the minority.
The spectrum of marketing on social media is a wide one, covering every type of business and industry. You might come across an influencer showing off the latest Adidas trainers on Snapchat, or a casino games streamer on YouTube inviting you to visit the website they are promoting; even wannabe politicians and commentators will ‘market their thoughts’ on sites like Twitter. It’s free and, therefore, popular, but not always effective, of course.
However, the biggest and arguably the most effective social media platform to market a business at the moment, though, is probably Instagram. Influencers, chefs, footballers, charities – they’re all on there! So, without further ado, here are a few tips on how to market your business on Instagram. Jon’s article has some in-depth discussion of popular tool Jarvee.
Understand your audience
Before executing any plan on social media let alone Instagram, it is vitally important that you understand exactly who it is that you want to target. You could come up with the best material ever seen, but if you aren’t targeting it at the right people then it means absolutely nothing. Take time to find out who exactly your target audience is, by using such features as Instagram insights. From there you can find out various insights from the tool, such as how many impressions a post gets, the total reach, the amount of website click-throughs, follower activity and a whole host of other useful, detailed information.
Talk with your followers, not at them
Spamming your followers with recycled posts and ignoring their replies is the worst thing you can do when it comes to building up a community on your page. You must engage with them, ask and answer questions, share fun images, share their images, hold competitions like caption contests and image submission competitions, create a community hashtag, and other things along those lines. They’re all great ways to encourage interaction. The higher the interaction and engagement, the more likely Instagram’s algorithm will be kind to you and enable your business to show up in more feeds.
(Image via https://twitter.com/VenturaAgency)
Make sure you use relevant hashtags
Hashtags enable your content to reach the right audience, while also helping you to organise and categorise the videos and images you share so you can find them more easily in the future. Essentially, if you want your content to be found, then you need to use the correct hashtags, but also keep in mind these key things; don’t overdo the hashtags and constantly use them – three targeted hashtags are better than 15 made up ones, avoid using overused tags – don’t just include a popular hashtag for the sake of it, and don’t spam with your hashtags – they need to be relevant.
Post at the right time
