How to use Instagram for Business

With 300 million active monthly Instagram users and many brands like Ben and Jerry’s, Starbucks and Nike now using this social network, it is critical to implement some Instagram marketing tips if you plan to expand your reach. Plus, with the growing number of Fortune 500 companies now using this platform to market themselves, it’s obvious Instagram is here to stay and coming up with an Instagram marketing strategy is key.

Using Instagram can not only help you grow your audience, it can also increase your brand awareness, website traffic and leads, all for free.

To harness the power of using Instagram for companies, here are a few steps to follow on how to use Instagram:

The 1st step when using Instagram for business is to decide on the goal you wish to achieve with your Instagram marketing efforts. Goals could include growing your audience, capturing an email database, increasing traffic to your website, nurturing relationships with customers, attracting business partners or just increasing brand awareness.

Then, the 2nd step when using Instagram for companies is putting together a strategic plan aligned with your goal. A strategic plan should include:

The frequency of posts: How many posts you plan to publish daily or weekly depending on what you can commit to, so you can plan your content creation process accordingly

The hashtags to be used: Selecting the hashtags you will be adding to your captions, which should be a combination of generic popular Instagram hashtags, your own hashtag and popular hashtags relevant to your specific industry.

The voice you want to adopt on Instagram: Come up with adjectives that best describe the personality of your brand you wish to use when publishing content. For example: friendly, bubbly, humorous etc…

The different types of content you plan to publish: Decide on the different themes you will be covering when publishing content to make sure your posts are not one-dimensional. For example, should you be in the fitness app industry, your content could cover the following themes: weightloss tips, recipes, motivational quotes, body transformation and exercise routines.

The key when putting together an Instagram marketing strategy plan is to make sure everything you decide on doing, leads towards reaching your goal. Having a strategic plan will keep you accountable and make sure you are consistent with your Instagram marketing efforts.

The 3rd step when using Instagram for business is engaging daily if possible with your target audience, by commenting on their posts, tagging them in yours, liking and sharing their content when relevant and appropriate. This will not only increase engagement with your content, but also build your followers even further.

The 4th step to implement when using Instagram is posting quality, unique content relevant to your business that includes links redirecting to your sales funnel. If your sales funnel starts with a free report to capture people’s name and email, then make sure that the majority of your posts include these links, whether your posts are images or videos. Images and videos should be fun, interesting, unique, engaging and should humanize your brand. Avoid at all costs treating Instagram as an online catalogue to display your products and services.

The 5th step is regularly, maybe once a month, rewarding your Instagram followers with discount codes or giveaways. This will not only incentivize existing followers to remain a loyal follower, but also attract new ones and will likely create a lot of buzz around your brand if your offer is enticing. Brands that perform the best on Instagram and social networks in general, are the ones that display generosity and the ones that nurture their relationships with their followers.

The 6^th step to follow when using Instagram, is tracking your efforts using tools such as sproutsocial.com. This will allow you to understand your audience better, see what they respond to the most, so you can eliminate whatever actions you take that don’t get you closer to your goals.

The 7^th step is using Instagram ads. Once you’ve tracked your efforts and know what your audience likes and wants, you can put all your efforts on steroids with a small advertising budget. There are a few Instagram advertising formats to choose from, such as carousel ads, picture ads and video ads and you will need to use Facebook’s “power editor” tool to set up these ads.

So to recap, here are the 7 steps on how to use Instagram for businesses:

• Step 1: set a goal
• Step 2: put together a strategic plan
• Step 3: Engage with your target audience
• Step 4: Post quality, engaging content regularly
• Step 5: Reward your Instagram followers
• Step 6: Track your efforts
• Step 7: Scale using Instagram ads

So I hope you’ve enjoyed these Instagram marketing tips, remember to share this blog post, and leave a comment below. And, to receive more social media tips, make sure you subscribe to our Youtube channel.

About the Author

Corinna Essa

Corinna Essa is known internationally as the go-to person when it comes to social media marketing.

Corinna owns a social media marketing company helping businesses around the world leverage the power of social media without doing any of the legwork. Her company has been featured in many media outlets including Sky Business news, Working Women magazine, Ymagazine, Tasmanian Times, Channel 7 and 101fm.

Corinna is also the author of 2 bestselling books “Money On Demand – The 16 Fastest Ways to Becoming a Millionaire Online” and “Reach: The SECRETS to converting your social media audience into your network marketing downline fast”