Guidelines for a Successful Instagram Marketing Campaign

Now that you already have an SEO friendly website and you are on top with content marketing, you might want to try social media marketing to boost your business performance. Have you tried marketing on Instagram? If you have a digital marketing strategy for 2018, Instagram marketing should top your agenda.

• According to statistics, Instagram offers you over 700 active users each month. This is a large target audience that you would like to reach.
• In the year 2017, over 70% of the successful businesses around the US were using Instagram.

Therefore, it is clear that Instagram marketing offers a huge potential for businesses. This applies to large and small corporations eyeing growth in their sales in 2018.

There are certain important practices that you should have in mind once you get started with Instagram marketing. It is not only about starting to send your posts and expecting to achieve success. You have to follow the following guidelines along with your digital marketing strategy.

Come up with your Specific Marketing Objectives

What attracts you to Instagram marketing? Why do you want to go social and specifically on Instagram? Obviously, this is the very first step that any business should begin with when crafting their sales and marketing strategy. Whether you are a pro-Instagram marketer or just getting started, you should not skip this step. So what are some of the strategies that businesses would like to achieve?

These can include the following.

• To Drive Targeted Traffic to Your Website
• Achieve more video views
• To increase brand awareness and loyalty
• To drive App Installs

These are just some of the objectives that a business would have. The specific objective will obviously depend on the nature of your business. For instance, the business that would like to achieve more app installs could be an application development venture.

It is also important to note that one Instagram campaign has the capability of serving different objectives. For instance, if you want more clicks on your website and still want to increase the number of video views, you can run a campaign that aims at achieving these two and more objectives. The bottom line is that before you get started, you have to ensure that you have a clear objective for your Instagram campaigns.

Let’s see an example with an illustration why it is important to ensure you clearly define the marketing objectives.

FashionNova went into Instagram Marketing with an objective of making their new jeans popular among the Instagram followers. The campaign was successful and reached over 2 million people and had over 500K comments. This is because the objective was clearly defined. See screenshot below to understand the impact of a clear objective.

Craft a Good Content Strategy

A successful Instagram campaign greatly depends on the content strategy that you apply. The content that you share on Instagram should be engaging. In addition, you have to ensure that the content is customized for your audience.

Irrelevant content will not have the effect it deserves to have. Therefore, before posting determine the content that you would like to share depending on your target audience and your marketing objective. Make sure the content is driven towards your Instagram marketing objective. There are three different types of content. These are:

• Product-Centric Content

Product-centric content is the content that directly features the company products. Therefore whether doing videos or posting images, you are concerned about your company products.

• Cultural Centric Content

An Instagram cultural centric content is mostly aiming at letting your target audience know that your business exists. Therefore this is about deriving brand awareness.

• User-Generated Content

You would also want to keep your loyal customers engaged. Therefore, you share the content that they have posted on your Instagram page.

Use Instagram Tools Strategically

Instagram has a number of tools that are beneficial to marketers. These tools will help you get the most from your Instagram advertisements. They include:

• Instagram Stories
• Instagram Live
• Posting Multiple content pieces using Carousel media
• Hashtag
• Targeting techniques

The Instagram hashtag is more or less the same as Twitter hashtags. When using Instagram hashtags, make sure that:

1. Carefully choose the popular hashtags that drive your Instagram marketing agenda
2. Use relevant hashtags
3. Make use of hashtags that are intended to get you new followers like #follow4follow
4. Make the hashtags discoverable and easy to remember

Use Instagram Analysis Tools

Now that you have your campaign running on Instagram, you would also want to ensure that the campaign is helping you achieve the objectives. If not, you would like to do some tweaks to improve it. To gain these insights, use the different analysis tools and based on the findings come up with an appropriate action plan. While doing the Instagram analysis you should:

1. Check out the conversions data to determine if you are achieving the set objective. For instance, if you were seeking to drive engagements, are you getting more clicks from the target audience?
2. Observe the follower growth to benchmark your goals.
3. Observe the followers actions like the number of likes, the comments to understand or get a feeling of what your audiences say about you.

Ensure you have an Expert Running your Campaigns

Lastly, it is advisable that you hire an Instagram marketing guru who will help you achieve the business objectives. This is a company specializing in social media marketing and one that has a record of achievements over the years. While choosing the company that should run your Instagram advertisements, be sensitive to check out the years of experience. This is critical because you would not want to invest your money in trial and error type of investment.

These are some of the guidelines that you should have in your mind when getting started with Instagram advertising. Therefore, you will be able to achieve success in your business.

For the best social media advertising contact us today. We have years of experience and our pricing model is pocket-friendly.