The continued popularity of Instagram makes it one of the best social channels for generating leads and sales. So, it would be foolish of you not to try using this social media platform for your business.

With over a billion active monthly users on the platform and 500 million daily Instagram Stories users, there’s at least a handful of your target audience that you can convert as customers there.

This post is a quick guide to help get your Instagram marketing off the ground. If you’re new to Instagram and don’t know what it can do for your business, you’re in luck!

Determine Your Goals

Image Source: DepositPhotos

You can achieve different goals on Instagram, and each business aspires for a specific purpose. Whether it’s to increase your brand visibility, grow your followers and build relationships with each other, and sell your products and services effectively, Instagram can do them for you.

However, Instagram is also unique compared to other social media platforms in that it’s a visual-based social channel. Whereas Facebook and Twitter can engage with other users using various content formats, Instagram restricts itself with images and videos, each of which includes a caption. 

While this may seem restricting to some, you can use the limitations to your advantage. Getting creative on the visual content you can publish can yield great results depending on various factors. 

The more you embrace the concept of Instagram, the faster you’ll be able to figure out the goals you have to set with it for your business.

Narrow Down Your Target Audience

Finding out who to target in your Instagram marketing campaign will be pivotal in its success. In fact, developing a buyer persona that consists of your target demographics makes things easier for you. Having a customer avatar allows you to target that person in your campaigns specifically. 

So, you don’t have to appease different masters with your strategy. Focusing on a single buyer persona with a specific age, income, educational background, hobbies, and interests in mind, you can create a highly targeted marketing initiative with a much higher rate of success.

Analyze Your Competitors

Knowing who you’re up against is a good place to start your campaign, especially if you don’t know where to start. A quick look at how your competitors use Instagram allows you to see the types of posts they publish, the quality of content they churn out, and other factors you must consider in building yours.

Look at as many competitors as you can find and take note of the things they’re doing. How many posts do they publish in a day or week, and what times are they? What hashtags are they using for each post? Are they using more images or videos? Which posts racked up the most likes and comments?

These questions allow you to reverse-engineer their campaigns to help you form a strategy for your brand. Ideally, you take the most common denominator among your competitors and determine whether you should use it in your Instagram marketing or not. 

Build an Editorial Calendar

Once you know the type of content to publish, you can begin piecing together your editorial calendar.

Here, you can’t just patch together random posts about your brand and call it a campaign. First, each post should be well-thought-out and must serve a purpose in the grand scheme of things. For instance, every post must reveal something about you that your audience doesn’t know. You can share your expertise by posting image quotes about it or showing yourself and your team performing something in action. 

In this case, you must build trust with your target audience first on Instagram. And being your authentic self while showcasing your knowledge about a topic is an excellent place to start.

Next, you need to know the best time when you can schedule your posts. The goal is to publish your images and videos during times when your followers and audience are online. If you don’t have followers yet, you can refer to the best times for scheduling posts.

Finally, it’s best to schedule your posts ahead of time using a popular social media calendar tool. Back then, you couldn’t automatically schedule posts on Instagram. But it’s not possible to create a batch of posts for publishing, so you don’t have to worry about uploading them one by one every time manually.

Analyze Your Results

After your campaign has concluded, you must review the results and see how much your strategy has on your Instagram marketing.

There are many metrics to analyze on Instagram, especially with the help of social media analytics tools. However, it’s best to focus on the key performance indicators (KPIs) connected to your goals. If your goal is to generate more sales, check how many users purchase your products from the posts you made on Instagram. If this is your very first campaign, use it as a benchmark for your subsequent campaigns. 

You want to achieve better results on your upcoming campaign, and you can do this by referring to the results of your current one and finding ways to improve it. 

This is a guest contribution by Christopher Jan Benitez.