Instagram Marketing Tips for Small Business in 2019

Planning on using Instagram in your marketing plan?

Looking for ideas to go about this?

Instagram, created by Kelvin Systrom and Mike K‎rieger was launched in October 2010 and has since been a major contender among all social networking platforms with over 700 million active users. 

Instagram is basically a visual app where people share their stories to the world using videos and pictures and since these two elements play a greater role in marketing today. Instagram now ranks among the top 5 social media platform existing today, hence this article will shed light on how we can use Instagram marketing to grow our business.

 Instagram Marketing Tips for Small Business in 2019

Why Choose Instagram

Business Profiles: Unlike the individual profiles, and just like the Facebook fan page or business page, Instagram business profile makes the user easily understand that such account belongs to a business organization and not an individual. Features of this profile include a single button contact page that drives potential customers to your site and a call-to-action button that gives options of a text message, phone call, and email. While the accounts work like regular IG accounts, the profile page is what differentiate them. 

Insights: Instagram Insights gives business owners and marketers analytics of how their content on IG is going. These, however, can be accessed only if you have switched to the business profile. Insights come with analytic data such as Impressions, content reach, and Demographic data. Now for you to get this working you need your Facebook business page linked to your Instagram account to get the insight data which can be accessed from the Instagram app.

‎Promotion: Just like Facebook page content booster, the Instagram promotions to help boost content. This feature is however not free. With the promotion tool, you can boost your content particularly the ones that your Instagram insight sees as your top performing post to target customers. Instagram will also suggest a post that it feels will need boosting.

Instagram Marketing Tips for Small Business in 2019

Integrate Instagram into your marketing plan: You start off by adding Instagram into your marketing plan. Note down what you aim to achieve for your business with this social platform and  find out the various ways Instagram can help meet your business goals

Have an eye-catching visual: Instagram is a visual app and thus rely on pictures and video to tell their story, hence you must have great visual and content. According to data, 93% of buyers on IG claim they product because of its visual appearance. Advice from Sprout Social "leave the Instagram post to your design team." 

Take advantage of Instagram tools: Instagram has a set of tools for marketers to use, such as the business page, insights, and promotion. These have been explained above. 

Cross promote content across other social media profile. The Instagram app gives you an opportunity to share your post in several other profiles such as Facebook, Twitter, Flicker and several others. Asked your followers from other social platforms to follow your IG account. This will help increase your brand awareness and followers too. 

Get Discovered: Nobody will ‎follow you if you don't take the time to put your business out there. Make use of Instagram explore features to find out who your followers are following the content they liked and commented on.  

Use the Geo: Take advantage of Geolocation feature as this will drive and boost your local audience to your business page and your local store

Tag People: Instagram tells stories and most of this stories involve people endeavour to tag them. It boosts your followership. 

Use Instagram Stories: Instagram stories gives businesses the opportunity to share a much more life experience with their followers. Sharing behind the scene story of your brand connects you more to your followers.

‎Post contents your audience needs: Thanks to the new Insights tool Instagram has introduced. Use this tool to research which content your audience responds to more at a given time and try to post more of such content. 

Don't post too much: Do not overwhelm your audience with too much post as this might likely lead to them unfollowing you. According to Sprout Social 1.5 times, a day is enough. Also, engagement is mostly gotten on Mondays and thursdays‎. Posting around 3pm-4pm drives fewer engagements but off hours aren't always off limits. Remember to post regularly. 

Interact more: When a customer leaves a comment on your IG business page, endeavour thank them for their comments. It gives such customer a feeling of recognition and importance‎. Also sought out ways to engage followers by being creative. For example, a Fashion page will post "tag a girl that will like this sunglasses" 

Use Hashtags: Hashtag helps you get discovered and if used wisely, increase engagement and makes you viral. 

Use Instagram Filters: Instagram offers a lot of filters for you to choose from. Using a particular filter gives your brand a unique presence on Instagram.

Don't overlook Instagram Insights: The data from Instagram insights help you better understand where you are heading to. It shows how your contents are performing. 

Conclusion

Instagram offers a huge platform for brands to share their story and influence people to buy their product using pictures and videos. With the various tools, Instagram offers, connecting with your audience and monitoring your growth has gotten far better. 

Instagram is a social tool, the focus isn't for you to sell, even though you have to make a profit using this platform. The focus here is more about awareness and information sharing. The app is majorly dominated by millennials so brands need to be more careful the way the project themselves on this platform