Instagram Marketing Tips For Small Businesses

Social Media Optimization is crucial nowadays and Instagram is no doubt one of the most popular platforms worldwide with 1.221 Billion Active Users. Hands down, that’s a huge number indicating why you should include Instagram into your first preference list to market your brand. Not only that but it is also the most popular and preferable social media platform among youngsters. So, that’s a plus point if your Business goal is to target a younger audience.

Though Facebook still dominates the game, Instagram holds a leading position on the global list for the highest engagement. With that supremacy, you cannot afford to ignore this platform. But how can you use it in accordance to achieve a high engaging audience and make a profit for your business?

Well, in this blog, we aren’t just going to show you how to use this platform, but we are also going to share the topmost Instagram marketing strategies that our experts fromDigital Marketing Agency Jacksonville use, which will help you too, to boost your brand and gain the top engaging audience, leaving your competitors behind.

In fact, you have come to the right place, if you own a small business or just started up or are planning to kick start your business. Or should we say you just found the jewel?

So let’s get to it!!

The best Instagram marketing tips for small businesses.

1. Give major preference to free Instagram marketing tools.

Instagram Insights is a free Instagram feature where you get a breakdown of the statistics of your followers, including information about their age, gender, location, and highly active hours. That itself does most of the task for your business, sparing your employees to work on other aspects as well.

That’s not finished yet, you can get specific insights on posts for the week that show you how many impressions you earned for that time period and what your top posts were. Isn’t that fascinating? Such a simple feature but plays a crucial role in monitoring your statistics. And yet some small businesses ignore this feature. This is one of the major mistakes that they make. No wonder why their businesses don’t grow.

Additionally, these insights help you know more about your users. The more that you know about how users are interacting with your brand, the better you understand them. This allows you to help make necessary changes and thus gain optimum results.

2. Make posters that attract the users first.

We all are well aware of the fact that how much the first impression matters. And also are thoroughly aware of the cons and disadvantages of an un-impactful first impression. Hence whenever promoting our brand, we should always consider making an eye-catching poster about our product or services.

Remember: People pay attention to the overall presentation and its design first and then the inside content.

So instead of just fitting in all the information about your brand at once, try to fit limited content in your poster and emphasize more on making it attractive and eye-catching. So that whenever your target audience scrolls through their Instagram feed and go through your advertisement, they should be bothered about this ‘unknown’ poster and would take their time to give a look.

After all, our goal is to catch our audience’s eyes at first and then give them information about our business.

The fact that I am emphasizing more on designing your poster rather than compacting it with your content is because - go through the highlighted text of the above paragraph, once again and also you don’t want your target audience to ignore your advertisement and scroll up without merely giving it a look.

3. Collaborate with Influencers for wider reach.

If you want to reach potential customers on Instagram, Instagram influencers are the best choice you got. Considering their well-established fan followers and their high reach can be the fastest way to reach maximum audience and also to create new ones.

For your information, users trust their respective influencers and will tend to buy whatever their favorite influencer recommends. So that’s what you have to gain the advantage of and start searching for the influencers who got maximum fan followings. Now, of course, you need to acknowledge the fact that the higher the influencer’s fan following is, the higher his or her charges would be. This is something you need to consider based on your budget.

Note: - If you build a relationship with each influencer, you’ll build lasting brand awareness with a new audience.

4. Post, customer-created content.

We are always in the hunt of finding new and creative ways to write a social media post and present it in front of our audience. But all that uniqueness is from our side i.e. the ‘host-side-content’. What if I tell you there’s another way through which you can create content by customer-created posts?

It’s a hardly recognized strategy that works wonders and single-handedly controls the entire game among the Social media marketing strategies.

Even our Digital Marketing Jacksonville experts will recommend you to use this tactic to gain your audience’s trust and make them engage in your business.

Let us help you explain this, suppose one of the users brought your product through Instagram and they post it on their account (note that we are not considering the user’s followers as our top priority). Your business should post the exact same picture that your customer has uploaded; in your feed, mentioning the customer’s name and applauding him as well. Take it as gratitude towards your audience for buying your product.

This is like hitting two birds with one stone move. And it has its own multiple reasons as of ‘why’.

So let us divide them into the following points:

First, is you win the customer’s heart by surprising them with their ‘mention’ on your feed. This will make the customer overwhelmed and would connect himself more towards your brand.

Secondly, this would be an unexpected form of content for your audience. They would be surprised as well and realize that your business is not just sales-oriented but you rather care for your customers too.

And the Third target it will hit is by making this a trend among your audiences. Your audience is now well aware of how you mention them in your feed. So, they will start following this trend. It is because your audience probably wants to grow their own following too. The outcome you won’t see coming is that you don’t have to force your customers to do this, but they’ll probably start doing this by themselves, indirectly giving you free promotion.

5. Timing is everything

Often small businesses make one of the crucial mistakes that leads to the turn-off of their brand among the users and that is over-posting throughout the day.

I know you must be thinking the more you post the more often you get exposed to your audience. But that is not how it works. There’s an old saying; “not everything too much is good” and I am pretty sure you are well aware of it. The result - Your audience will probably get bored or worst-case scenario, your audience will get frustrated of seeing you often on their feed and this will eventually lead to mass unfollowing. With limited posting, you also need to pay attention to the timing.

According to our research, the worst days to post on Instagram are Wednesdays and Sundays, while Mondays and Thursdays are the best days to post and the best times of day to post are between 8:00 AM and 9:00 AM, as well as between 11:00 PM to 2:00 AM.

This is because the time between 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM are the active hours where the users are starting off their day with some latest feed and refreshment and the time between 11:00 PM to 2:00 AM is considered as young folk’s active hours. Not only this but during this time period, the job-oriented users are ending their hectic day with some chill feed and refreshment as one last source of entertainment before sleep. While as young folks are mostly active scrolling through Instagram when they should be sleeping, so this makes it the second most popular time to post.

Conclusion:

Instagram has dominated social media with 1.221 Billion active users. It’s a more preferred platform for image sharing with over a billion monthly users.

Make sure you give major preference to free Instagram marketing tools. They are worth more than you realize. Don’t let it go off.

Pay attention to making unique posters for your content. People pay attention to the overall presentation and its design first and then the inside content.

Don’t ignore influencers. They are the best source to reach the maximum potential customers in no time.

Post, customer-created content and include your customers in your Business. Make them feel like they’re taken into consideration and prioritized. This is the best way of proving the quote, “Don’t tell them, show it.”

Finally, make sure that you tune the proper metrics to look at how your Instagram advertising efforts are paying off.

Focus your attention on the follower growth rate, engagement rate, and URL click-through rate.

With these strategies by Digital Marketing Agency Jacksonville, we hope you would achieve your desired results pretty soon and remember the fact that good things take time, “Quick success doesn’t last long”.

Well with all that, ALL THE BEST!