Instagram Marketing

What Is Instagram Marketing?

Instagram has been one of the most powerful social media platforms for businesses since its launch in 2010. Today, there are over 2 billion active monthly users around the world and 90% of Instagram accounts follow at least one company. Marketing on Instagram is an important and essential way for businesses to connect with new and existing customers. The average user is on the platform for 2 hours and 25 minutes per day and users turn to Instagram for everything from entertainment, to shopping, to customer service. For this reason, creating an Instagram account is often one of the best ways to reach new audiences.

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With the right tools, strategies and best practices in place, Instagram is an effective social media platform for everything from small, local businesses, to large-scale global corporations. Whether your brand’s goal is to increase awareness, drive traffic to your website, boost sales, or build customer loyalty, Instagram can help you set your business’ online presence up for long-term success. Find out how marketing on Instagram can play an important role for your brand and how to set your brand up for success today.

Set Up Your Instagram for Business

Creating an Instagram business account is the first step to getting started. Instagram’s native analytics for business accounts provides primary data about follower demographics, such as age, gender identity, location and when your audience is online. Instagram’s analytics can also give brands a glimpse of what type of content resonates with audiences with an overview of metrics, such as reach and types of interactions. The native analytics provide baseline information, but many brands opt to use additional third-party tools to measure deeper metrics that reveal how to accelerate growth and improve strategy. 

Switching to a business account is easy. Go to your profile settings, select the Account option and scroll down until you see “Switch to a Business Account.” Next, choose the label that best describes your brand and confirm all of the remaining details. That’s it. Now you have access to a new set of insights about your content and your audience.

Identify Your Audience  ‍

Speaking of your audience, over half of Instagram’s global users are ages 34 or younger, according to 2021 research. This makes the channel one of the top social media platforms for millennials and Gen Z. Currently, 57% of millennials use Instagram multiple times a day. Since millennials are reaching their prime spending years, effective Instagram marketing can help brands connect with this sought-after demographic. Similarly, Gen Z are true digital natives and are the future of shopping. 60% of this demographic use Instagram to shop, as well as to learn about different brands and products. As they are one of the most brand-loyal age groups, now is the time to use Instagram marketing as a way for companies to attract younger consumers.

Discover the Platform 

With a new business account and a better idea of what your audience looks like, it’s time to look at Instagram through a new lens that considers all types of content that can be posted to your account. The most classic is, of course, the single image or carousel of multiple images. These images can be anything from product shots, behind-the-scenes (BTS), influencer posts and UGC (user-generated content), a favorite of marketers. UGC is the images that are taken and shared by your followers, that you can then re-purpose onto your own feed.

Although Instagram was once used exclusively as a photo-sharing platform, video has become one of the most impactful pieces for marketing strategies. Video content was first introduced to the platform in 2013 and has continued to grow ever since, particularly with the introduction of short-form video. Today, there are multiple video formats on Instagram, including Reels, Stories and in-feed video posts, so be sure to become familiar with each of these posting styles before diving into your strategy.

Creating Your Own Strategies

With a whole new set of analytics with your new account, more insight into your audience and a refresher on the various post types that come with Instagram, it’s now time to put it into action. 

It can appear to be daunting, but it’s actually quite easy. Do what works. And by that, we mean for you to really dive into each of those individual post analytics to see what people are and are not, engaging with and how many impressions are being gained. By using the analytics provided with your account, it will be simple for you to get insight into what your audience wants to see moving forward. This is also a great time to work UGC into your strategy. Re-posting followers' content not only shows them that you care and that you’re listening, but also entices them to post more, higher quality content in hopes of being featured. It really is a win-win.

Another win-win is video content. With so many different ways to be creative with video content, it’s no surprise that 70% of social media marketers plan to increase video activity on Instagram in the near future. Experimenting with various forms of video content is an excellent way for businesses to grow organically on Instagram.

Elevate Your Instagram Strategy With Dash Hudson

Although Instagram marketing can be one of the best ways to build a better online presence for e-commerce brands, creating content, developing new strategies and social media management all take time. For this reason, the world’s leading brands turn to software like Dash Hudson to accelerate brand growth across key social media channels like Instagram.

Dash Hudson simplifies the process of creating and sharing visual content that your target audience craves by predicting the performance of photos and videos with Vision. Product tagging for Instagram shopping and Reels is easier than ever. Scheduling your social media content becomes a breeze with a feed planner and scheduler with recommended times to post. Accelerate your Instagram with Dash Hudson’s automatic daily, weekly and monthly reports that will help your brand grow in the social entertainment era. 

In this new era, it is crucial for brands to have cross-channel insights highlighting the impact short and long-form video is having on their strategy. Take your strategy one step further by utilizing custom analytics, dashboards and reporting for Instagram Reels.

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