Your Guide To Instagram Marketing

After Facebook, Instagram is the second most used social media network. This visual-focused platform with high engagement entertains over a billion monthly users and sees 500 million Instagram stories on a daily basis. Today, Instagram is a platform that is not limited to usage by individuals for personal reasons. What used to be a humble photo-sharing app, has transformed into a huge marketing channel with the help of top social media marketing companies in Kuwait. According to a study done by Oberlo, about 71% of businesses have joined the global platform in an attempt to increase brand awareness. In fact, even B2B companies turn to Instagram for product research. To sum up hundreds of studies on this topic, Instagram can strengthen your brand, improve engagement, enlarge sales, and grow your audience.

In order to succeed as a business on Instagram, it takes more than just joining the platform. You will need to gain a deep understanding of the platform and your audience, and be able to use Instagram tools and content strategies that resonate the most with your customers. We want to help you achieve all of that and more, so we’ve created a step-by-step to building your very own well-designed Instagram marketing strategy.

1. Set goals & find a target audience

Your goals will define the way you advertise and format your content. Is your objective increasing brand awareness or building a community? Are you looking to accelerate sales or gain customer and market insights? If you’re already faring well financially, for instance, you might be less interested in sales and more in market insights. Your goals might also change based on the amount of time and budget you’re able and willing to allocate to Instagram marketing. Whatever your goal(s) be, you should focus on creating SMART ones for better efficiency. If you don’t know why you’re joining Instagram in the first place, you will not be able to use tools to measure and analyze your performance.

Determining your target audience is another thing you want to accomplish before you begin marketing on Instagram. Monitoring popular hashtags and events related to your business is a great data-driven approach to gauge factors like audience age, gender, location, and income. You can achieve the same by checking out your competitors’ followers and learning about their interests. And while you’re at it, also take a look at the kind of hashtags your competitors are using, since hashtags are one of the best ways to reach your audience organically (Social listening services or CRM systems can help ease competitor research). All in all, defining your target market with help from a digital marketing agency in Kuwait will allow you to create content that is specific to your audience and directly speaks to them.

2. Make a business account

Instagram business account is replete with benefits. It gives businesses the opportunity to add info about them, track their performance in real time, and learn about their followers’ behaviors.

To set up or switch to a business account, you will first need to create an apt keyword-optimized bio, a 150-character description of your business and its unique value proposition (yes, you can also use emojis!). Next, you will choose a minimalist and high-resolution profile picture that is easily recognizable and a fitting reflection of your business. In most cases, this will be your logo, logo mark (a logo without the words), or mascot. It’s also important to add a link to your website within your profile description so that you can benefit from lead generation. Finally, take advantage of the business mode features, such as the ability to add categories, contact info, and call-to-actions.

Hashtags, actually, make for great call-to-actions. Your hashtags can either be your brand’s name or a slight variation of it. Its purpose is to allow and encourage you and your followers to tag your brand and as a result, improve customer engagement. Make sure your bio includes a traceable link that can monitor the behavior of all traffic.

3. Create content

With Instagram's several content formats, you can choose to display your products, your company’s culture, or even entertain your customers. Whether you utilize static pictures, galleries, or IGTV videos to reach your audience, depends on your initial goals.

A study by HubSpot concluded that images receive about 27% more likes than videos, but both receive similar amounts of comments. This statistic might be different for your business, so don’t be afraid and play around with the formats.

Images are the most common type of post on Instagram. Use a variety of them to amplify the diversity of your brand and to engage customers in different ways. Instead of using the image for outright advertisements, try to convey company culture and behind-the-scenes of your operations. This will augment the authenticity and genuineness of your brand. Other types of posts include educational posts, influencer posts, motivational posts, and user-generated content (UGC). UGCs are posts that originate from your fans and followers, which you can repost (and credit the original poster), making them feel good and showing that you really care about them.
Videos on Instagram cannot be longer than a minute and default to playing without sound. So ensure that the first few seconds of your videos can be understood without sound.
A boomerang is a three-second looping video that plays forwards and backwards. They’re quirky and perfect for posts that show jumping, clinking glasses, high-fives, etc.
Hyperlapse is a tool on Instagram that allows lengthy videos to be condensed into shorter, postable videos. It features built-in stabilization and produces a smooth final result.
Instagram Reels, though fairly new, are a direct competitor of TikTok. Reels have their very own explore page and allow users to create 15-30 second looped videos, which is a great way to increase audience engagement.
Instagram Stories are great for high-frequency, unpolished, and organic posts like behind-the-scenes content. Because they are time-sensitive and disappear after 24 hours, they are also helpful for displaying live business events.
Instagram Story Highlights can be preserved beyond their 24-hour limit and are perfect for a semi-permanent display of products, services, and promotions. Think of these highlights as a menu or an extension of your bio.
The Instagram Live option can be used sparingly to exhibit exciting, real-time content like Q$As and reveals. When you start a live video, your followers will be notified and live viewers will also be able to comment on them.
IGTV features long-form, vertical videos, usually in the form of interviews, product reviews, tutorials, etc. These can last anywhere from 15 seconds to 10 minutes.

Instagram Shop is another great tool that allows business accounts to use product tags and stickers, which users can tap to get additional product info and visit the site. Instagram Shop has several features such as shoppable posts and stories, influencer tagging, in-app checkout, and explore shop. These features, because they’re extremely convenient for users, can easily boost your marketing efforts.

The best part about all of these content formats is that you don’t need to start from scratch anymore. Today, there are numerous third-party apps that can help you create content that perfectly aligns with your business aesthetic.

When formulating a content plan you can begin by getting a style guide in place, setting up your page composition and color palette, choosing your fonts and filters, and thinking about captions. Of course, you can always enlist the help of an Instagram marketing company in Kuwait to aid your efforts.

4. Publish content

Now that you’ve readied our content, you should start implementing the how's and when's of publishing that content. For starters, you need to come up with a caption that includes a call-to-action, a couple of emojis to give it some personality, and anywhere between 1-5 hashtags. When writing these captions, remember that less is more. Another thing you want to strategize around is the timing of your posts. There are certainly optimal times for your content to receive the most engagement, i.e., when activity’s the highest on Instagram, and when your followers are most likely to see your posts. You can easily find a list of these times online, use one of the many Instagram marketing tools out there, or consult an internet marketing company in Kuwait. These tools can also help you cross-post from other platforms, while allowing you to optimize each post for Instagram.

5. Access Instagram Analytics

Instagram’s business account features a few analytics tools that help in viewing insights like follower growth, number of impressions, reach, and engagement. However, these metrics are limited to individual posts and campaigns. If you’re interested in getting a more in-depth analysis of your content strategy, you can always use a multitude of third-party apps. It’s a good idea to look at how different content types perform in comparison to each other. For instance, if your audience is more interested in product photos and not so much in your lifestyle photo shoots, you know what to cut back on. Instagram Analytics is the perfect way to better understand your customers’ needs and wants, keep improving your content based on that information, and ultimately produce better results.

Whether it's for growing an engaged community, reaching a new customer base, or boosting ecommerce sales, businesses of all kinds have a lot to gain from an established Instagram presence. To take your company’s brand awareness, customer loyalty, and sales to the next level, contact our team at Design Master, a social media marketing company in Kuwait. We can help you manage your Instagram marketing presence along with your other social channels.

Check out our website for more information: https://www.design-master.com/