With nearly a billion active monthly users, Instagram is full-fledged global social media network that enables marketers to promote their brand, showcase products, recruit new talent, humanize their content and inspire the audience. It is an excellent platform for creating brand awareness, introducing your services and products, building a loyal follower-base and driving sales and traffic. In case you are looking for ways to instantly increase your follower-base, you can Buy Real Instagram Followers. Regardless of what you sell and what your brand is, here are is how you can start with Instagram marketing.

Understanding Target Audience

For any social media marketing, it is essential to spare some time to identify your target audience before you run a campaign. This will get you an idea about how large and diverse your audience is, and help you figure out the type of content you need to share. Basically, the target audience is the foundation, on which your Instagram content depends. To define your target audience, use social listening to understand the conversations on Instagram. What do people in your industry talk about? What are the target topics on social media? Once you have spent some time looking at the conversations, you will be able to participate in them and interact with your prospects. Expand your focus beyond the topics that are related to your brand. Identify a few popular Instagram users who are relevant to your brand. Dive into their profiles to understand what they care about on social media. This will help you determine the topics you should talk about.

Also Read: 3 Awesome Ways to Use Instagram Stories for Marketing

Reaching the Audience

Now that you are clearly aware of who you are targeting on Instagram and what they care about, it is time to reach out to these people. You will need to have a strategy to reach your audience. In your strategy:

• Figure out the best time to share a post, that is when most of your target audience is active.
• Identify which content and campaigns have generated the best results over the past years.
• Observe what your competitors are sharing, as this could be source of inspiration.
• Prepare content for Instagram Stories as they can help interact more deeply with the audiences and generate greater engagement.
• Determine trending hashtags relevant to your industry, as hashtags are an excellent way to target niche communities and increase usership.

The strategy varies depending on the industry and business type. What’s working well for a clothing store may not work for a tourism brand. Even in the same industry, if two brands are not selling the same products, they cannot use similar tactics, like simple text-driven branding, tight influencer partnerships and videos.

Connecting with Influencers

The next step is to invest in an influencer strategy. For those who do not know, in influencers are your way to reach the buyer communities that you cannot reach organically. But before you can actually get in touch with an influencer, identify your goal. What do you expect from the influencers? Do you want them to help you drive more sales, or raise brand awareness? Whatever your objective is, make sure you define it for the influencer. Secondly, come with ways to track your progress and ensure you are reaching the goal. For this, you can create an Instagram analytics dashboard to measure the impact of influencer marketing. A social marketing report from 2017 stated that a number of brands use influencers to extend their reach, share branded content, promoting offerings and products etc. Instagram is an extremely effective platform for influencer marketing. In fact, results from a survey found out that Instagram influencers are the sixth most effective in influencing purchases.

Listening and Analyzing

Marketing on social media is a never-ending testing process. To keep getting good results on Instagram, you need to perform an analysis of your marketing performance from time to time. The analysis can be done in two steps. Firstly, listen to the larger conversion, that is what your audience on Instagram is generally talking about. This conversation will change as your audience changes or grows. The second step is to analyze the content you own. Are you publishing the right content based on who your target audience is? Does the audience interact and engage with your content? Are your marketing objectives being fulfilled? How well are your doing in comparison to your competitors?

Instagram Stories were introduced in August 2016 and are being my millions of users every day ever since. If you have not heard of the feature, the Stories allow you to share a photo or a video on Instagram that is only visible for 24 hours, similar to the Stories on Snapchat. While we a lot of personal accounts making use of the feature, a few brands have also tried it. Instagram Stories are an excellent tool to engage new and existing customers, promoting your products, creating brand awareness, reaching out to potential followers etc. In case you are looking for other ways to reach out to new users, you can Buy Real Instagram Followers. Nonetheless, here is our guide on how to use Stories on Instagram for Marketing.

Instagram Story Ads

Instagram Stories are an excellent placement for advertisements, where advertisers can upload videos, photos and Boomerangs, applying various fun custom tools. There are various ad objectives that can be fulfilled using the Stories, including Video Views, Reach, Lead Generation. Brand Awareness, Conversions, Traffic and App Installs. Different objectives require different CTAs. The CTAs that you can use in the Stories are Apply Now, Buy Tickets, Watch More, Sign Up, Book Now, Contact Us, Shop Now, Download and Learn More. It is essential to ensure that you choose the ad objective very carefully as it affects the other elements, such as the content of the Story, targeting audience and CTA. For instance, if your objective is to drive Traffic, your target audience will be the people who are most likely to click. Similarly, for the Conversion objective, your ad will be shown to the users who are likely to click and convert.

Also Read: How to Set Up Instagram Stories Ad to Get The Best ROI?

Insights for Stories

Just like for other ad formats on Facebook and Instagram, you can also view insights for Instagram Stories ads through Facebook Ads Manager. In this section, you will be able to determine the overall performance, reach, impressions and video metrics of your Story. By monitoring these insights, you will have an idea about which Stories are performing well and which ones are not. You can create more Stories like the ones that are performing well because your audience wants to see more of these.

Instagram Story Highlights

Although Instagram Stories are only visible for 24-hours, there is a way to make them last a little longer through Instagram Story Highlights. This feature has a section on your brand profile, just below the bio and above the posts. These Highlights are individual stand-alone Stories that appear in the section permanently unless you delete them. To post Story Highlight, you will have to create a Story and later archive it. Also, you can turn on the ‘auto-archive’ feature so that you do not lose any valuable Stories. When a user visits your brand profile, Highlights are often the first thing they notice. Hence, it is recommended that the Story Highlights are a representation of your brand. A good idea is to use the same thumbnail image for all Highlights. This will give your profile a professional and cohesive look, while making it attractive to potential customers and other viewers.

Live Stream Video Stories

Another very cool feature that businesses can make use of via Instagram Stories is the Live Videos feature. You can share a live, real-time video as a Story, which like other Stories, will last for 24-hours. Through Live Video Stories, you can verbally respond to the messages that appear on your stream. This is a form of an intimate and transparent interaction with the viewers, which is invaluable for businesses that are trying to build connections with their followers and create brand awareness.

Stories for Brand Awareness

One of the most common problems that businesses face when marketing on social media is creating brand awareness. It is easier to convert a potential customer who is familiar with your company, the real challenge is to attract the user who has never heard of your brand. This explains why brand awareness is so crucial and it must not be taken lightly. Instagram Stories are an excellent way to build brand awareness. When you consistently post Stories about your business, viewers will have more opportunity to connect with you and overtime they will start trusting your brand. When a user watches your Story, they have the option to reply to it. With more than 300 million accounts using the Stories feature on Instagram and one-third of the Stories coming from business accounts, about 20% of these Stories gets a direct message from the viewers. Hence, Stories are a great way to open up the lines of communication between your brand and the potential customer.

It is the compelling and gripping images that can make the users engage with your content on Instagram. In fact, for brands that sell their products on the network, 93% users consider image as one of the most important factors in a purchase decision. The key to earning followers on Instagram is to share visually-stunning pictures that have the power to amaze people. Also, you can Buy Real Instagram Followers to boost the follower count. Nonetheless, here are some tips on how to capture visually stunning images.

Avoid Over-Editing

There are various touch app tools available on the smartphones and PCs that can help add a more professional look to the photos. Also, you can use filters to create a more consistent look. Instagram features some excellent photo editing options that can take your picture to the next level. However, with plenty of options available, people often over edit images, which can be a huge waste of time because the editing makes very little difference to the followers. In fact, the over-edited images can appear inauthentic, fake and focused on the wrong objects. This is what users do not like seeing on Instagram. Instead of spending time on editing the pictures, you should focus on capturing better images from the start. Identify a few filters that you can apply to make the picture look more consistent.

Also Read: Branding Yourself on Instagram

Focusing on the Subject

Your picture should be focused on a single primary subject that you are trying to highlight. Even if you have multiple objects, one of objects should stand out, immediately drawing the viewer’s attention towards it. A picture that is missing a single focus point appears cluttered, where the brain and the eyes are forced to make sense of the image. In addition to this, when there is too much going on in an image, some people tend to feel stressed, as their brains try to separate the unimportant from the important. Hence, you need to make sure the images you share can be deciphered quickly and make the viewer feel something about it.

Incorporating a Background

One of the most important elements of the picture is the background. It is the logical extension of the object you are capturing. You can use a colorful or intricate background to make the plain object appear pop. On the other hand, if the subject is colorful itself, then you should go for a less intricate background, to allow the object being photographed to speak for itself. Moreover, another idea is to use backgrounds that complement with the subject matter, having similar color schemes or patterns. There are various options for backgrounds that can make the subject look:

• Friendly
• Fun
• Laid-back
• Lively
• Peaceful
• Professional
• Sophisticated
• Vintage

You should choose the look that best represents your brand and pick the background accordingly to enhance the message.

Using Natural Light

Since we spend a lot of our time in poorly lit homes and offices, our eyes have become used to it. But cameras love the natural light. Pictures taken under the natural light have more vibrant colors. Their borders appear more defined, and it is easy read the text as well. You should try to take photos in the early morning or just before the dusk. Prepare for your photoshoot when the sky is filled with white fluffy cumulus clouds that block some of the direct sunlight.

Using the Grid Feature

The grid feature can be found on most of the digital cameras and the camera app on smartphones. The feature enables the photographer to see the composition of the shot before capturing the picture. This way you can easily capture the object in the center of the grid, if centering is your goal. Or strategically place an item of multiple items off-center. Although it is not possible to make the real world perfectly conform to the grid, the grid feature helps a great deal to see the hidden symmetry that already exists.