How to Use Instagram to Promote Your Brand and Drive Sales
Web Designer in Houston
Would you like to get your products and brand seen by more people, grow a strong following of customers who really relate to your brand, and get paid? If so, then Instagram is your magic spell.
Now that Instagram has over 700 million monthly users (that’s more than Twitter!), many brands are finding ways to interact with the Instagram community and earn personally invested customers who keep coming back for more.
But it’s not just the numbers you should care about. It’s the people using Instagram.
Instagrammers are shoppers. Iconosquare’s 2015 Instagram study shows that 70% of IG users report having already looked up a brand on the platform. Plus, 62% of users follow a brand just because they like it!
If you post the right Instagram images, consumers soak up your marketing message without any hard sales pitches from you; hence, your magic spell for appealing to customers without “selling to them.”
Shoppers turn to social media for references. So the moral of the story is this: Instagram helps convert passive shoppers into confident customers.
1. Set Up Your Optimized Business Instagram Account
If you’re going to Instagram for your business, your account must be separate from your personal one.
Keep in mind that marketing is all about the audience and not about you, so selfies and snapshots of your Costa Rica trip with the significant other should stay personal. They’re not relevant to your customers and won’t get you sales!
Include a Link to Boost Traffic to Your Site
On Instagram, you have only one opportunity to directly lead a click over to your website.
Your bio is the one place where your link is clickable, right under your name and description at the top of your Instagram page. Always include the link to your online shop or a targeted landing page in this spot.
Stay Recognizable with a Consistent Name and Photo
All your Instagramming will be for nothing if the pieces don’t easily fit together to show what your brand actually is. The key is to stay recognizable! Choose an Instagram name that’s the same as, or related to, your business’s name across other social media channels.
Keep your profile image consistent as well. All your interactions and engagement on Instagram will be accompanied by the little thumbnail of your profile pic. Make sure it’s something recognizable and professional!
2. Create Popular Instagram Posts That Users Want to Follow
You’ve heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, so let’s use this power to its full, customer-hooking advantage.
Analysts credit the growing popularity of Instagram to its image-centric platform, especially since other social media sites (for example, Facebook) get twice as many comments on posts that contain an image versus just text or links.
Our preference for images is bio-engineered into our brains. In fact, 90% of information transmitted to our brains is visual.
So let’s harness the beloved and effective visual world of Instagram and post some product photos that really make sales! But remember that while Instagram is full of shoppers, it’s not necessarily a shopping destination.
3. Reach a Larger Instagram Following
Even if you’re posting awesome images, you need a strategy to get people to even see them and start following you. Here are some techniques to grow your followers list and show off your brand to more potential fans:
Include Hashtags to Widen Your Discoverability
Instagram feeds change fast, and your content can get buried quickly. Hashtags are the only way to increase the shelf-life of your Instagram posts. They lump your posts together into communities linked by a keyword, remaining discoverable forever.
Most posts include at least one hashtag (88%), but don’t go overboard on a single post. Engagement has been shown to go down on posts with more than 5 hashtags. Plus, it’s a cluttered look and risks coming off salesy.
So How Do you Hashtag?
(1) Brainstorm keywords and phrases relevant to your brand.
(2) Research popular and trending hashtags.
Use data analysis apps like Iconosquare to research popular, trending hashtags. For example, you can look up whether #womensfashion or #womensstyle has more searches. Then scan through people who use those tags to see if your image fits that community.
Source: NeilPatel
About LaraNet: We are a web design firm focused to help you to grow your business and communicate with your customers and prospects using two simple but powerful tools: 1) Interactive Website and 2) Internet Marketing Strategy on social networks like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc… Whether you want to work with just a web page, or launch or improve your presence on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn or communicate with your customers through newsletters, or improve the location of your business in the search engines through Search Engine Optimization, or start marketing your products or services online, in LaraNet we can help you.
