How To Use Instagram To Promote Your Brand And Drive Sales

Posted by Tonny Rossi on November 28th, 2018

A major component of social media marketing strategy is Instagram. With its visual-based platform, Instagram has become one of the best social site in the world with over 500 million daily active users and 800 million monthly active users.

Factor that makes this site a number one platform for brands, advertisers and consumers is that 70% of hashtags featured are branded. That means that if you are not using Instagram aggressively, your competitors certainly are.

Creating an Instagram profile is just not enough. It necessarily doesn’t translate to sales. If you want Instagram to be a useful resource in driving sales and making huge profits, then you need to formulate a killer strategy that will deliver. This guide will help you get everything it right concerning Instagram marketing.

Increase followers

After setting up your profile, strategizing how to increase your follower basis the initial step for having a successful, and effective Instagram marketing. It is hard to generate sales without having a substantial number of followers. You don’t want to post cool stuff about your business and no one sees them.

The first place to start looking for followers is your current customers. A statistic revealed that over 73% of users would follow brands on social media because they are interested in the brand’s product or service.

Tell your existing customers about your Instagram profile and ask them to follow you.

As an existing business, you already have an email list. Start sending messages to your subscribers with an incentive that will entice them to follow your profile.

You can ask them to follow your profile to see frequent discounts and promotions. Be sure to stick to your words if you promise them something.

Use your business other social media platforms to promote your Instagram profile. You can place an Instagram icon with a link to your profile on your website so that traffic coming to your site can click to get to your Instagram profile.

Another strategy of gaining followers on Instagram is by following other people, people that are within your audience of the target. This will be important in your bid for generating new leads and driving sales.

To get people that lies within your target market, discover similar accounts to yours. What this means is, find profiles that post similar content to what you post or related to your industry. Start following people who follow these accounts, they will get a notification and they will click your profile. If they find that your content is similar to that of the brand they follow, they will likely follow you back.

With more followers to your account, it will be much easier for you to start generating sales through your Instagram profile.

The first impression of your page is important

The features new users see when they click your profile matters a lot.They should see your profile picture, which may be your brand log or your key product. They should also see biography and your recent post. What people see when they land on your Instagram profile should be good enough to get them to start following you.

Your Instagram profile should clear send out a message about who you really are. A logo as a profile picture is the most sensible option that may be a photo of your manager, CEO or one of your product. Your profile should immediately grab user’s attention or you will struggle to gain followers.

As far as your profile goes, just keep things short and detailed as possible.

Regular posting

If users come to your brand’s Instagram page and find a post from 3 months ago, they are going to literally run away. This will harm your brand severely.

Posting contents regularly will keep your brand fresh in the minds of your followers. But then again, be cautious when choosing the intervals of posting. You don’t want to be a nuisance to your followers.

Posting once per day is the most ideal strategy, even if you have a lot of contents to share. Nowadays Instagram has a feature called an Instagram story where you can add some of your content.

A research revealed that leading brands post on Instagram about 1.5 times per day. Translating to 10 to 11 posts every week.

The best time to post is typical during office hours. There is a reason for this though. As research showed that almost 90% of office employees use social media as a means of distraction while they are at work.

Don’t be desperate to sale

As much as the aim of all this is driving sales, don’t be all over the place with promotion contents. That is a sure way of getting a dramatic number of individuals stop following you. Try to mix things up. You can post photos of, for example, employees or die-hard customers. Do this while you stay within the objective of your Instagram marketing campaign.

We have seen that posting too much of promotional content will annoy your followers, well there are a bunch of other subjects that you need to steer away from. A subject like politics, religion or race will offend a section of your followers. Even those unaffected by your controversial post will change the perception they had of your brand.

As social media strategist of your organization tries as much as possible to keep off behaviors that will annoy your followers. These include, as we mentioned above, posting too many promotional contents, using slang and jargon, lack of personality on your account, trying too hard to be funny and not replying to your followers’ messages.

Keep this in mind, 46% of Instagram users say they will stop following profiles that post too many promotions.

Go live with your content

One of the important marketing features on Instagram is the live broadcast feature.

This feature allows you to connect with your followers in real time. This feature lets users post comments when you are online. To keep your audience engaged, try to reply to those comments and acknowledge their efforts. This is important as it will help shoot your engagement metrics up.

There are many uses of live broadcasting, like demonstrating new products, giving your audience a tour of your facility or use it to introduce employees who make the magic happen behind the scene. Saving the best for last, you can use the Instagram live story to collaborate with other brands. Other brands can feature your profile on their live broadcast. This can get your brand new exposures, increasing your followers and eventually increase your sales.

Involve social media influencers

Of course, you’re the number one promoter of your business Instagram profile, but there are other parties you can involve like social media influencers.

Influencers can help you get your content to a new audience and encourage sales. Social media influencers are known to have a very high engagement rate with a great personal relationship with their followers.

Followers tend to see micro influencers as their peers and a research shows that 90% of consumers say they trust their peers’ recommendations. 

Include hashtags to your captions

Curate captions that drive engagement, this is an art in itself so be careful. There are numerous online resources that you can learn to write best Instagram captions.

Hashtags are very important in posts. You can choose to use the hashtags that already exist or you can create a new one for your own.

Observer your most-liked posts

Note the posts that get the highest engagement level as these are your successful posts.

Instagram likes provider

These likes translate to the direct feedback from your audience that your posts contain the right content for them. Pay attention also to those posts that attract the least amount of likes and extract the differences with the ones that gather more likes. This will help you share the post that attracts right engagement from your audience.

Consider using sponsored posts

If the free strategies are not working for you, try using paying ads. This will prove to be effective even for a brand with less number of followers. These ads are linkable also, which means you can include CTAs like “Shop Now”.

Promote User-generated Content

User-generated content inspires users to post contents to their personal Instagram page related to your brand, leading to your brand getting exposure from these user’s followers and following. This is a recommendation-like type of content. There are many ways in which a brand can encourage user-generated content. First, is by running contests, and secondly by featuring users photo of their profile.

In conclusion, an active Instagram profile is the only option for an effective campaign. One of your constant goals should be to increase your followers by ensuring that your profile sends great first impression. Post regularly and not too regularly. Avoid too much promotional content. Take advantage of live video broadcasting, social media influencers and the use of hashtags.