The digital marketing game is extremely competitive for a long time now. Every new year, fresh opportunities arise. Since Instagram has become a huge trend in social media, every blogger, webmaster, and digital marketer should definitely understand the potential of this amazing platform.
First of all, Instagram is owned by Facebook. You probably understand what that means. If Facebook stays, Instagram stays too. As a matter of fact, Instagram’s popularity has never decreased throughout the years, showing only significant increases.
Second, Instagram is THE social media network which is recognized as the “best place” for posting images, graphics, and visual content in general.
If you’re a blogger who’s appealing to an Instagram-friendly niche, then you’ve landed on the perfect spot. In today’s post, I’m sharing X significant tips that’ll skyrocket your Instagram marketing performance in no time.
The best part is that these tips are all practical, achievable, and proven. You just have to work for it!
1) Know Your Audience First
Every social media campaign – whether its Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram – requires some basic fundamentals before it is set into motion.
One of the key essences of effective Instagram marketing is the understanding of your target audience. If you’re posting content on social media, it means you’re looking for people who are resonating with the messages you send. However, you must find these people first.
In the first instance, you get to know your audience asking yourself some questions:
- Age/gender/nationality/ideologies/culture/etc.
- What are their biggest problems?
- What are their pressing needs?
- What are their urging desires?
- What do they do when they spend time on Instagram?
- What do they pay attention to online?
- What do they subconsciously seek?
- What sparks their attention?
- What motivates or inspires them?
Basically, the first step to effective Instagram marketing as a blogger is to identify why would the people you “bring” from Instagram become interested in your content, suggestions, or offers.
You should leverage social listening tools to instantly get notified whenever your brand’s name is mentioned on Instagram. By quickly responding, you can create some engagement and improve the reach of your social media page.
2) Establish Concise Instagram Marketing Objectives
As a blogger, you should always organize yourself properly by following specific goals. As long as you know where you’re heading, it’s just a matter of time. However, if you start an Instagram campaign without knowing exactly what you want to achieve with it, chances are that it’ll never get accomplished.
Here are the most common Instagram marketing campaign objectives:
- Improve brand awareness
- Promote a product launch
- Increase the brand’s reputation
- Generate email subscribers
- Survey the audience and obtain feedback
- Acquire direct sales
I’d highly suggest you stay away from “intrusive” advertising, as Instagram is a place where people try to relax. Being too intrusive with your advertisements and content will probably put you in a very bad spot.
3) Use the 80/20 Rule
Pareto’s 80/20 rule or principle suggests investing 80% of our resources into 20% of the most important things. Simply put, you should focus 80% of your attention, energy, and money on 20% of the Instagram marketing strategies/ideas/campaigns that are proven to generate the most results.
Also, Instagram is all about quality content. Nowadays, every Instagrammer is trying to improve the quality of his pictures – either by taking better shots or by selecting better content to curate. Outsourcing a writing service is often a wise choice, especially if you’re not capable of writing decent copy and content. I’d further advise you to check Papersowl review, as you can find some pretty good writers there, exactly as I did.
4) Upgrade Your Post Headlines
The overall quality of an Instagram post is comprised of more factors. Your headlines matter so much because they’re the first things that get read. If the user sees something potentially interesting in the headline, he’ll immediately click on the title to see more.
Creating a mediocre title is just like cleaning up half of your room only. If you want to obtain the real result (attract attention / feel good because it’s clean), you need to go all the way and make sure that you’re taking the best actions that will lead to the best result.
To improve your Instagram post titles, you can use the so-called “power words”. These are strong words that enter the person’s subconscious and make him pay attention!
5) Improve Your Reach through Influencers
Influencer marketing is a great method that works for every social media marketing campaign, especially on Instagram.
Instagram is well-known for its number of “influencers”. Well, an influencer is not just the user who has over100.000 followers. It is also the user that has over 5000 engaged followers. In fact, the level of engagement that an audience presents is often more relevant than its quantitative aspect.
I’d highly suggest you start by contacting “small influencers” who are followed by your ideal target audience members. So, for example, if you are blogging about health improvement, you can easily contact influencers that are covering psychology and mental topics because the two niches go hand in hand.
Another tip would be to let the influencer speak for himself rather than providing him with a script. Every influencer knows its audience better than you do, and they know how to “expose the problem” or how to emphasize the benefits of your business offers.
6) Use Stories Properly
Instagram Stories are huge assets for every blogger who’s looking for extra reach. Your blog posts or video posts can be easily promoted through your Instagram stories:
Simply create a thumbnail, write your post’s title and description on it, and include a CTA (call-to-action) that asks people to click your link if they want more information.
Stories have a bigger reach potential than posts which are posted normally on the news feed. Most people check their Instagram stories more than once a day just because they don’t want to “miss something”.
Well, that’s a great angle to use, especially if you’re in the blogging business!
7) Use Hashtags Wisely
Hashtags are effective “weapons of reach” that you can get used to really easy and quickly. Learning to use hashtags on Instagram isn’t rocket science – the best way to figure out how many you should post, whether there should be two or three general/specific hashtags, or whether to post them on this post or that post is to study and see what works in your niche.
Simply have a look at your direct competitors and learn from what they’re doing. Find the patterns behind their hashtags and complete it with your own knowledge, experience, and expertise. If you’re totally new to hashtags and their general use, make sure you read this first!
8) Don’t Be Afraid to Invest in Instagram Ads
There’s a simple saying that goes like this: no risk, no win. It’s true, and it applies especially to blogging and marketing.
You see, a blogger must truly fight his way out of the “average zone”. That is not an easy fight, especially if the blogger lacks the necessary resources.
Paid advertising is the most effective way to immediately reach your Instagram objectives, regardless of what they are. If you’re willing to risk $50 to win $60 even if you risk losing them all, it means that you’re willing to fail and lose before you find a way to win.
Work a few extra hours at your fulltime job, write an extra article and sell it for money, do something for an extra buck, and start investing!
9) Focus on Engagement rather than Transactions
As I’ve mentioned before, Instagram is not a marketplace. It is a social channel that individuals use to “eat time”, communicate, and have fun.
If you’re a blogger that’s looking for genuine followers, you want to introduce yourself properly by giving people a reason to engage. That either means you provide them with an incentive (free eBook for email), or you ask questions at the end of your posts in order to generate conversations.
Focus on creating the initial contact and use other channels such as email or phone to cultivate the relationship. Ideally, Instagram is the bridge between prospective leads and confirmed leads.
10) Track, Measure and Optimize Your Performance
Just like blogging, Instagram marketing is a fluid activity that is always changing and shifting. You’re promoting your blog’s content on Instagram because it’s supposed to bring you enough traffic for your efforts to be truly worthwhile.
Now – you can only do that if you can constantly keep track of your decisions and the performance that follows after they’ve been taken. Simpler put, you need to track, measure, and optimize your campaigns as you are performing them. If something’s wrong, pause the campaign and fix the mistake. If it works perfectly, repeat the process or simply scale it.
Of course, you can leverage digital marketing tools (Instagram analytics, more specifically) to improve your marketing automation and to eventually generate better results.
Takeaways
Instagram marketing is a tremendous potential source of traffic that every single blogger can now leverage to change the face of their business. Make sure you actually put all this advice into practice and the results will speak for themselves, and make sure you’re truly consistent!
Author Bio:
[thrive_testimonial name=”” company=”” image=”https://www.dsim.in/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/PeterHill.jpg”]Peter Hill is one of the best essay writers online working for the thesis writing service BestEssay. He is a socially active person, likes traveling and photo/video editing. You can find him on Twitter.[/thrive_testimonial]
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