Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms that every marketer can leverage to boost business growth. It is a very important social media channel to reach a larger audience and increase brand awareness. So if you do not have a good Instagram branding strategy, you are missing out on something big!
Today, I’ll share with you what I’ve learned from building a brand from scratch. You’ll learn all my time-tested tricks to help you grow your brand on Instagram. Instagram followers are also helpful in building the brand on Instagram. More you have followers, more you have views. When you have a number of followers, you become more famous and viral which can help you to build up your brand.
1. Define Your Goals
Before you post your first post on Instagram, ask yourself why you want your brand to be there.
What are your goals? What do you want to accomplish using Instagram?
Purpose of your brand on Instagram
Are you:
Trying to spread brand awareness
Trying to grow a community
Acquire new customers
Planning to connect with current customers
Trying to increase blog traffic
Planning to increase social media impression
Improve your current KPIs
For me, it was brand awareness. My focus was finding and helping other short men like me.
Goals and objectives can come in many different forms, depending on your brand.
The good thing is, goals change as you grow. I recommend having one to start.
2. Optimize your profile
In just 150 characters, your Instagram bio needs to make a great first impression, convey your brand personality, and tell people why they should bother following your Instagram account.
That’s a lot to ask from a small space.
Fortunately, you also get a few other fields on your Instagram profile to showcase what your brand is all about and make it easier for people to find you. These include:
Your name: 30 characters, included in search.
Your username: AKA your handle. Up to 30 characters, included in search.
Your website: A clickable URL you can change as often as you like.
Category: A business feature that tells people what you’re all about without using up bio characters.
Contact info: Tell people where to find you.
Call-to-action buttons: Give Instagrammers a way to interact with you directly from your profile page.
Tourism Vancouver does a good job of making the most of all the fields the profile has to offer.
3. Know your audience
A little preliminary research can help you figure out who you can best reach when you’re thinking about how to market on Instagram. For example:
The most active Instagrammers are between 18 and 29.
The United States is the largest Instagram market.
More urban residents use Instagram than their suburban peers.
But that doesn’t mean you should only use Instagram to try to reach urban Americans in their 20s. Instead, you need to define your target market so you can create content that speaks directly to that audience.
This will also become critical when it comes time to choose targeting options for your Instagram ads.
4. Align your Content and Audience
The first rule of building a brand on Instagram is that you need to be a content creator, not a promotional brand. People want to follow accounts that offer unique and interesting content for them to enjoy, not a string of commercials for a product or service.
This means you need to get a vivid picture of who you are targeting on Instagram and what they are interested in. This picture ought to be extremely detailed, and should include their hobbies, favorite fashion brands and ideal careers.
Once you have this consumer profile developed (and it may include multiple profiles) you need to figure out how to create content to match their desires. For example, say you are a car company and your research indicates your target customers love looking at food on Instagram.
5. Post consistently
Sticking to a regular posting schedule helps you show up in your target audience’s timelines. Instagram strives to show each person the content they’re most likely to enjoy, so it looks for content that is recent and relevant to each person’s interests.
Instagram’s algorithm uses machine learning to continuously study each person’s activity and customizes their timeline accordingly. People can’t like what they don’t see—posting regularly helps you show up in people’s feeds and give them more chances to engage with you. The more they interact with your content, the more often they’ll see it in their Instagram feed.
You can stay on top of your content by scheduling posts in batches so your account never goes dark if you get busy. Plus, scheduling makes it easier to experiment with posting times. While there’s no single best time to post on Instagram, there may be ideal times to post to reach the majority of your audience. With Buffer you can set up preferred time slots, so all you have to do is add content to your queue and the posts will automatically be placed into the next available slot.
Then, you can check back to see if posts slotted at specific times get higher engagement rates than others.
6. Write great captions
True, we just said that Instagram is a visual medium. But that doesn’t mean you can neglect your captions. Your brand voice is just as important as your brand look. Like your visuals, it should be consistent across posts.
Instagram captions can be up to 2,200 characters long, so you can use them for everything from a quick quip to detailed storytelling. That said, only the first two lines of text appear in news feed without tapping more.
Since people tend to scan captions rather than read them thoroughly, you want to get all the important information into those first two lines.
7. Use hashtags wisely
Hashtags are a key way to increase your visibility and discoverability.
You can use up to 30 hashtags in an Instagram post. But, realistically, you probably don’t want to do that.
We recommend using between five and nine hashtags per post. More than that can look like hashtag stuffing, a spammy tactic that turns followers off. Worse, if you use irrelevant or repetitive hashtags, users can choose not to see your content for that tag.
To get the most benefit, choose hashtags that:
Are relevant
Are specific to your niche
Do not encourage follow- or like-swapping
8. Create a Branded Hashtag
What’s a branded hashtag? It’s YOUR hashtag.
Creating a branded hashtag is a great way to build instant engagement.
A branded hashtag is when people use your hashtag to stand a chance to get featured on your Instagram account.
People love tagging pages and using hashtags on Instagram to get featured; I’m one of those people. It’s a way to get exposure and get more followers.
I do it all the time, and I’ve been featured on some pages. It’s one of my secret tricks.
First, mention on your profile that people will get featured if they use your hashtag.
Next, search for a moderately popular hashtag that has less than 50,000 posts, go to those photos, and start liking the pictures. This is a surefire way to get people to get notice of your account.
This will get your followers and the people whose photos you’ve liked to use the hashtag and post images of them because they will want to be featured on your page.
