Today, Instagram has over one billion users and counting, making Instagram marketing more important than ever for brands hoping to grow their audience.
However, between using hashtags and making content striking enough to garner more likes, trying to find an effective strategy for Instagram isn’t easy. Whether you’re struggling with your approach to Instagram or want to pick up the pace with your follower count, we’ve compiled a list of 15 Best Instagram marketing tips that will change your Instagram campaigns forever.
15 Best Instagram Marketing Tips (That Actually Work In 2024)
1. Define Your Instagram Goals
Effective Instagram marketing starts with clearly defining your goals for the platform. Though Instagram is a crucial part of brands’ social media marketing strategies, each brand has different goals for using the platform. While some want to increase brand awareness and boost web traffic, others are focused on lead generation and improving community engagement. For this reason, it’s important to first define your social media end game before launching into a new campaign.
Defining your goals helps to improve your Instagram ROI, guide your social media marketing budget, and help to make sense of your analytics from each campaign. These goals will help you gain a better understanding of how insights like impressions, engagement rates, and followers are helping to take your business to the next level.
2. Find Your Audience
The next step in successfully marketing your brand on Instagram is to accurately identify your target audience. Your target audience should be a composite of your buyer persona or the ideal customer that you’re hoping to target with your Instagram marketing efforts. Consider your ideal customer’s interests, socioeconomic characteristics, and financial circumstances to gain a better idea of your target audience.
In identifying your audience, pinpoint the age, goals, and occupation of your audience. Remember, that your ideal audience is one that is already interested in the product or service you’re selling. These are the people that you’ll be targeting in your upcoming Instagram campaigns.
3. Use Instagram Tools
If you aren’t already using tools to improve your approach to Instagram marketing, now is the time to make this part of your Instagram campaign. Consider the following tools to use on Instagram:
Kicksta
As the favorite Instagram growth tool of brands and influencers, Kicksta kickstarts Instagram growth with its automated “liking method”. Clients input their target hashtags, accounts, and location as Kicksta “likes” two posts from relevant Instagram accounts. This type of engagement will result in increased likes and follows from new Instagrammers and organic growth.
Canva
Instagram is all about appearance. No brand’s Instagram campaign is complete without compelling graphics for their main feed and their stories. Canva is a free graphics tool that allows you to make quality content that fits in with your consistent brand aesthetic.
Plann
Plann is a popular planner that many Instagrammers use to create a more strategic feed. This app makes it easy to plan out every post ahead of time, allowing you to create a highly curated Instagram feed that followers find aesthetically pleasing.
In addition to planning your content, Plann is a scheduler and analytics tool that allows you to schedule posts ahead of time and analyze your Instagram metrics.
4. Optimize Your Profile
Optimizing your Instagram profile is another important step to follow in the best Instagram marketing tips. With over 25 million brands on the platform, it’s important to stand out as much as possible. By optimizing your profile with the right hashtags, links, and bio, you’ll be sure to attract new followers quickly.
The first step in optimizing your Instagram profile is to make a business account. Business Instagram accounts provide analytics for every post’s performance and metrics related to follower growth. Additionally, business accounts enable a tab for your office hours, location, and contact information that is separate from a traditional bio. Moreover, on business Instagram accounts, brands have the ability to boost a post to a wider audience.
Your bio is another aspect of your profile that you need to curate properly. Take advantage of the space in your bio by using relevant or branded hashtags that will allow followers to discover your content. Similarly, sharing a branded hashtag adds another clickable link that Instagrammers can click through to find relevant content.
Don’t forget to include a tagline or statement that will endear others to your brand. For example, Target’s bio is simple: “Your happy place on Instagram.” *
5. Choose The Right Profile Photo
Don’t forget to focus on a powerful profile photo when redesigning your Instagram account. The perfect Instagram photo is one that speaks volumes about your company and is consistent with your branding. For example, many brands use their logo as their profile picture to ensure long-term brand recognition.
Other brands may want to consider using a profile picture that’s true to life. Entrepreneurs and influencers often use a headshot as a way to introduce themselves to their visitors as quickly as possible. Lastly, make sure your profile picture is the same on all your other social media accounts as this helps with brand recognition and consistency.
6. Create Visually Compelling Content
The reason Instagram is so wildly successful is the simple fact that it’s all about telling a compelling visual story. The only way for brands to succeed is to develop creative content that is equally as exciting. With so many brands on Instagram already, your content needs to be visually stimulating enough to grab the attention of your target audience. Make your online presence felt using these social media marketing tips.
When creating your content for Instagram, remember to keep quality and creativity in mind. Visual content that is well crafted and intriguingly unique will be more memorable and attractive to your target audience.
Brands like Starbucks do a great job of promoting their products in unique and captivating ways:
7. Partner With Influencers For A Wider Reach
No brand’s Instagram marketing campaign would be complete without influencer marketing. Working with influencers gives brands access to opportunities to increase awareness by utilizing influencers’ growing reach. An influencer with strong ties to their community is viewed as trustworthy, leading their followers to take their advice when recommending particular brands, products, or services. When used correctly, influencer marketing can lead to a tremendous uptick in engagement and lead conversion.
Be sure to work with an Instagram influencer that complements your brand, has a large enough reach, and has quality engagement. This way, your new influencer marketing campaign will be an effective way to boost your own Instagram reach as well.
8. Write Great Captions
On a platform that is so dependent on the quality of visual content, written content still matters just as much as photos and videos. The best captions can cultivate a sense of community, serving as a bridge to help both brands and influencers feel authentic to their audience. Though some brands make the mistake of putting all their effort into crafting incredible photos and videos and using a few emojis as the caption, writing out thoughtful content with every post is another way to connect with your audience and encourage more engagement.
The right caption is what stands between garnering several hundred comments or just getting a few likes, so choose wisely. Your caption can offer deeper insight into every post you share. Ranging from a simple sentence to multi-paragraph confessions, your written content on Instagram can reach your followers in a way that the most popular picture can’t. Choose carefully crafted captions to make sure they drive the point of every post home.
9. Use Hashtags Wisely
Hashtags are another essential to include as part of your social media strategy. Hashtags are essentially keywords that influencers, brands, and the average Instagrammer use to find the content they like and to share their own content. Taking advantage of trending Instagram hashtags and recently used hashtags will instantly grow your brand’s reach and boost your follower count over time.
Start off your hashtag use by researching related and relevant hashtags that fit your brand using tools like the Kicksta hashtag generator.
Use this tool to type in a hashtag and search by top hashtags, random hashtags, and hashtags that are the best match. Then, enter your email to unlock your hashtags.
10. Use Instagram Stories
Instagram stories are another tool to include as part of your Instagram marketing campaign to better reach your audience. Instagram Stories allows brands to share a feed of timely content that disappears after a 24-hour period. Share videos or photos to your stories to stay in constant contact with your Instagram followers.
While your Instagram feed is equally as important, your Stories are prioritized by the platform as they are highlighted at the top of the Stories feed. Whenever you add a new post to your story, your profile photo is highlighted purple, alerting your followers that you’ve just added a story.
All content in Stories has a sense of scarcity and urgency, encouraging users to act quickly when engaging with your content. The best Stories content includes tutorials, behind-the-scenes, time-sensitive promos, and special announcements.
11. Post At The Right Times
Another aspect of social media marketing brands must remember is to share their content at the right time. While it may seem that Instagrammers are always using the platform 24/7, it’s important to pay attention to when your followers and Instagrammers in your target audience are most active on the platform. This way, you can capitalize on their active engagement by sharing your content at these peak times.
In Instagram Insights, you’ll see the times your followers are most active on the app.
Similarly, apps like Best Upload Time share the ideal time to post based on your followers’ activity.
12. Monitor Your Followers
Over time, your Instagram following may not accurately reflect the users that actively engage with your brand. If you’ve had your Instagram account for several years, it’s important to take the time every now and then to do a follower spring cleaning. Look through your list of followers to identify inactive accounts or bots. As these accounts aren’t actively engaging with your posts, getting rid of these followers serves to keep your follower count as authentic as possible, ensuring that you’re growing an audience of interested, active, and real users.
13. Follow Other Users On Instagram
Though brands may get the idea that they should keep the number of accounts they follow as low as possible on the platform, real engagement comes from forming authentic relationships with other users. Brands can foster this type of relationship on Instagram by actively following other followers. Though you may be concerned about increasing your follower count, don’t worry about this. As you follow more users and engage with more Instagrammers, your following count will continue to grow expeditiously as well.
14. Expand Your Audience With Instagram Ads
Though your hashtags, posts, follows, captions and stories all serve to drive engagement, this isn’t always enough to reach your audience. Thankfully, brands on Instagram have access to Instagram Ads. On Instagram, brands can use Instagram Ads to boost any post based on customization options, formatting and targeting capabilities designed to increase your reach and improve engagement.
As Instagram’s ever-changing algorithm continues to affect brands, influencers, and most Instagrammers in general, it pays to promote certain posts on the platform. By boosting your posts with Instagram ads, you’re guaranteeing that more Instagram users will have access to your content.
15. Make Sure You Track the Right Metrics
Metrics on Instagram can help you optimize your campaigns for the highest level of engagement. However, Instagram analytics are only useful if you know what to look for. Make sure you’re tracking the right metrics as you work to improve your campaigns.
The most important Instagram metrics are those that will help you attract more followers, increase your engagement, boost your click-throughs, and help you achieve your overall Instagram goals. Watch out for the following metrics:
- Impressions
The number of people looking at your posts
- Engagement rate
The number of shares, likes, and comments
- Branded or trending hashtags
Measure the effectiveness of your hashtags
- Click-throughs from the bio link
This metric determines the click-through-rate of your bio link
- Follower growth
The rate at which your followers are growing
- Instagram story engagement
The level of engagement driven by your Instagram Stories
Quick Links
- How to Increase Instagram Followers Organically [Guide]
- 11+ Social Media Experts Roundup On- Instagram Marketing Tips For
- How To Grow Your Instagram Followers By 300% On Your Account
- How To Make Money Through Instagram (200% ROI)
- Top Ways You Can Promote Your Company Through Instagram
Conclusion- Best Instagram Marketing Tips in 2024 Instagram Marketing Tips You Can’t Afford to Ignore
Instagram is a powerful marketing tool that should be an essential part of any brand’s marketing campaign. Make sure your efforts on Instagram are as effective as possible by following a comprehensive marketing strategy using these tips to guide you along the way. Following the above given 15 Best Instagram Marketing tips you can kick start your business online. Make your online presence felt using the best social media marketing tips.
