How to Advertise Your Business on Instagram- Instagram has quickly become one of the best advertising platforms that businesses can join. From large corporations to small businesses, more and more companies are harnessing the potential of Instagram on a daily basis. Due to it’s growing popularity among businesses, many people are wondering “How do I advertise on Instagram?” or “How do I sell my business on Instagram?”
Instagram provides an excellent platform for business promotion. Businesses on Instagram are using their feeds to tell stories, engage with their customers, offer exclusive deals, promote products and services, and all kinds of other marketing tactics.
Table of Contents
Be an Active Participant on the Platform
Rule #1 of any social media strategy is to be more than just a publisher of content. You need to be involved.
On Instagram, that means a few things:
- Follow other people, brands and influencers
- Engage in the comment section of your posts and other’s
- Publish the awesome content of prospective customers and @mention them
Also notice the “lifestyle” content here: “Fueling up with kombucha + salad with salmon.” I’ll get into lifestyle content a bit later in this guide.
Use Testimonials
Let’s face it, you’re not the most unbiased source of information when it comes to your own business. You have a pretty damn vested interest in its success.
This is what makes testimonials as powerful as they are. And not just on social media. Testimonials are a powerful element of any marketing funnel, from landing pages to your homepage, advertisements and more.
Stick With One Branded Theme
Branding is a big part of content creation, and that goes for social media as much as it does your blog (maybe more).
People are more comfortable with your brand if they recognize it. You’ll grow more quickly, have better brand recognition and recall, and will come across as more professional than if you just throw out your posts willy-nilly.
Ramp up your content production
There’s no shortage of Instagram content you can publish to fill up your feed.
Customer photos. Memes. Bite-sized videos.
And that doesn’t even scratch the surface of what’s available to you.
To figure out what performs the best among your audience, you’re going to need to experiment. That means ramping up your content production and posting more frequently.
Publishing to Instagram at least once a day is within the platform’s best practices. Heck, major brands like TopShop and H&M post up to three times per day (if not more often).
As you roll out more content, it’s crucial to squeeze more engagement out of your following by understanding the best times to post on Instagram.
And speaking of which, that’s also why Instagram Stories are so valuable. Off-the-cuff content via Stories essentially allows you to “skip the line” and appear front-and-center in people’s feeds. Not only that, but you can freely post Story after Story without worrying about spamming your fans.
The takeaway here is that Instagram moves much quicker than it did a year or two ago in terms of content. Brands should ramp up if they want to keep up. To create content that your audience will love, make sure you have a comprehensive strategy in place and are using data to create more successful content. Download our Instagram marketing strategy guide to learn more.
Cross-promote your Instagram posts across other networks
The effort it takes to snag the perfect snapshot and craft a clever caption isn’t something that should go to waste.
Cross-posting your content to other social platforms is a no-brainer to get even more of an ROI out of your Instagram presence.
For example, you can promote your Instagram content across the likes of Facebook and Twitter to maximize your content’s reach.
Although cross-promotion is a smart move, bear in mind that each social platform has its own best practices. For example, Instagram tends to go heavier on the hashtags while you might want to craft a slightly different description for images posted to Facebook.
Sound time-consuming? It doesn’t have to be.
Sprout Social’s Asset Library enables you to store images, videos and text in a centralized location for use across multiple social networks. Quickly find, edit and publish directly from the Asset Library to deliver engaging posts that are tailored to whatever network you’re using.
Focus on people-centric content
Although Instagram is a place to score sales, it is still first and foremost a place to share experiences.
The popularity of selfies on Instagram speaks for itself, as does customer photos and pictures of people using products in real-world settings. Much of the appeal of Instagram is that brands are capable of advertising in a more human way without bombarding followers with messages that scream “BUY NOW!”
And on a related note, this is exactly why user-generated content such as customer photos are such a goldmine for brands. Not only do folks on the ‘gram love it when brands shout them out, but customer photos represent marketing firepower that proves that people dig your products.
But in order to spot and curate user-generated content for your feed, you’re going to need to understand how hashtags can help you promote your Instagram.
And that leads us to our next point.
Brands both big and small should create a hashtag to encourage sharing and promotion on behalf of their followers. Doing so doesn’t have to be rocket science, either.
For example, Ernie Ball displays their #iplayslinky and #colorsofrocknroll hashtags loud and clear in their bio.
In turn, they use the tag to promote their own posts in addition to thousands of loyal fans promoting the brand organically.
See how that works?
Beyond your own hashtags, you should try to promote your Instagram using more general, community hashtags specific to your industry such as #6strings (music) or #unicornhair (beauty). Tacking on extra tags essentially makes your posts searchable by tag-followers and instantly increases your reach.
As noted in our guide detailing how to use hashtags across every social network, engagement peaks at approximately nine hashtags. Although you can certainly use less (or more), the takeaway here is that you should at the very least add something.
Don’t forget to take advantage of hashtag analytics tools. Sprout lets you track and analyze hashtag performance to find out what’s resonating with audiences and optimize usage.
And with Sprout’s Advanced Listening, you can move beyond quantitative data to find qualitative insights related to hashtags, allowing you to fully understand campaign performance and measure share of voice. Additionally, you can identify related hashtags to dive deeper into the brand-relevant conversations consumers are having on social.
Conclusion
Instagram is the go-to social media app for many people. Whether you’re a small business owner, an entrepreneur or working for an established company, learn how to use Instagram effectively and drive sales and traffic to your online store.