Social media platforms have taken over the world, providing news, insights, entertainment, product recommendations, and more. With the variety of different audiences present on these platforms, they are an incredibly powerful tool for marketing your brand.
However, success doesn’t happen overnight, and you need to have a concrete social media marketing strategy in place to reach your business goals. Today we will look at how to make your brand stand out on Instagram. According to the platform, more than 25 million businesses are actively using this social media platform to build their brand, so you need to know how to build a concrete brand presence here to effectively reach out to your target market.
What are the benefits of branding on Instagram?
Builds trust and recognition
Brand trust is a valuable asset that reveals your audience’s confidence in your business.
Instagram helps your showcase to your audience why you are the right choice for their needs. With brilliant visuals, engaging text, and the right partnerships, you can use this platform to connect with your audience on a deeper level. Your audience can tell when your content is professionally curated to your brand values. This will help you foster trust and help your audience recognize your brand from its stylistic colors, imagery, and more.
Generates traffic
Traffic is a major part of your Instagram marketing strategy. Whether you’re generating it using the link in your Instagram page’s description or providing links back to your account from other platforms (such as your website or emails), Instagram allows you to create connections cross-channel. This provides your audience with what they need from the touch of their fingertips.
UGC
There’s nothing better for businesses than user-generated content (UGC). UGC itself implies that your existing customers are happy with your products and services and are happy to create content showcasing their love for your brand. This content captures your audience’s attention, builds brand credibility, and drives customer engagement.
Luckily for you, Instagram is the ideal platform for encouraging your audience to create UGC through customer showcases, product highlights (learn more about this in our blog Instagram Shoppable Posts: 10 Reasons Your Marketing Needs Them), competitions and more.
How to build your brand successfully
You’re now aware of the benefits you gain from branding on Instagram. But how can you get started? Follow these Instagram branding guidelines to become an Instagram branding powerhouse.
Know your goal
Whether you want to drive more traffic to your website, get your audience to sign up for a contest, generate quality leads, drive user engagement, or more, your goals are the foundation of your marketing process. Understanding your marketing goals will help you see where you stand as a brand and know how to make your Instagram marketing count. Your goals will influence your content, brand posting guidelines, style of posting, brand partnerships, and more!
Know your market segment
Where do you belong in the market? More importantly, where does your target audience belong? Market segmentation is dividing your target audience into defined groups based on similar characteristics. This segmentation is based on your audience demographics, interests, geographic locations, preferences, and more. Knowing your audience helps you understand their needs better and present groundbreaking solutions.
This will assist you in creating strong messages, designing targeted ads, differentiating your brand from your competitors, attracting quality leads, and converting your audience. Importantly, this will also help you identify your opportunities in your target markets.
Tip: Market segmentation is NOT the same as creating buyer personas! This is on a much broader scale.
Create a clean, understandable profile
Creating your profile is the first step to optimizing your Instagram account. You must put your best foot forward to present a clean and coherent profile for your audience. Whether your approach is professional, casual, or witty, your profile should use your brand’s voice and style to showcase your business’s personality.
Ensure that your brand’s name is mentioned clearly in your content and that any products or promotions you run are understandable. Doing this will help your audience browse your content and land on your website faster.
Create your signature style
This comes back to your brand style guide. From your logo, website, and color palettes to fonts and specific design elements, branding elements elevate your brand and bring consistency to your business. When you have your signature style in place, it is easy for your team to create great posts with uniformity. This helps your audience identify your brand easily and differentiate you from your competitors.
Hashtags are your friend
Instagram hashtags are the backbone of your audience outreach and engagement. If you’re new to this platform these may seem insignificant to you, but they play a major role in promoting your brand.
Here’s just a few of the many reasons you need to choose your hashtags wisely:
- To help your audience find you
- To appear within niches in your industry
- To appear where your competitors appear
- To encourage interactions with your followers
- To understand what’s on trend
- To reach out to new audiences
- To break into new markets
But don’t be fooled! You need to include the right hashtags — not just a plethora of random words. Don’t add too many either, as this will get your posts ranked lower.
Create a posting schedule
Each piece of content you create for social media should have a specific date, time, and reason to post. A posting schedule helps you plan your content, ensuring you always have something to post that fits your theme. This is particularly important for Instagram as a consistent posting schedule will help you appear more frequently in your followers’ feeds.
Be responsive
Your audience will use your social media platforms to engage with your brand in the form of questions, feedback, social shares, and more. If you wish to survive on Instagram (or any platform), you must have a dedicated team or team member that can take the time to respond to your audience. This helps you foster brand trust and establishes you as a business that truly cares for its customers.
Measure and analyze
Measuring and analyzing your business performance helps you reach your marketing objectives. To measure your marketing campaign effectiveness on Instagram, you need to pay attention to key performance indicators (KPIs) that help you understand what’s working for your brand and what’s not.
Audience engagement rate, post reach, follower growth rate, referral traffic, Instagram Stories metrics, and click-through rate are just a few noteworthy KPIs you need to keep an eye on. Measuring your performance and understanding your opportunities will help you make data-backed decisions that put you ahead of your competitors. An Instagram marketing company can help you make precise decisions to advance your brand.
Even more social media marketing tips
Social media is essential for growth marketing success, but it needs to be done right. Luckily, our social media marketing agency has the best tips here: Social Media Marketing: Your Ultimate Guide to Growth.
Instagram has the power to boost your brand’s authority. With a massive audience presence, being able to reach out to your audience on Instagram can benefit your business immensely. While our guide may make it sound easy to build your brand here, this is easier said than done.
Teaming up with a proficient Instagram marketing agency can help you achieve this task with ease. Growth Marketing Genie is an accomplished Instagram marketing agency that can help you make the best social media marketing strategies for your business.
To learn more about how we can help you, talk to our team today!
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