If you own clothing, gift or another brand, you may want to consider using Instagram and Instagram Ads to promote it. Here’s how to proceed with some practical tips.
Continually growing and updated, always in step with user needs, but very close to the needs of companies wishing to sponsor themselves through social media marketing: we are talking about Instagram, the visual platform par excellence, historically linked to the world of images but today open to dynamic experiments on video content of various kinds.
Suppose you have entered the world of online promotion. In that case, you will indeed have wondered if it is worthwhile for your business to include Instagram in the marketing mix and start using it in a professional and targeted manner for your growth and visibility purposes. Some particular commercial sectors, such as those related to the fashion or design universe, are undoubtedly perfect for being promoted on a social network like IG. Still, with a well-planned strategy, this tool can prove to be an excellent ally for a wide range of businesses.
Capable of arousing immediate reactions and high emotional impact, images, Stories, IGTV, and Reels are certainly engaging channels to effectively promote your brand on Instagram and combined with the paid advertising opportunities offered by the Zuckerberg platform, they transform a “simple” social in a real showcase open to the target audience you want to intercept.
How to make the most of the social network? Here are some essential tips for setting up your Instagram marketing.
Also Read: This Is How Instagram Marketing Works
Is it worth promoting your brand on Instagram?
Before thinking about how to sponsor your business on Instagram, there is a preliminary strategic phase that you should face: a careful evaluation of aspects such as if, how and why you should use IG to promote your brand. Why would you want to integrate Instagram into your marketing plan, and what do you expect to achieve from the platform? The most wrong step you can take in your communication choices is investing time and resources in companies whose aims and possible returns you do not know exactly.
So stop and study in detail what your corporate macro objectives are and assign specific sub-goals to be achieved to each communication channel you would like to activate. Also, engage in an in-depth analysis of your target audience: this is essential to understand which of the many social media available precisely reflects the audience you would like to intercept.
Try to identify the specific characteristics of the IG audience to understand if the buyer personas you want to contact widespread the platform: in what age group are IG users, what profession they do, what buying and browsing habits they have, what are their hobbies and interests and what type of content do they want to enjoy?
To make these fundamental considerations, you can be based on the numerous reports that periodically analyze the targets of individual social networks. Still, you can also spy on the movements of your competitors, who will have done the same research before you: what they do, on which social networks they move, and how do they operate? Get inspiration and ideas to build your plan of attack.
Create and curate your corporate Instagram profile
To hit your typical consumer in the heart and capture their attention, you have a few seconds, whatever the means of communication you use. The first elements that IG users encounter when they happen on your profile are your profile picture, your name and your Bio: it, therefore, follows that they must be organized in the minor details and treated maniacally.
Choose a profile image that expresses your brand’s personality in a few strokes: the excellent idea is to use your company logo, but you could also make a careful selection to find an image that tells about you and the feelings you want to convey to the public. The same goes for the username choice: to create a strong brand image, it focuses on coherence, harmony and recognizability.
The Instagram Bio, in its few characters, holds extraordinary importance. This is where you should make a short but incisive narration of your business, your brand and your offer. Your Bio should clarify in a few characters who you are, what you do and how you do it and make your visitors feel immediately involved and pampered by your profile.
Two handy tricks are to use relevant hashtags to make your profile even more SEO friendly for the IG algorithm, and also insert in the Bio a link that guides your users to the pages of your website, your blog or your store or accompany them to visit landing pages specifically designed to welcome them.
Instagram also allows you to insert a button that leads to a contact email, but you can enter the primary references to reach you directly in the Bio if you want.
Also Read: How To Gain Followers On Instagram?
Define your content strategy
Once you have clearly and foresighted your goals, opened your Instagram account, and created an engaging Bio, it is time to define precisely what to publish in practice to achieve your business goals.
First of all, ask yourself which messages you would like to express through social media and which elements of your brand you would like to promote through Instagram. Do you want to use the platform to talk about your corporate culture or behind the scenes of your company? Or to get an overview of your products and services and lead customers to action? Or, do you want to use IG as a showcase to increase your brand awareness and create a community of passionate followers?
Once you have decided what to communicate, you will have to decide in what format to share it: in your Instagram feed, you can insert photographs, but also graphics, short videos, or, nowadays, even your IG TV content or your Reels.
Identify specific field experiments that are the most engaging formats for your audience and create a content strategy that continually offers new and high engagement.
When planning your content, remember that you will draw from your archive of images and graphics, and other valuable sources. For example, you can schedule quotes, repost, or third-party content (always mentioning the source clearly and tagging the author of the content).
But you can also count on the interactivity of the social network to convince users to produce so-called User Generated Contents, i.e., content created by the followers of the profile and loyal to the brand, both spontaneously and when stimulated through specially designed contests, quizzes, and games.
This strategy allows both always to have new content for the feed and, above all, make users feel part of the company and its philosophy and an essential element of a lively and dynamic community of people sharing the same values. In short, you can transform every single follower into a brand ambassador of the highest value.
However, the essential advice is to draw up a specific editorial calendar to follow, which explains the publications in the short, medium, and long term, their frequency over time, and their role in the overall strategy, so that the way to go is clear and that there is a particular logical thread that accompanies each proposed content.
Also Read: How To Promote Instagram Using Traditional Marketing Techniques?
Take care of the aesthetics and tone of voice of your profile
Instagram is social visual par excellence, so the aesthetics of your feed are crucial. To effectively promote your brand on Instagram, you will need to decide what your profile will look like in terms of images, graphic layouts, colors, etc. Each of these points will reflect your brand and tone of voice and communicate you’re every message even before captions, promotional claims, and calls to action.
Choose them carefully to be consistent with your corporate image and with the tone of voice you also use on other channels, such as website, newsletter, or other social media. You could have fun developing mood boards that contain the main elements of your communication, such as the color palettes to use, the atmosphere that your profile must have, and the emotions that your copy must convey.
Having them available will allow the entire team that deals with social media to maintain constant communication consistency: the quality of every single post will always act as a beacon in the IG universe, which must meet high standards, whether it is photography or video content. The public now expects excellence from the material proposed on Instagram.
Instagram Ads
Suppose you want to increase the visibility of your profile and reach a large number of users on the platform. In that case, you can also decide to sponsor your brand on Instagram using IG’s sophisticated advertising platform.
Promotions on Instagram can be managed directly from the social network, but to have full control over the ongoing campaigns and the KPIs to be monitored, it is advisable to use the Facebook promotion tools, which allow you to activate promotions both on FB and on Instagram, at the same time or separately.
The degree of segmentation possible today achieved by these social networks is exceptionally sophisticated and allows you to launch promotional campaigns to target specific, well-selected audiences, maximizing budgets, resources and results.
It is also possible to precisely decide the purpose of each campaign and then aim to achieve new likes or followers, clicks on links and CTAs, traffic to the landing website, and many other conversion strategies.
Also Read: Who Founded Instagram | History, Characteristics & Features
Collaborate with influencers
An equally performing alternative today to promote a brand on Instagram is to establish collaborations with the influencers of your market niche: users who have achieved success on the platform and can count on a large community of followers who listen and trust their opinions.
The trust element is precisely the critical factor of an influencer marketing campaign, since conveying a promotional message to users who are already segments and inclined to assimilate what their favorite influencer has to say leads to a net increase in the chances of success of each campaign.
However, it is necessary to choose the most suitable influencer to be the spokesperson for your brand and who has engagement rates appropriate to your spending possibilities on the budget you decide to channel into this activity: do not forget that in addition to the mega influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers, there is an exciting panorama of micro and nano influencers who, in the face of a lower number of followers, have a powerful impact on the fan base that follows them with passion and dedication.
Try to integrate all the elements seen so far into your communication tactics, dynamically combining each point, from creating a specifically designed bio to applying paid promotion strategies. You will immediately notice how Instagram can transform itself into an indispensable resource for your business.
