Instagram isn’t just another social media platform for sharing selfies with friends and pictures of food. With more than one billion monthly active users, Instagram is one of the most powerful social media platforms for businesses to connect with audiences. Over one third of Instagram users have used the app to buy a product online, making it a very effective social media marketing tool for businesses and influencers.
In this post, we will outline the reasons why Instagram is the best social media platform for building brand awareness and provide some tips that will help you promote your business and expand your customer base.
Establishing a personality for your brand
In order to succeed on Instagram, you need to establish a strong tone and personality for your account that allows your desired audience to see what it is exactly that your brand stands for. You can’t just post pictures randomly though, you need a strategy and direction for your Instagram account. If you want to market your business effectively with Instagram, your content should be visually stimulating as well as reflect the message and values of your brand.
The biggest reason Instagram shines over other social media networks is that it is purely focused on visual-based content. There’s no denying that the content that gets the most likes and shares on Instagram is often the most visually attractive. Even if you think the industry you’re in isn’t particularly interesting from a visual standpoint, your content needs to be consistent and of high quality.
Your feed should not look like a patchwork of random images. The idea is to create a theme and visual identity that reflects the values of your industry and matches the interests of your target audience. In other words, your feed should look like what your followers aspire to. Take, for instance, Maria Ho, one of the top-ranked female poker players right now.
While the majority of her posts are about when she plays in large tournaments, what makes Maria’s Instagram stand out from a lot of the other top professional player’s feeds is that she posts engaging content about travel and her lifestyle as a poker pro, often sharing photos of herself from stunning locations around the globe. Good visual content is becoming an increasingly important part of business, so it is important that you take the time to curate eye-catching images for your Instagram feed and a create a consistent personality for your brand.
Make use of Instagram stories
Instagram Stories are probably the hottest thing on Instagram right now. It’s one of the best features for reaching out to your audience and engage with your followers to build better brand awareness. It has even been reported that Instagram Stories now has more than 500 million daily users, as of January 2019.
Unlike the photos and videos published to your account, Instagram stories disappear after 24 hours. The impermanent nature of Instagram stories allows for more informal and playful interaction with your followers. According to Instagram, some of the most popular content comes from brands, with one-third of the most-viewed stories on Instagram belonging to businesses and influencers.
Take Kayla Itsines for instance, an Australian personal trainer with just under 12 million followers. Kayla uses stories to share before and after photos of her clients to show the success that they have had using her Bikini Body Guides (BBG). This is a perfect way to promote your brand to potential customers, because you can show them how your customers have benefitted from using your product. Kayla’s posts are all centred around fitness and she often shares videos of herself and other women using her program. Kayla started her Bikini Body Building Company in 2014 and since then it has grown into a multi-million dollar business, a large portion of which is down to her strong Instagram presence.
The fact that the stories are only viewable for a limited time adds immediacy to the content you share and will encourage your target audience to engage with you if you put a call-to-action in your story.
Be sure to make use of polls, mentions, ask questions and promote your business with giveaways to keep your content audience-focused and engaging. If you want to increase brand visibility and social engagement then you need to start using Instagram stories in your content marketing campaign.
To sum up
Instagram has proven itself to be a very powerful social media marketing tool, providing a lot of advantages to businesses and influencers hoping to expand their audience and boost their brand awareness. Instagram offers businesses the opportunity to engage with their followers in a unique and creative way, which differs from pretty much all other social media platforms on the market today.
With more than 25 million businesses using the platform, it’s no surprise why so many businesses are using Instagram to promote their products. So, if you’re not already using Instagram in your social media marketing strategy to reach new customers and grow your brand then it’s definitely time for you to start ‘doing it for the gram.’
