If running an excellent social media strategy is the key to boost your sales, Instagram should be the best channel for businesses to market and widen their audience. With approximately more than 500 million users daily, having an effective Instagram strategy is a recipe for building a huge presence for your brand.

Increased engagement translates to increased sales and effective brand promotion. However, not all Instagram marketers have mastered several ways of making their Instagram presence to be felt. Actually, despite this age of digital marketing, only 52 percent of small businesses use Instagram to promote their products and services.

That said, if you want to reach out and churn a significant percentage of the audience on Instagram, try out the following tips.

Update Your Instagram Bio

Instagram bio is an amazing tool that several businesses haven’t learnt how to leverage it yet. It is a key factor if you are looking to optimize your page. Update your Instagram bio with the following;

• Business hashtag
• A brief description of your brand
• HTML link to your website

You can include any other necessity to your Instagram bio. Note that the more authentic it seems, the better for your Instagram’s page growth.

Curate Your Instagram Strategy

There are currently more than 9 million Instagram business profiles, with this number increasing. This reflects the amount of competition your business is facing, perhaps a reason why you should have an Instagram strategy to stick to. The first and most important thing in your Instagram strategy is identifying your audience.

You should have a clear knowledge of who you are targeting. Are they male or female? What age bracket do they fall under? Doing market research to understand your audience is an essential part of this strategy. Once you identify such demographics, you can then publish relevant content.

Your Instagram strategy should also outline the objectives of growing your Instagram presence. The type of goals on your strategy is hugely dependent on your industry of concern. However, there are three common goals for every business. You could either be looking to build brand awareness, generate leads and drive sales or make your Instagram presence to build an active and engaging community.

With your goals well laid out, focus on creating and publishing content that will help you meet the goals. Depending on the goals, you can use various types of content. Photos and videos, stories and user-generated content are suitable for meeting the three mentioned objectives. An Insta followers app could also help you in that process.

Leverage Instagram Stories

Instagram stories are perhaps something that every Instagram user is well aware of. However, has it helped you attract traffic to your page? If you want to boost your presence, keep your IG story always active. You should include videos, product pictures with brief descriptions, links and much more.

To have Instagram followers feel connected to your brand, share rare pictures and videos such as behind the scenes in your Instagram stories. Don’t forget important tags such as polls, location, and GIFs to boost your engagement.

Post More of Visual Content

Since its inception, Instagram has been a highly visual platform. You should, therefore, make sure that you include at least one video in your feed or story every day. You can also take advantage and repost an already viral video to drive huge traffic and audience to your Instagram business handle.

When reposting videos, ensure that the video has some correlation with your niche. It can also be a funny video but should drive your target audience to your Instagram page. Video content and visuals, in general, are a good way of creating engagement on Instagram and other social platforms.

Find Optimal Posting Times

All social media platforms have their own optimal posting times. The best time to post to your Facebook or Twitter audience won’t be the best time for your Instagram audience. From your Instagram business profile, you can easily tell the best time to post or publish your content.

Stick to a schedule, making sure that you post at least once every day. The more active your business page is, the more users will notice and thus more engagement. Once your audience identifies you with specific posting times, they will always be on the lookout every other time for new content from your page.

Check Instagram analytics to understand the best time and days to post. According to various stats, the best time to post is between 3pm and 6pm and from 9pm onwards on weekdays. Regardless of the time, Wednesday and Thursday are considered the most engaging days while Sunday is the least engaging day.

Nonetheless, always keep a close eye on your likes and engagement to find the best time for your brand as this doesn’t provide a guarantee that it will work for your brand.

Maximum Use of Hashtags

The use of hashtags is synonymous with Twitter and Instagram. However, not all Instagram marketers have mastered this art. To turn around your presence on Instagram, ensure that you make good use of searchable hashtags. Make sure that you understand how to use them to avoid stuffing your posts with irrelevant tags.

Using a lot of hashtags doesn’t translate to immediate audience reach. You can as well reach your target audience just by using a few hashtags. An optimum content-driven post should have a maximum of nine hashtags. Hashtags aside, ensure that you add a good and captivating caption that attracts your audience.

Conclusion

Turning around your online presence on Instagram is quite a task, taking into consideration the limited knowledge on better use of Instagram for business. Instagram is a nice performing platform and an absolute goldmine for a new business looking to establish a new audience on this platform.

Apart from the tips mentioned above, publishing quality content is the key to make your Instagram presence stronger. Note that Instagram is a highly visual platform. Therefore, when using content, ensure that you keep it clear, concise and creative. You should as well learn to work with influencers to boost your brand’s credibility score.

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