In today’s digital age, no one can deny the importance of social media marketing in our lives. Meanwhile, Instagram has played such a crucial role in marketing that it ranks second after Facebook, leaving other social networks such as Youtube, Pinterest, and Snapchat behind. Also, Instagram has a higher engagement rate than other social media platforms. 78% of marketers worldwide use Instagram to reach out to their target audience and achieve more conversion and ROI rates.
Instagram can be a game-changer for your startup business and take it to new heights if you know how to use it effectively. Therefore, in this article, I will discuss advertising your startup using Instagram to build brand awareness and promote your business. If you are interested in the topic, stay with me.
1. Create High-quality & Engaging Content
First of all, develop a content strategy that is unique, informative, creative, engaging, and relatable. Such compelling and relevant content will provide high brand awareness and drive more interested users toward your page. Posting organic and fresh content that is eye-catching and tells a story about your new brand or business works well. You can tag some influencers or active followers in your posts to advertise your startup further.
Effective and meaningful content marketing can create a massive buzz around your brand or business and set you apart from the rest. If necessary, you can hire some content creators as freelancers. Note that to create a powerful brand on Instagram, you need a cohesive and eye-catching feed. Hence, you had better use an Instagram post deleter to clean up the old, irrelevant, and outdated content in your Instagram business account.
2. Use an Instagram Growth Service
Attracting more targeted followers to your Instagram business account is essential because the more followers you have, the more reliable and trustworthy your business will appear. However, you had better increase your follower count organically and gradually, as buying fake followers will harm your online reputation. Choosing an efficient Instagram growth service will provide you with organic reach without bots, spam, software, or fake followers. It will use advanced targeting filters, including your location, brand, the type of followers you want to target, the right hashtags, the industry competitors, and more to find new potential, real clients for your business.
3. Collaborate with the Right Influencers
Instagram influencers are great for increasing the outreach and visibility of your brand on the platform. However, to maximize the effectiveness of marketing with social media influencers, you should partner with influencers relevant to your niche or industry and know about it. It will help if you analyze their followers to ensure they align with your target audience. If your startup has a limited budget but aims to reach more targeted and interested people, working with micro or nano influencers is the best option for you. Therefore, in setting up your effective campaign, you should constantly pay attention to several factors and track its performance. If you are too busy to handle the whole process yourself, you can work with an influencer marketing agency to achieve more positive results.
4. Run Instagram Contests and Giveaways
Professional marketers run Instagram contests and giveaways to acquire new followers and increase their engagement rate substantially. Creating an Instagram giveaway by offering a compelling prize related to your brand or business is a great marketing strategy to raise brand awareness, generate buzz for a new product, and boost sales. Moreover, promotional giveaways can keep your brand in customers’ minds and increase traffic to your website or online store.
Use an Instagram giveaway picker to choose a random winner for your giveaway, contest, or promotion. The service can manage the process of selecting a winner fairly and impartially. Otherwise, you will lose the trust of your followers, destroying your chances of building a positive brand reputation.
5. Improve Your Account Engagement Rate
In addition to the follower count, you should also pay attention to the engagement rate. There are many ways to do this. Firstly, you should unfollow inactive (or ghost) followers who don’t follow you back or are not interested in your content. You can use an Instagram unfollow app that lets you manage your account better and get more information about your followers.
Secondly, be sure to add value to your followers. Your content should not be only focused on making sales. Try to follow the 80/20 rule of social media marketing. Accordingly, 80% of your posts should inform and entertain your audience, and only 20% should advertise your business directly. Followers should think of you as an expert in your field, not as a marketer.
Thirdly, for building a positive brand experience and establishing solid relationships, show your humanity. To be more friendly and personal with your followers, join the conversations, respond to comments and questions open-heartedly. Moreover, take advantage of Instagram captions, DMs, Stories, Reels, IGTV, or Live to keep your audience more engaged and interested.
6. Use Hashtags
To market your startup effectively on the platform, use hashtag strategy wisely. If you include a hashtag in your content, it becomes searchable and can reach a wider audience. To get your posts seen by more interested people, you have to use hashtags correctly. For example, too general and popular hashtags are not very effective. Because there is tons of content on them, and your post may get lost among them. Thus, you had better use more specific, branded, niche-relevant or local hashtags to improve the chance of being discovered by your desired audience.
7. Invest in Instagram Ads
Instagram ads have powerful targeting features to create ads for your specific target audience based upon their demographics, location, shopping interests, purchasing behavior, and more. That is why knowing your target audience is so essential.
Generally, video or carousel ads generate higher engagement rates. You can track and test your ad performance with Instagram Insights. So that, if needed, you can make the required adjustments to achieve better results in the future.
Final Note
There is no doubt that Instagram is a perfect tool to find potential new customers, generate excitement for your brand and drive more sales. However, startups find it day by day more difficult to stand out and gain visibility in such an increasingly competitive platform. To be successful, you need to reach out to more target audiences and nurture them into becoming engaged followers and loyal customers. It sounds simple, but in practice, many startups often fail as it needs lots of consistency, patience, dedication, and creativity to establish your online presence and reputation on the platform.
On the other hand, thousands of startups have succeeded in brand building and generating higher sales using the platform. It is possible to prove that you are also one of them. Do you not think so?