Instagram for Business – Instagram is among the most popular and influential social media platforms. It has over 2 billion active users, one-fourth of the global population. Hence Instagram is a great marketing channel to use for marketing your brand
If you’re new to Instagram or want to study how to market your brand on Instagram better, we’ve put together a complete guide on how to use Instagram for business. From improving your profile to creating great content, we have it all.
Table of Contents
In what way to use Instagram for Business: 5 steps
Here are some of the steps that describe how to use Instagram for business
Instagram is a graphic social media platform with a strong focus on photo and video content. It may seem difficult for brands without visual products, but B2B and service-oriented brands can profit from this network.
If you survey our guide, you can quickly grow your target audience and attract your followers’ attention.
1. Make an Instagram Business Profile
There are three types of Instagram accounts: individual, creative, and business. Creator and Business accounts are the two kinds of professional accounts offered. While influencers and creators may want to use a creator account, you must create a business profile as a brand.
With an Instagram business profile, you have access to valuable features such as:
More sections to include in your profile
Instagram insights/analytics
Instagram Ads
Ability to connect to the scheduling app
Product tagging in Instagram store/posts
Each feature can help your brand make the most of its Instagram presence.
2. Optimize Your Instagram Business Profile
As I mentioned, your business profile has more sections, so take advantage of them. It will provide a lot of upfront information to your potential followers and give them a clear idea of what your business organizes and why they should follow you.
Enhance your profile using the following areas:
Profile photo: It’s best to use your corporate logo as your profile photo so people can easily recognize your brand.
Name: Match this with your business name on other social profiles of your brand.
Username: This must also be your business name. The message that your username cannot have spaces.
Pronouns: This is on every profile, but you’ll only need to use this if you’re the face of your business.
Website: This will be the lone clickable URL on your Instagram page. Most companies use their website or link to their latest promotion pages. You can also use a link in the resume widget to multiple pages.
Bio: Your Instagram bio is where you get the attention of other users. You can describe what your business does, promote your website, or put your brand logo there (or all of the above).
Page: Link your Instagram business profile to your Facebook business page.
Category: Choose the category that finely describes your product’s industry or product/service offering.
Contact options: Connect all the best ways customers can contact you, such as email, phone, or physical address.
Action Buttons: Add a call-to-action button like “Order food”, “Book now”, “Book”, or “Get a quote” directly to your Instagram profile.
Instagram Stories Highlights: Add high points to your profile and categorize them based on the categories of stories your brand classically creates.
3. Build a Solid Instagram Marketing Strategy
Every marketing channel you have a presence in needs its strategy, and your Instagram is no different. Because Instagram is a visual platform, much of your strategy should revolve around finding or creating the images you share.
Identify Your Target Audience
First, make sure you create content that will engage your target audience. However, for this, you first require to define that target audience. Look at your current customer personality, then do an Instagram search to find profiles that match that personality. Survey them and analyze the content they share. Examine the brands they follow and analyze the content they share as well.
Then use these analytics to guide your Instagram content plan. Pay courtesy to which of your posts, stories, or videos get the most attention so you can create more similar content.
Set goals and key performance indicators
What do you anticipate to get profit from your Instagram presence? The most likely targets might look like this:
sales
site traffic
connection
followers
User-generated content
Influencer partnerships
All the overhead can be done quickly, but you need to regulate your Instagram strategy for each.
For instance, if you aim to sell through your social media creativities, you’ll want to open a store on Instagram and tag your products every time you post. If your goal is website traffic, create a multilink link to your website, blog posts, and sales pages in your bio and use the anchor tag in your Instagram stories.
Set your goals and KPIs, then create a plan that pleases them.
Track Your Performance and Metrics
With your own Instagram business account, you can access built-in insights, data, and analytics. Take advantage of this to see how your strategy is performing. Check out your top posts, how many engagements each post gets, your supporters’ stats, and more.
You can also take benefit of Sprout Social’s social media analytics dashboard to gain deeper insights into your Instagram performance:
Create a Content Calendar and Publishing Schedule
The final part of your Instagram strategy is to decide what type of content to create, create a social media content calendar, and start planning your posts.
For eCommerce brands, this will likely consist of product images, as we can see on Bloomscape’s Instagram below:
Find the kinds of content that make the most logical for your brand and start creating.
4. Post Quality Instagram Content and Follow Best Practices
We’ve touched on the range briefly, but let’s dig deeper because Instagram offers many opportunities to share new content with your audience. You must also know Instagram’s best performance to see the best results.
Test With New Instagram Features
It should come as no wonder that Instagram is continuously releasing new features. To get the maximum out of the platform, it’s a good idea to test them all to see what resonates the most with your followers; Instagram Reels, link labels in Stories or somewhat else.
Find the right tackles and apps to make or edit Instagram posts
Many Instagram tools can help you make unique content. Some are ideal for photo editing, while others are for creating branded graphics.
Here are some Instagram posting tools to consider:
Canva
Visme
snapseed
VSCO
Test a few different apps to find the easiest for your team to use.
Write a Comment on Instagram
There’s an art to writing good Instagram captions that get your audience involved with your content, follow you, and buy. Some tried and accurate tips include:
Keep it short and pleasant. Just because it can be 2200 characters long doesn’t mean it has to be.
Enquire about a query or tell a story that will make viewers more likely to comment.
Include emojis or social media language.
The usage of hashtags helps Instagram users find your content.
Here are 50+ Instagram caption ideas for more inspiration.
Explore Different Types of Instagram Posts
Instagram offers its users many ways to create and share content, so make sure you take advantage of them. It can be boring for people to go to your Instagram post and see the same type of content over and over.
Instead, open it. Share stories, photos, branded graphics, videos, loops, reels, guides, live video streams and more. Add each content type to your content calendar so you can design accordingly and maintain robust variety.
Increase Sales with Shoppable Posts
E-commerce brands can get more out of Instagram with shoppable posts. Set up your Instagram store, tag products in your posts, and make it easy for customers to buy.
With Shoppable Posts, your followers can click on a product they see in one of your columns, click on a product listing in your Instagram store and make a purchase, all without leaving the platform.
5. Increase the Number of Your Instagram Followers
Finally, it would help if you started increasing your Instagram followers. While follower count is a measure of vanity and your earnings aren’t as important as engagement and conversions, increasing your followers is still a good idea. It can help with social proof and help you reach a broader audience on the platform.
Some strategies to grow your Instagram followers include:
Comment on Instagram posts from people who seem like they’ll be part of your audience.
Use relevant hashtags in your posts so people looking for those hashtags will find your content.
Post frequently and also share various types of content
Collaborate with influencers to expand your audience reach
Cross-promote your Instagram account on your site and other social media feeds
Pay courtesy to the most engaging content and then create more content like this
Conclusion
Start creating brand awareness ads on Instagram. Get started with Instagram for business. If you haven’t started an Instagram business, don’t panic. With an active and ever-growing user base, Instagram is making itself a staple of social marketing rather than pushing itself forward.