Instagram offers small businesses a powerful way to establish their brand. With the platform, you could reach out to new audiences while staying engaged with the existing ones and drive sales directly from the app. That makes an excellent platform for small businesses to promote themselves.
To see consistent growth in your business profile and drive sales, you need to develop a tactical and artistic strategy.
However, bringing that balance between art and strategy could be challenging if you are beginning in Instagram marketing.
This article directs you to overcome challenges that small businesses face on Instagram. Let us jump in to know ways to build a winning Instagram strategy for small businesses.
#1. Discover Target Audience with Hashtags
Reaching out to the right audience is one of the significant challenges faced by small businesses. Besides, if you could find and use the right hashtags, you can showcase the products and services you offer to the right audience. Also, it lets you bring in new followers, get automatic likes for Instagram, and turn people from followers to customers. While finding proper hashtags for your brand, think over the terms of “buckets of the topic.”
Suppose your business target audience is female entrepreneurs; you have to start focussing on the kind of content that interests them. You could put a blog on branding and marketing or females in entrepreneurship or empowerment of women in the workspace. These kinds of topics must help you design topic buckets to determine the type of hashtags for every post.
In the above example, you may think of using #entrepreneur; it could be a great strategy. But not, the hashtag might have tons of posts shared every minute or seconds. That means there is a high risk of getting lost in the crowd. Select your hashtags that are not very common.
Instead, create hashtags that are in your niche and relevant to your followers. Streamlined hashtags like #womenpreneur are very particular to the businesswomen and reach the target audience.
You may also use branded hashtags like community hashtags but with a brand name or product name. When you post creative content to promote your brand to a flooded market, your content won’t reach the right audience. Hence, while choosing hashtags, bear in mind not to be generic or hashtags that are lengthy. There are many tools to find and save hashtags; you could use them for best results.
#2. Research Hashtags for Business
Getting the correct hashtags requires time and effort. To get started, tap on the Explore page to look for hashtags that you think would fit in your brand and texting. Instagram displays several results for that hashtags, and also you will find a list of related hashtags at the top of it. That is an excellent way Instagram enables you to discover more trending and relevant hashtags to your brand. Do remember to see what number of posts under the chosen hashtags. If there are already thousands of posts under it, it gets saturated, and your posts probably get unseen.
Also, you can check competitors’ pages to understand what type of hashtags they use and get inspiration from them. So, when you have found the right hashtag that brings in the right audience, it is necessary to divert them from your Instagram page to your online store.
#3. Drive Traffic to your Website
Speaking about social media marketing, remember that you don’t own followers on Instagram. What if someday Instagram vanished, and you want to continue to have a customer relationship with your Instagram audience. Therefore, it is essential to check for opportunities to get people from the Instagram platform onto your online stores.
Imagine Instagram as a launch-pad to bring people to your website’s homepage or browse the product in the list. Suppose you run a business-to-customer business, then you could promote your brand and attract an audience to check your website and purchase with promo codes. Or, if you are a business-to-business, you could quickly get people off Instagram by offering a free guide, training course, or workbook. Ensuring to include call-to-action in your post captions and stories is a perfect way to guide your audience to your target place.
#4. Be Creative with strategy
Creating beautiful aesthetics helps attract additional followers; at the same, it is essential to remember that your aesthetics must mirror your business and brand. Imagine crafting Instagram feeds as a strategy for marketing; it has to talk to your audience, drive them towards the brand, and make them know about you. If you want to get creative with your content, you have to be sure with following things,
- Business Vision: What does your brand stand for? How will you be able to transform goals and messages via pictures on your profile?
- Audience Interests: Think about the type of content that resonates and serves them on a platform.
- Brand Uniqueness: How do you make your business stand out from the crowd?
When you get a clear idea of these points, you will construct a creative strategy, a solid aesthetic that depicts your business grabs additional followers and transforms them into customers.
Conclusion
To build a successful Instagram strategy, all you have to do is ensure a balance between strategy and creativity. That guarantees you to reach your target audience, gain additional followers, and make them your potential customers for your business.
Author Bio
Amelia John is a Social Media Content Specialist at Sociaboost who creates curated content on all things related to Social media. She possesses sound knowledge to knit effective marketing strategies for companies of all sizes. Cooking is her favorite free time activity.