Instagram has become the go-to tool for those who want to take their visual and social marketing to a new level. One of the fastest growing social networks on the web, it now has 500 million monthly active users, an increase of 100 million since just a year ago.
Instagram marketing is growing exponentially. According to this page, about 30 percent of mid-sized or larger U.S. companies are using the platform to advertise these days. The number is expected to rise to 70.7 percent in 2017.
The smart marketer knows that they need to strike while the iron is hot, building their brand now before the crowd gets too heavy to see through. But you can't do it through creativity alone.
Mastering the right techniques will go a long way towards allowing you to craft an innovative and effective Instagram marketing campaign. These techniques are critical, and each touches on different aspects of the process. Keep a handful of them on hand if you want to make your Instagram goals.
Instagram Marketing Tips
Use Instagram Photos as Customer Reviews
Curating social media testimonials is the most authentic way to show your happy customers and convert visitors into buyers. Social media reviews and testimonials are easy to verify and thus look legit.
Instagram takes social media reviews to the next step turning words into pictures that, as we know very well, are worth a thousand words.
Tools like Yotpo make curating and publicizing reviews on Instagram a breeze. Search Instagram right inside the tool and publish selected updates to your assets with one click.
You can then display selected photos on your product pages to trigger more sales as well as engage more customers into leaving Instagram reviews. Yotpo lets you create a nice-looking widget with all curated Instagram updates and also encourage more reviews by displaying your hashtag.
Improve Your Strategy Using Instagram Analytics
Analytics have been a little slow to make it onto Instagram. While there are several platforms, they tend to leave a lot to be desired. Minter.io is one that has aimed to get it right.
It monitors your account identifying best time to post to Instagram, your followers' demographics and more. It has a solid hashtag analytics feature: if photos are the lifeblood of Instagram, hashtags are the veins. Their pricing is a little steep, but worth the cost if you are serious about marketing on IG.
Create Instagram an Editorial Calendar
We all know the importance of editorial calendars for content on blogs. So why aren't be utilizing the same idea for visual content? Options like Later offer planning, scheduling and publishing that gives you more control over what you post.
The best feature of Later is the collaborative sharing: You can engage your whole team into contributing content to your corporate Instagram account, then review their contributions and put into the schedule.
It is also a storage app, so you can organize and keep your visuals in one place. That is quite handy for your team. They have a decent free plan, but their pro plans are cheap.
Use Instagram to Promote Your Videos
Few marketers consider Instagram as a powerful video making tool. You can record, edit and filter right from the app, then share it with the hundreds of millions of regular visitors to the site.
Instagram is the perfect place to make your directing debut. The only downside is the length limitations. You only have a handful of seconds, so you have to really make them count. Here are quite a few methods of creating and editing micro videos for Instagram.
Sell Using Hashtags
An ambitious system, Boost has changed social marketing in a real and intense way. It is an end to end transaction feature that works entirely through hashtags. The customer uses hashtags to purchase an item, it is verified, and the customer is automatically charged, and the item sent out.
The system is compatible with both Magento and Shopify, so you can turn it into a whole eCommerce shopping cart solution, if you choose. Or just use it through your account as a one off transaction system.
Do you have a tip to innovate your Instagram marketing? Let us know in the comments!
Instagram Photo via Shutterstock
This article, "How to Innovate Your Instagram Marketing" was first published on Small Business Trends
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