How To Use Instagram To Market Your Business

How Instagram Helps in Marketing

With over 500 million active monthly users, Instagram is a great place to market your product or service. Their users have shared more than 40 billion photos and share on average, 95 million videos and images each day. This makes the platform a potential gold mine of low cost traffic if you know how to use it.

Using Instagram for Business

Using Instagram for business is a smart idea. Not only is it a popular platform for business owners, but is also one of the latest trends in the social media industry. Over 200 million Instagrammer’s visit at least one business profile and each day according to researchers; whereas 60% of its users have indicated that they’ve first discovered a new product or service on Instagram.

Instagram is already a great place to hone in to your target market and your market niche. You can carve out and target multiple market segments right on the Instagram platform as well via paid advertising, in addition to your organic content.

If you are a business owner, it behooves you to set up a free business profile as well. That way, your business can become recognized and well known by clients and potential clients alike. It is also a great way to capture an already active and captive audience to become followers of your brand.

Getting More Followers

You may have heard of businesses with millions of followers and are likely wondering how you can get more Instagram followers for your brand too. Well, the process is pretty easy. You may have heard the old adage, in order to make new friends you must first show yourself friendly. And on the Instagram platform, the same is true here too. After you set up a free business profile, it’s important to begin posting content that you’d like to see in your feed while using the most relevant hashtags possible. Afterwards, it’s important to start following other similar accounts that add growth and value to your business.

There are some advantages to setting up a business profile with respect to learning how to get more Instagram followers.

As with other marketing techniques, you can get real-time information on the outcomes of stories and posts that you have promoted and how they have fared throughout the day. You can also gain insight on your followers and learn how they go about interacting with your post, your images and the stories that you have shared. (See image below)

With the business profile, you can also add additional information about your company too; such as:

• Your hours of operation
• Your location
• Your phone number and
• A website link

Since Instagram is a highly visual social media platform, you can also learn how to create appropriate content by telling your story through captivating captions, photos, and videos. If you’re unsure about how to best use Instagram to market your business, you can follow the step-by-step training on how to get the most out of Instagram.

Creating an Instagram Strategy

Although there are over 500 million daily Instagram users, there are 800 million Instagrammers in total all across the globe. What that means for you is that you can easily identify your desired demographic and develop a marketing strategy to reach that segment.

So, how do you stand out from all the other businesses and individuals with millions of stories, videos, and photos that are posted on Instagram each day? How can you create relevant yet beautiful content that will capture your audience’s attention? It all starts with a plan. Your Instagram marketing strategy for your business should result in you delivering the right message to the right people at just the right time. It is a means for you to increase your presence by starting with clear and concise goals. For example, your goals may be to:

• Build your Instagram community
• Increase your followers
• Increase the awareness of your brand
• Display your products or services on Instagram, or
• Share the latest updates and news

The key is to have clear and concise goals in mind ahead of time, which will allow you to get help with your planning and marketing strategy for your business using the Instagram platform.

Making Money Using Instagram

As with all marketing plans, the ultimate goal is to convert users and generate sales. You’ll be happy to know that you can also use the Instagram platform to make more money for your business as well. Some of the ways that you can make money on Instagram include the following:

1. Promote your products or services – Use Instagram to promote your products or services in a non-salesy manner. (It’s better to establish an online presence and build relationships before attempting to sell your products or services.)

2. Sell photos – Whether you are an amateur or a pro, high-quality, relevant photos are always in great demand. And there’s nothing quite like a never before seen original image that’s up for grabs. It’s a great way to make some extra money on Instagram.

3. Work with sponsors and influencers – Once you establish relationships with sponsors, you can earn additional money by developing original sponsored content for a wide variety of brands; Particularly brands that you can highlight that are associated with your product or service.

4. Affiliate marketing – Affiliate marketing is a great way to generate extra money for your business using Instagram. It allows you to promote other products or services and get paid a portion of each sell that is made. This is more common among bloggers, but it’s a great way to make money on Instagram as well.

As you can probably tell by now, many businesses have tapped into and have taken advantage of various ways their business can benefit from Instagram. They have likely experienced improvements in their business in leaps and bounds while also learning how to grow their market share and make money on Instagram.