Why boost your brand on instagram?
Instagram is one of the fastest growing social networks among users of all ages. From a business point of view, it is another tool in the marketing and sales strategy. Therefore, it is a network to which it is essential to make the most of starting today, and brands are not missing the opportunity and are betting heavily on extending their activity to this social network. Boosting your brand on instagram, therefore, should be among your business plans.
Given this new landscape, we have a few questions for you: Are you making the most of Instagram’s potential to boost your brand? Do you know the platform and the algorithm well? Do you know how to use it to get the results you’re looking for?
If you’re not on Instagram yet, your brand can’t be left behind. But remember: it’s not enough just to have a presence on this social network, you have to stand out and connect with your audience, interact, etc. So if you want to venture with your brand on this platform you do well, and to give you a little push in this adventure, we come to reveal the keys and tricks to boost your brand on Instagram.
1- The importance of increasing your reach
The level of reach of your business account is a basic for your brand to succeed among so much competition, and there are different ways to do it, such as:
- Increasing followers
- Interacting with your audience
- Investing in advertising
None of these options is exclusive, but the best option is to put them all into practice. To achieve point 1 you need to get qualified followers, i.e. users who are likely to be interested in your product or service. It is important to get at least 10,000 followers, because until you reach that number you cannot incorporate a very powerful tool: the swipe up.
The swipe up allows you to insert links in your stories to external pages and sites, such as your website. This is a very powerful tool, as it allows you to drive direct traffic to your online shop and capture qualified leads, as well as allowing interested users to make a purchase in a maximum of 3 clicks.
We have just mentioned the importance of reaching 10,000 followers, but we all know that this is not easy. That is why it is interesting to help you with advertising on instagram, which will allow you to increase your reach and, as it is programmatic advertising, reach a user who is really interested in your content. In addition, Instagram Ads is very good value for money and cost-effective, so it will help you to boost your brand at an affordable price.
It is worth mentioning that another of the new features of this social network is instagram shopping, which allows you to tag your products in a publication so that the user can directly access the product on your website and buy it. We could classify this new feature as a win-win, because for you, as a brand, it allows you to direct traffic directly to your website and “not lose the potential customer along the way”. On the other hand, it saves time and makes it easier for interested followers to see the price with just one click, and if they are interested, they can go directly from Instagram to the location of the product to complete their purchase.
2- It is essential to create a bond with your followers
First of all, we have to take into account Instagram’s -sometimes friend and sometimes worst nightmare- algorithm. Since this new algorithm has been implemented, it has done a lot of damage to influencers and brands, as they are having less reach than before. This is because the algorithm takes into account many factors of how the user interacts with the platform and the different accounts to finally show and prioritise the posts that it knows will interest them.
For this reason it is essential to know the algorithm and adapt to it. Create content of interest that adds value to your brand and establish a conversation with the community of followers to generate interactivity and increase engagement considerably.
Interact with your followers, get to know them well. To do this you must discover their tastes, preferences and feelings. Get to know them and make them get to know you. It is also important to analyse what your competitors do, because after all, they offer a similar service to yours and you must know how to communicate in such a way that you can differentiate yourself from them and provide something more.
In short, humanising your brand will help to build loyalty with your followers, leading to a more valuable relationship afterwards.
The aesthetics and appearance of your profile is also key to capture the user at the moment they enter your profile, and is a determining factor in their decision to follow you or not. To do this, you must define a style line that is consistent with your visual identity and so you will have an attractive feed.
Apart from offering an aesthetic profile, try to be original and creative. Also create a good biography, with a catchy and original message. Take into account the following aspects when creating it:
- Username: put the exact name of your brand so that the user who wants to search for it on the internet does not get confused.
- Description: it is important that your contact details and the location of your business appear.
- External link: take advantage of this to direct traffic from instagram to your official website.
3- Take advantage of stories, they are a very powerful tool.
More and more users are spending more time on Instagram Stories than browsing the feed. This is because it is a very fresh and spontaneous channel, and it is very well accepted by users, so it is essential to introduce it into your Instagram strategy to boost your brand.
But how to use this tool well to boost your brand on Instagram? This feature has great potential to highlight things about your brand that your audience might have missed. For example, if your posts have not had the reach you wanted, you can reinforce them through stories as a call to action to direct users to the post they missed. It can also serve as a complementary tool to connect content between posts and stories, thus applying a multi-format strategy that will ensure that your followers get the desired message.
Another key point of stories is that they allow you to generate interactivity with the user through surveys, questions and answers, voting, etc. Don’t hesitate to use them, this will ensure that your followers don’t just pass the story without even looking at it, but you will attract their attention, increase their time on your account and, above all, increase engagement, which will help the Instagram algorithm to boost your brand.
Finally, and as a curious fact, the new algorithm does not distinguish between stories and feed, but values all interactions received equally. Therefore, we recommend that you explore and reinforce this channel.
In both stories and posts, the idea is to alternate commercial content with content of interest, giving more relevance to content of interest to gain trust and credibility from users. Ideally, only 1 out of every 5 pieces of content should be commercial.
4- Draws and competitions
It is clear that when users have something to gain, they show more interest. You have the power to make your followers more interested in your brand and a good way to do this is through sweepstakes and contests. These will allow you to get to know your followers better, gain visibility and engagement and generate leads. Moreover, through sweepstakes you reinforce the sense of belonging to a group, to a community of followers.
This technique is even more productive if your sweepstakes is in collaboration with another brand or with influencers, as you will gain more reach, credibility and new followers, something that will allow you to boost your brand on instagram.
Normally, Instagram sweepstakes work by asking users to follow the account and mention friends as conditions for participation. But your profile goes even more viral if one of the requirements is to share the contest post in the user’s own story. In this way, instead of being seen by the two friends the user has tagged, you can be seen by all their followers, thus increasing the reach radius of your Instagram account.
5- The importance of publishing at rush hour
Instagram is the most frequented social network by users of all ages, and receives millions of posts per day. You should bear in mind that if you post at a time with little user movement, by the time your potential target is most active on the network, there will already be a hundred other posts that will push you down in the top positions, so your visibility will be reduced.
That is why it is vitally important that you research your target audience’s peak times and impact them at that time to ensure their attention. And how can you know if your followers are online? It’s easy. Analyse your Instagram stats.
It’s also important to take into account what type of post your audience likes the most so you have the ability to replay it or create content in that style to generate more engagement with the user.
Remember to combine publications between posts and stories so as not to saturate your audience, we don’t want them to go to the unfollow button.
6- Create shareable content
Attractive content to share is a direct way to increase followers. In this type of posts, videos are very powerful, and if the content is interesting or funny, they can go viral.
To get more presence you can also use relevant hashtags related to your content. Think carefully about the words you use, as they can be key when it comes to displaying your content in the explore section when someone enters a hashtag of interest. Try to get into the mind of your target audience and use the hashtags you think they would search for to better connect your brand with their audience. The idea is to keep hashtags short and concise and directly related to what the image represents.
You can also create shareable content by joining important dates, humanising your brand, showing that you are on the same level as your followers while creating a strong and engaged image and reaching out to them.
So much for our post today on how to boost your brand on Instagram. Before we go, we’d like you to keep one thing in mind: whatever content you create, you need to be very consistent – but remember: always without saturating your followers. Instagram users like to feel that a brand is alive, that at any moment it will share content that catches our attention. We also like to have the peace of mind that if we send a direct message with any question or concern we will get a response. In short, we like to feel special and important, and we like to be part of a community. So you as a brand have the power and the duty to make your followers feel like they are part of something beautiful and lasting. So start today.
