Wondering how to start your Instagram marketing for your brand or business? Or maybe you have started but have no ideas what content to do.
Here's how you can get started with your Instagram marketing
1 - Interesting pictures
Instagram is a visual based media, make sure you have interesting photos. If you are a skincare brand you may need some nice designs, but if you are in the service industries, other types of images like infographics, quotes etc. can also do well to educate, inspire or entertain your audience.
2 - Play with different types of content
You will initially need to play around with different types of content to see how your audience relates to your content. Once you have an idea of what your followers like, then do more of it and then experiment with other types of content. We like to follow the 70/20/10 rule, 70% we do content that people like, 20% we experiment and 10% we just go crazy and try to think of what types of content that people may like - that is appopriate for your followers of course, you don't want to post baby pictures when you sell tudung :)
For tips on what types of content that social media users want, hope the picture below helps
3 - Upload customer testimonials
This builds trust that your service is reliable and it has worked for other people as well. You can get testimonials from your customers via Whatsapp, you can try doing a Google form to gather feedback, or send your product to influencers to see if they like it.
4 - Do contests
Contest is great to build engagement with your followers. You can do different types of contests like tag your friend, comment and share, hashtag contest. Keep things fresh by doing different types of contests.
5 - Use hashtags and create your own hashtags
This will allow your followers and new users to find related content. For example, you may have a specific product catalog you want to promote, or certain type of content or maybe perhaps it's a branded hashtag (hashtag associated with your brand). Having hashtags allows users to easily find your content.
6 - Do Instagram ads
This is important initially if your page is new and you are trying to grow your brand awareness. When you are new, you need to get the word out on your product or service, and with social media, the targeting available to you is tremendous. You can target by location, by age, by gender and most importantly, target by interests. And best of all is that you don't even have to have a big budget. We started with RM 200/week budget, and doing 1 or 2 campaigns and have seen relatively successful returns from it. You can start with a small budget first to dip your toes, and grow as you see more success from your ads campaign.
7 - Offer discounts and giveaways
As shared in picture above, the number 1 type of content that followers want are discounts and giveaways, but of course, you can't really build a business by giving discounts and giveaways all the time :) Mix it up with other types of content like posts that can build relationships and trusts with your customers and offer discounts and giveaways to really boost your brand.
Hope this is helpful. If you need help with your content creation, contact heysocially where we help out entrepreneurs and businesses build better content.
*Data on types of content based on survery from https://sproutsocial.com/