25 Jan How You Can Use Instagram For A Business To Help You Grow
Instagram for a business is a growing space for digital marketing. They have the potential to showcase your blog, art, talent through visual inspiration and drive a much wider audience for your account or other portals. Apart from these, Instagram advertising is immensely popular for marketing small and medium-sized businesses around the globe.
Read our article on Social Media For A Business
It’s becoming the first choice of flourishing start-ups to establish the brands and draw the attention of potential customers. There are many advertisement formats on Instagram, such as Stories ads, Photo ads, Video ads, Carousel ads, Collection ads, and ads in Explore. Instagram has over 700 million users which makes it one of the best platforms to promote your business. Instagram advertising has brilliant targeting strategies and click-through rate.
It’s way ahead in terms of targeting capabilities and reach than say Twitter advertising. This is also the reason why Instagram ads cost more than Twitter ads.
The referral marketing technique has become a thing of the past with the onset of the internet. What revolutionized digital marketing is the invention of Instagram and its enhanced features for commercial purposes. Nowadays everything can be compared with other products of a similar kind with the help of a screen. People buy what they can see and test online.
Instagram for a business provides a high-quality virtual introduction of the brand to the specific or targeted audience. It’s hashtags, stories, short video format and multiple layered posts with description deliver what’s needed for the perfect advertising and digital marketing strategy.
How to Use Instagram Ads for Business
There are few techniques to follow when using a social media application like Instagram solely for business. These days e-commerce and start-ups are blooming and promoted continuously on various social media channels. Almost all channels which were initially started for conversations and media sharing apps are now turning into digital marketing portals. Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and Instagram have all introduced special features for business accounts. Below are some of the best ways to use Instagram for business for fastest and more successful growth;
Links
It’s common knowledge that Instagram doesn’t facilitate an option of attaching a link to the original post. This often has caused some doubts in the mind of digital marketers. But the data has time and again indicated and proven that Instagram remains one of the prominent sources of business as it drives the maximum customers to the content or original post. If you are looking to start a business and promote it through an Instagram advertising campaign then, you must know that your original post won’t be containing any direct links to your web portal, shop-cart or business page. What you can do is – you can refer people to the “link in bio”.
The ‘link in bio’ has proven to be more effective than merely redirecting people to the web portals. It makes interested customers check your profile and engage with all the possibilities, varieties, products or opportunities your business has in store for them. Your profile functions as a product or business catalogue without you having to pay to showcase each product separately. These kinds of ads are more effective in Story ads and Photo ads format.
Shopping on Instagram
Instagram is to soon introduce its partner – Shopify to all UK accounts. This will enable users to browse through your products and discover your brand cleanly. This will also include hashtags and tags for each of the products to direct the buyers to the e-commerce sites directly. Shopping on Instagram would soon become more accessible, and more fun and customers are likely to come to know and trust small to medium sized businesses along with the enterprise level e-commerce sites we are all see dominate search engines – social media offers a much more even playing field.
Product tagging and e-commerce redirection would take digital marketing and Instagram advertising campaigns to new heights. For beauty, skincare, health, fitness and lifestyle products and business, you can ask beauty and fitness bloggers to promote your business among their followers. It will be very impactful since they already have a specific kind of audience which suits your purposes. This, finding a niche promoter for your particular type of business and target that particular audience is nowhere more successful via digital marketing than advertising on Instagram.
Promotion via Popular Accounts
As Instagram for a business has grown to become popular one of the most renowned celebrities Kylie Jenner uses it to earn millions for a single post, and what could be a better portal to find a target audience?! There are numerous local and global celebrities, content creators, actors, musicians, comic artists, people in business and influencers with a massive number of followers. If you want your product or business to see a spike in sales or a being shared within a new community and target audiences then there is only one way is to go for sponsored ads.
You can also of course negotiate with Instagram influencers of your liking for your sector and agree terms about your business marketing by promoting them on their accounts, stories and posts. Many big brands like Olay etc. use this technique to draw the target demographic they are after to ultimately improve sales. This can be expensive and at times – limited, but it is worth the cost long term.
Ads Curation
Instagram advertising is totally in your hands in terms of digital marketing. Other than the obvious technical and interface related limitations, you can pretty much control the entire flow of your products reach.
Instagram allows you to curate your own because only you could know what works best for your business’ growth. You can choose how your ads will appear, how they will pop up and when. You can also select the type of ads you want which is offered at the scalable pricing.
E-commerce web, start-ups, app installation, traffic drive have different kinds of advertisement campaigns and appropriate hashtags related to each category. This is why Instagram is a perfect platform for small businesses to grow, see instant responses and feedback. Also, it lets you know about the advertisement’s reach and targeting; this robust reporting gives you more control of your digital marketing techniques.
Lead Generation
Lead Generation is a feature by Instagram that gives digital marketers more stable, refined and more targeted audiences for the future. It collects user’s data (with their consent) like email addresses and other social media accounts so that you can send promotions and advertisements at other platforms, as well.
Lead Generation objective is more directed towards a target audience that is already warm and familiar with your product services or competitors services and products. These ads are also available in multiple formats.
Conversions
For businesses and e-commerce start-ups who rely solely on the sales of their product for earning, Conversion objective is the ideal choice. It was previously known as Dynamic Ads and Website Conversion. If you want to optimise for people conducting a specific activity for your business such as purchase objective then you should use Conversions Ads for digital marketing of your brand.
Campaign
Digital marketing professionals know how to create a post, what hashtags to use, what accounts to tag, what captions to write to draw the attention of the high-end consumers online. If you are planning to invest in digital marketing at various portals, Instagram advertising campaigns would only cost a little more to be more efficient and effective if you let a professional handle the work. You can achieve greater reach and faster growth but you must ensure you do not waste money on poorly managed and targeted campaigns. Below are some steps you can follow;
Steps
- Create an Instagram business account and link it with your Facebook page or account.
- Go to Ads Manager and create your ‘campaign’ by using Business Manager. Choose your objective accordingly and the preferred goal.
- There will be different Conversions, as mentioned above. Choose a conversion wisely. Generally, it makes sense to layer these objectives to build warm audiences first. If you go straight for the sale, you often miss out. You need to build trust first.
- Define your ad, include well-structured ad copy and carefully select your target audience.
- Fill out all the details. And check the preview before sending it out.
- Once your ads are live, optimise daily and even set rules to create alerts.
- You can always moderate, edit and change your advertising campaign details at any time. The key is to test, test and test.
Good luck and if you ever need any help, reach out to us anytime