Successfully leverage Instagram for your business; So, think of all the accounts you follow on your personal Instagram. Barring family and friends, you choose to follow certain influencers and brands.
No obligations.
Why?
Because you’re drawn towards their content, and you see value in it.
This is the same philosophy that you need to keep in mind when you’re leveraging Instagram for your business — To deliver value.
Instagram isn’t just a photo-sharing app anymore. Instead, it has evolved into a platform where users can engage with their audience using different forms of content. Currently, more than 25 million businesses are actively engaging with their audience on Instagram.
Do you know why?
Because Instagram is the ultimate customer-facing digital transformation tool. It has added new features at lightning speed, allowing businesses to provide immensely interactive customer experiences on a digital medium.
But having a presence on Instagram is not enough. As a business, you have bigger responsibilities. First, you need to stand out from the competition. You need to supercharge your account to target genuine followers.
Where do you start?
Let’s see below some of the main methods you can use to build your visual identity on Instagram.
1 – Create a branded style guide
When you’re building a profile on different platforms, you need to ensure consistency in your brand identity. Think about what is the tone you’re going to adopt. Is it going to be fun and quirky or reserved and mature? What are the fonts and colors should you shortlist? Are they going to be plain and minimalistic or youthful and bright?
You need to build a strong visual identity in a manner that your audience can immediately gauge your brand personality and values.
Determine what you want to communicate and to whom. Note your objectives and build your target personas. You can then go on and pick your brand colors fonts and define the color palette of your Instagram feed. Finally, dedicate a personalized hashtag for your brand that you consistently use in your posts.
For example, Tiffany & Co’s Instagram profile has consistently used its signature ‘Tiffany Blue’ color for strong brand association. As a luxury brand, it’s very well-aware of its target audience and has maintained a subtle tone throughout its posts. It also consistently uses the hashtag #TiffanyAndCo on all its posts, creating buzz and driving traffic to its profile.
2 – Share great photos and videos to leverage Instagram for your business
Since Instagram is all about visuals, this is where you can get as creative as you want. However, you need to find your brand’s individuality in terms of content. Despite being in the same industry, what works for one brand may not necessarily work for another. Hence, you need to find your visual aesthetic and stick to that.
The content you post obviously needs to be in alignment with the products and services you offer. But you can find opportunities to go beyond the usuals. Some top ways you can build an engaging content profile on Instagram are
- Go behind the scenes with Instagram reels
- Go Live for special occasions (Events, interviews, launches, etc.)
- Announce Giveaways
- Post about influencers using your product
- Jump on the trend
- Leverage user-generated content
- Sneak peek into company year-end reviews, work-life, festivities, and celebrations.
3 – Use Stickers, Polls, and Quizzes
Half the brands on Instagram engage and connect with their followers in real-time via Instagram stories. The best part about Instagram stories is its stickers that help brand flex their creative chops to infuse participation.
The polls and quiz stickers help you ask questions to your followers. For example, you can post your product catalogs, encourage social responsibility, create industry-related quizzes to boost engagement, etc.
Everyone loves a little trivia in the middle of the day. The polls and quizzes encourage participation and give you a sneak peek into your audience’s tastes and preferences.
As a brand, this gives you an amazing opportunity to stay relevant and produce fresh content regularly. Some top brands that ace their Instagram poll activities are National Geographic, Airbnb, and Starbucks.
4 – Include a CTA to leverage Instagram for your business
Ultimately every engagement activity you do on Instagram should be oriented towards driving your sales. If you want your followers to try out your products, you cannot rely on hope and hints. You need to be loud and clear.
Include a valid Call-to-Action that convinces people to act while browsing through your Instagram store. Your CTAs can be short and simple or may even contain a few words.
It may depend, but you need to ensure you keep the brand tone in mind, you’re using strong action words, making the benefit clear, and directing to the right landing pages.
The top three instances where a CTA is a must are:
- Adding a new button to your ads
- Add contact buttons to your profile
- Adding CTA to posts and bio
5 – Create branded highlight covers
Over 500 million Instagrammers put up stories every day. Needless to say, the Instagram story is one of the most popular features that Instagram provides. For brands, it enables them to reach a wide number of audiences without incurring a high cost. However, its only limitation was it lasted for 24 hours.
Highlight covers add considerable weight to your visual brand identity and the first impression of your Instagram page. In addition, it is the repository of your story highlights and allows users to browse through your past stories.
But you need to take a step further. Instead of keeping default thumbnails, create customized highlight covers for your brand. This will help you maintain neatness and professionalism while retaining the visuals on your profile. You can use tools like Canva to create branded highlight covers.
6 – Be consistent in posting to leverage Instagram for your business
Think from your prospect’s perspective. What if he hears about your brand and decides to check your Instagram page. The date of the last post was around a year back. Do you think the prospect would still be enthusiastic about learning more about you?
It may not seem like a big deal but ensuring consistency in posting is very important. Or else you can end up becoming a forgettable brand that sometimes posts.
Developing a content calendar will considerably help you plan your posting schedules on Instagram. So, you don’t have to post every day, just at regular intervals, to hold your solid presence on the platform.
You can simply create posts and automate their schedule using social media automation tools like Sprout Social and Hootsuite if you have your content ready.
Wrapping up
Instagram is an evolution that you cannot miss to be a part of. An active and growing user base has become a reliable platform for brands. It enables you to provide visually gratifying content that lays a strong foundation for customer engagement. If you haven’t built a presence already.
