The question of how to build an Instagram marketing strategy that works is a question that consciously or unconsciously lies in the heart of every marketer or brand owner who manages a brand on Instagram. As the third largest social media network in terms of active users, Instagram has grown to become an empire for brands looking to build, connect, and convert an audience. But with 100’s of thousands of contents uploaded daily, how do brands cut through the noise and enjoy the rewards of being on Instagram?
This question and more is what this article aim to cover
Why Instagram Marketing Strategy Matter?
Over the years, Instagram has grown from a simple photo sharing app to becoming host to over 2 billion monthly active people, offering an opportunity for brands to showcase their offers and reap a reward. Here are a few reasons why Instagram marketing strategy should be part of your overall social media plans;
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Engaged User Base
One of Instagram’s strengths is its size and unmatched engagement rates. Instagram audiences are active viewers of posts, often liking, commenting, and sharing contents that resonate with them. This active participation translates to better conversions for the content owner.
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Ease of Growth
Unlike other platforms, Instagram’s algorithm and features are designed to help businesses grow their presence organically. Features like reels, explore, and stories help to build virality if maximised well.
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Different Contents Formats
Instagram provides options for multiple content formats, providing different canvas for the display of creativity. We have 20 pages carousel slides, reels, stories, live videos and single images
There are a host of other reasons, but let’s now focus on the real question, how to build an instagram marketing strategy that works
How to Build an Instagram Marketing Strategy That Works
Step 1: Setting Clear Goals
Like many endeavours in life, it is important to have a SMART goal when starting out on Instagram. SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time Bound.
Example 1:
Emeks is a business that makes and sells footwear for both males and females and is looking to leverage Instagram to get more customers and generate more sales revenue. His Instagram marketing goal can read
- To grow my Instagram followers from 150 followers to 1,400 followers in the next six month”
- To generate N1,000,000 in sales revenue from Instagram over the next 90 days
Example 2:
Tola is a service provider specialising in providing financial coaching and mentoring services to professionals and business owners. Her goal could read
- To build authority on Instagram by attracting 30,000 new engaged audiences over the next 365 audience while maintaining a 5%- 10% engagement rate.
- To get 40 students for the 15th cohort of `Grow your Wealth like Dangote Masterclass’
This template of setting goals allows you to tailor your Instagram marketing efforts and assess if you are making progress or wasting resources. If you struggle to set a goal, Chatagpt is your best friend, and if you need a human to work with you to create a goal and scale your marketing efforts on Instagram,. Reach out here
Step 2: Defining Your Target Audience
In my experience as a social media manager, I’ve realised some brands do not know their target audience and yet want to have a thriving presence on Instagram or any other social media platform at all. That’s flux.
There are a lot of templates you can leverage to build a detailed and well furnished target audience for your social media presence. I’ve created one here. The link contains two templates: one is a basic Audience persona form and the other is more detailed
The more detailed your target audience, the more aligned your marketing effort would be on Instagram and yield better results.
Step 3: Optimizing Your Profile
Your Instagram profile can be broken down into 5 parts, namely
- Your username
- Your business name
- Your bio
- Your link in bio
- Highlight section
- Your branding
- Your content approach
- Your username is your brand name, nothing more, nothing less
- Your Instagram name should be optimized for search; if people search for a keyword related to your brand, your brand should be found
- Bio: There are many formats to approach optimizing your bio but the central thing i should pass the message of what you and the appropriate call to action
- Link in bio can be a link shortener, WhatsApp link, website link, or a one-page website
- Highlight section: There’s no set rule for this too, but About US and Testimonials are some common highlight sections across the board.
- Your Branding: The idea of branding is that there’s a style of colour, fonts, logo, and style of speaking that is associated with you.
Step 4: Competitor Analysis and Market Research
As a brand owner, you might think research is time-wasting, but I kid you not, if you miss this step, you would struggle on Instagram.
This step involves finding out people who do what you do in your locality and analysing everything they do on Instagram—their profile setup, contents, and ads if they run—and the non-visible approach and modelling them. Model not steal either.
The number of competitors you fish out depends on you but the larger the database, the more rich the wealth of inspiration
Step 5: Creating a Content Plan for a Winning Instagram Marketing Strategy
Simply put, a content strategy is your plan to achieve your Instagram marketing strategy goals through goals. This would include the content formats(video, text, images), content posting schedule, video shoot dates, content creation format, etc
If you ask me, a content calendar captures this super well. Here’s a content calendar template. We are in an artificial intelligence era, but that doesn’t mean your content should be bland and filled with ‘unlock’, ‘leverage’, ‘elevate’; it should be human and speak to your audience.
Step 6: Organic growth through engagement
While I do not suggest brand owners running an Instagram page without a budget for paid advertisement, life happens and brands are limited by available resources.
To grow organically, you need to find 7-10 pool accounts that contain your target audience and best friends with them by commenting and liking on their post as soon as it drops. The pool accounts may not necessarily be your competitor because, truth be told, if I were your competitor, I might remove you if you do too much. Do this for at least 45-60 minutes every day.
One way to measure if this is working or not is to check how many followers you gain weekly and your engagement rate. If there are no results, you are either not doing It well or you are doing too little.
Step 6: Understanding your Instagram marketing analytics
Platform analytics is a report card of all you’ve done so far over a time period, and Instagram can show you a report card of your activities up to 90 days at maximum.
As a social media manager, I’ve mastered the art of increasing account reach and engagement monthly, and in some cases, I witnessed these metrics drop despite having existing good efforts. Events like negative account reach is a all to review your processes and optimize for more growth
For followers growth, you can’t stop people from unfollowing you, but when net followers gained are negative, then there is a problem that requires an urgent review.
Your most active times influence when you should post. To maximise content reach and engagement, post about 15 times to your most active audience time.
If the analytics here are not corresponding to the age range of your target audience,. It means you have the wrong audience on your page and you need to re-align your processes
You also want to keep a tab on your content performances and conversion metrics like the number of clicks on your bio, purchases, comment triggers, or DMs.
Step 7: Paid Advertisement
Paid ads help to amplify your existing efforts, and once the previous efforts are done steadily, paid ads would fall flat.
Final Thoughts
A well-crafted Instagram marketing strategy is essential for growth and success. By setting clear goals, understanding your audience, optimizing your profile, and leveraging content and engagement, you can turn Instagram into a powerful tool for your brand.
Start implementing these steps today and watch your Instagram presence thrive!
