Businesses who can harness the power of social media (especially Instagram) to share what’s great about their business stand a chance grow their online presence and generate more leads among today’s millennials considerably.
Instagram is a fast-growing social media platform where businesses and individuals can share photos and short clip videos. There are more than 400 million active users on Instagram every month, and every day 3.5 billion photos are liked. Using Instagram for business purposes in the right way is one of the best ways to have an instant viral marketing success.
There are a lot of creative ways businesses can harness the power of photo sharing on Instagram to drive more business growth. In this post, we highlighted 7 tricks to generating more leads and business growth on Instagram.
Source: theoffbeatstory.com
Also Read: 5 Inexpensive Digital Marketing Channels Small Businesses.
1. Use brand specific #Hashtags
Hashtags are a major part of Instagram. Instagram posts with at least one hashtag average 12.6 percent more engagement than those with no hashtags, according to a study by Simply Measured. So use them when they are relevant to your post and target audience—but don’t use so many that they crowd your copy and make it difficult to read.
2. Use general #Hashtags
Always good to include general tags on your Instagram posts, to be found for your products or lifestyle posts. For example, hashtags like #picsoftheday or #quoteoftheday can give you a good number of daily interactions than brand specific hashtags. The best practice is to include one or two of these general hashtags in your post from time to time.
3. Add geo-location to your post.
One of my favorite features on Instagram is the Geo-tagging feature. This feature allows you to add location to your shared post which means when people search for such location, then your post appears. If you are a small business shop that sells within Lagos, a good example will be to include Lagos in your posts so that when other people in Lagos are searching what is happening within Lagos your post shows up and the can interact with it.
4. Use Instagram influencers.
Influencers are one of the most powerful sets of people on Instagram. These are users with hundreds of millions of followers that you can market your business to. Even though the most popular way of getting influencers to talk about your brand is to pay them some money, you can also offer free gifts (such as T-Shirts etc.) to them and also a discount to their followers. Nigeria has a lot of Instagram influencers that you can leverage to market your business.
5. Use Instagram Stories.
Instagram stories allow you to share short videos that last up to 24hours with your followers. This is a great way to showcase what products and services your business in a short video. Its also help to educate users about your brand. The best practices for Instagram Story is to keep the concept simple, take advantage of fullscreen and also provide brand information or call to actions.
6. Interact well with your customers.
Share customer’s photos on your social sites. Show your customers you appreciate them by acknowledging their cool photos, and share them with your Facebook fan or Twitter followers. You can also do this by commenting or liking post contents shared by your customers.
Also Read: 3 powerful secrets to a successful Facebook marketing campaign.
7. User Generated Contents.
User-generated content (UGC) is the most influential and viral form of media for marketing on Instagram. You can do this by encouraging your followers to come up with short creative contents about your brand in reward for a gift. Trust me, Nigerians like free gifts. Aside from having the opportunity to win free gifts, they also get the chance to be famous which is the goal of every millennial on Instagram.
Conclusion
So there you have it, 7 free and creative ways to market your business on Instagram and get you better connected to your market. Try them out, and see how authentically successful your visual marketing can be.
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