The world we live in now is a highly digital place, but that wasn’t always the case. Letting people know about your products a few years ago was a much harder process; commonly used methods were TV ads, billboards, and newspapers. These strategies were expensive and at times just inefficient for marketers. The thing in recent years that has made the lives of marketers much easier is social media marketing! It helps the company who is selling the product, to the marketer promoting the product to the actual buyer who receives the product.
So what exactly is social media marketing? It is increasing brand awareness, target audience size, engagement, and other marketing goals through the use of various social media platforms in the form of content users can see. Through social media, we can set goals like increasing website traffic through likes, shares, comments, etc. We can develop the marketing strategies based on the niche that we are targeting to give users a more personalized experience. Through social media, we can also use various types of content like videos, stories, blogs, and many more to truly get a product or service out there.
There are many channels through which you can perform social media marketing. Some of the most common ones are Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter. Just from this list, we can already see the variety in marketing strategies and methods, such as Instagram being a more photo and story-based audience versus Twitter being a more blog-like. For this blog post, we will be focusing on the basic marketing strategies used for Instagram!
Instagram is constantly evolving, especially with new methods of posting content to prompt yourself. It is also evolving in that it is becoming harder for smaller creators to get noticed on the platform. Most people would put their energy towards posting mediocre content with an emphasis on growth strategies, but because of these changes, the content you do post must be qualified to see results. You can do this by making sure your content is as engaging as possible whilst valuable to your target audience. To make sure you stand out from the competition on Instagram what you need to do is pick a niche that your product or service falls under, understand who is your ideal follower, and then make sure that every piece of content serves that person. An example is creating infographics that serve and teach your audience rather than random photos that will never resonate with a user. You can start to get ideas by looking at people who currently dominate your niche; you should look at the content that is being posted and your goal should be to be posting stuff equivalent if not better than theirs. Content is the center of this platform, so constantly asking questions like “how can this look better aesthetically and convey a better representation of the brand” on a day-to-day basis can yield much better results. This can be landing on the explore page, ranking better on hashtags, more followers, and much more.
The next step is having a basic understanding of the Instagram algorithm. Say you make a great post and a person engages with it; they like it, comment, and share it with their friends. Instagram will realize that this person enjoys your content so the algorithm will push more of your content into their feed because it’ll keep them on the platform longer. For the next post, you put less effort and post mediocre content. Every time people interact with the content less and less, the algorithm will take note and push that content less. The key to winning inside the Instagram Algorithm is to build a community that likes and trusts you and your content. Your goal is to keep your reputation up to make sure that people engage with it and then Instagram can then spread it to new users.
Two major tools that Instagram provides users to promote their page and interact with followers are hashtags and stories. Users can put hashtags in their post and then the post can get on the trending page for that hashtag, promoting it to thousands of users. The key for hashtags when you are trying to grow your following is to put more targeted hashtags that are ultra-specific to your target audience and your account. Another thing to keep in mind is the size of the hashtag. On big hashtags like #funny, there are already accounts that dominate that space and already established their loyal fan bases, so posting on there wouldn’t give much traction towards your new account nor would it get on trending. Instagram stories are especially useful in making your followers into true fans, then from true fans to customers. It gives you a chance to post content that is not perfected and shows more of your personality, therefore building true connections. You can use polls, Q and As, and various other tools within stories to convey a sense of genuity to your fans.