Instagram has gone from being an app where you share photos of your girlfriends, your cat, or your biceps, to being the first choice platform for businesses to market themselves.
It's now seen as a hub of high-quality, influential content and opportunities to develop a large-scale online marketing strategy.
In 2024, more and more solo entrepreneurs and small businesses are seizing this growth potential. If this is the case for you but your account is still not attracting an abundance of new customers, it’s time to change your Instagram marketing strategy. Let's take a look at the 10 steps you can follow to boost your online sales with Instagram in 2024.
1.Create high-quality and uniquely distinctive visuals
If you want to gain followers on your professional Instagram account, you need to create relevant and high-quality content.
Especially now that both users and Instagram's algorithm are becoming more and more demanding.
No need to buy fancy, expensive equipment. All you need is a good phone. It’s more important to define your overall graphic charter, and have a creative and authentic feed that will entertain, inform, and inspire your audience. Common ways to develop an impactful feed are:
- Edit your photos with the help of tools such as Photoshop or Lightroom. If you’re not confident in your graphic design skills, you can find a person who is on Legiit.
- Avoid using Instagram filters on your posts. Users find this approach unauthentic. Save it for stories.
- Use different angles and types of content to diversify the feed: close-ups, quotes, infographics, short videos, etc.
- Find your color palette and stick to it.
- Use an outside app to organize your feed. Each time you post, the Instagram grid shifts. Planning and matching your posts in advance gives you an idea of the final result. But don't anticipate your communication too much so that your posts are always relevant.
2.Play with the content to hook your audience
Compared to other social media platforms, the added value for the customer is very different on Instagram.
We are dealing here with something more ephemeral, aesthetic, and extremely stimulating. Once you understand this, you will constantly find new situations that inspire and generate content creation. However, be careful not to drown your followers in a flood of irrelevant images. Always ask yourself the following questions before posting:
- What are your goals?
- What reactions do you want to provoke?
- What aspects of your brand do your customers like?
But then, what should you be posting if your offer is a service?
Even if your product or brand only has something abstract to offer, you can still arouse the curiosity of your followers and get their attention. Don't think of Instagram as a direct sales tool. Instead, see it as an instrument for building customer loyalty, attracting the attention of new customers, and inspiring sympathy for your target audience.
3.Incorporate successful hashtags, then create your own and make them go viral
Incorporating hashtags into your posts and stories makes them more visible to people searching for content related to your brand or business.
Start by searching for popular hashtags related to what you’re offering using Instagram's search feature.
Set up a tracker to monitor posts with these different hashtags so that you can identify the ones that users are engaging with the most. Be careful not to overdo it as this can annoy your community. Limit yourself to about three hashtags per piece of content. You can play around with how and where you use them:
- In the beginning, it acts as an introduction to the topic
- Inside the sentence, it keeps it fluid and readable
- In the end, it can be understood as an invitation to further research and reading
Once you’ve gained a good following, you'll be able to start your own hashtag. The hashtag you choose must, of course, be related to your brand and your niche.
It should also be in line with the mindset of your target audience. Make the hashtag really clear if you want people to click on it, and genuinely appealing if you want them to share it on their accounts. It should be easy to remember and type to encourage people to use it as often as possible. You can even combine your own hashtag with others that are already popular and use them as springboards.
4.Build a genuine relationship with your followers
There’s no better way to stand out from your competition than creating a unique look and pairing it with powerful storytelling.
Tell your followers a story they can relate to, or one that shapes their perception of you as the face of the business in a positive way. Here are some common themes that will get them hooked, especially if written by a skilled copywriter:
- Your humble and not so humble victories
- The difficulties you have encountered
- How you overcame them
- What’s going on behind-the-scenes
- How did you get where you are now
Apart from being vulnerable, you need to be active on Instagram as much as you can. In 2024, the relationship with your audience is a give and take one.
You have to earn their support. The perfect balance is to post two to three times a week. Beyond posting, you need to be engaging in more direct communication through:
- Daily stories
- Comment replies
- Feedback sharing
- Private messages
5. Make your content shareable
Using tags is another powerful way to get more people to notice your Instagram account, and maybe even your website if you linked it in the description.
Tagging people on your posts and stories with @ automatically sends them a notification that encourages them to share your posts with their own followers. You can also pinpoint locations, especially if your business is located in a popular location. By clicking on the location, the user has access to all the photos and stories posted from that place. This boosts your visibility enormously. But before you start applying all the tips we shared so far, you need to understand your target audience:
- Profiles
- Interests
- Behaviors
- Problems
- Location
6.Organise exciting giveaways
Offering your community a giveaway on Instagram can be used to announce the opening of the brand's Instagram account in order to bring in the first followers.
If your brand has already been on Instagram for a while but your followers are silent, it will boost your audience's engagement with the brand during and after the contest. You’ll also gain some new followers that never heard of you before the giveaway. It can go a long way in raising awareness of a new product or service during launch. There are different kinds of promotional giveaways that you can consider depending on the results you want to achieve. Here are some ideas that you can easily try on Instagram:
- Participants have to like an image posted by your brand and the winner is selected randomly.
- Participants have to answer your question in the comments section, and the best answer will get them to win.
- Participants have to post an image from your Instagram on their own feed or share your content in their story while tagging you.
- Participants have to tag one or more of their friends in the comments section and get them to follow you. The winner is selected randomly. This technique allows you to reach far more people than just your subscribers.
- Participants have to promote your brand’s product or service on their personal accounts in a creative way. The post has to include the hashtag of the contest and a tag of your Instagram. This is called UGC (user-generated content) and helps build credibility around your brand.
7.Pitching through your Instagram stories
Stories are a very important aspect of the platform and an essential part of every great Instagram marketing strategy for small business.
You can use it to communicate with all your followers at the same time. Address some common topics around your offer instead of replying to every single message in your inbox.
Stories are also great to create a genuine relationship with your community, just like we discussed above. You can use it to offer an exclusive backstage window into the business.
You can also highlight some of your happy customers by tagging them in your story. A sense of recognition and trust will then develop. The person you tagged will share it again with their followers, who might start following you as well. Your brand capitalizes on the visibility of this customer. Once you have a loyal and responsive audience, you can use this golden opportunity to communicate about an event or to share a product demonstration. Don't hesitate to add polls or countdowns that will allow you to further engage your followers. If you have more than 10,000 followers, you can also include links to swipe up. This feature is a sure way to increase organic traffic on your website and boost your conversions. You’ll also make it easier for your followers to access the content you produce on other platforms like YouTube. This results in an increased following for those accounts as well.
8.Promote your Instagram account within your other marketing strategies
So you’ve now seen how your other social media accounts can benefit from your Instagram marketing strategy. But the same is true the other way around.
If you already have a large number of followers on other social media platforms, encourage them to visit your Instagram profile by sending them exclusive incentives. You could give them a coupon code that is only available on Instagram. You could also inform your audience that you just posted on your Instagram and hide the image with a sticker to arouse their curiosity.
Don't hesitate to create a section in your newsletter in which you will share your most liked or commented Instagram posts. This will not only send some great traffic to your Instagram account but will also make your subscriber feel like you're a real deal. They will see that you have a whole online community backing your products and services.
9.Create an IGTV to add more depth to your content
Since 2018, you have the option to use Instagram's TV feature to post 1 hour-long videos. Unlike stories, IGTV videos are permanent.
You can present your brand's products, services, or values more effectively, and create unique storytelling to demonstrate your brand's authenticity. You can add links directly into the descriptions of the videos, and as a result bring traffic to your website, your online shop, a product page. Here are some ways you can use IGTV to promote your brand:
- Show the behind-the-scenes of your business
- Give a tutorial on how to use your products
- Showcase content from users and customers after they have given you their consent
- Display your activism or values through inspirational conversations or speeches
10.Track your KPIs to make sure your Instagram marketing strategy is working
Even if you have prepared your action plan correctly, success is never guaranteed. As with any business strategy, it is important to know which of your actions worked best and why. You will then be able to react and adapt. To do this, you can consult the internal Instagram statistics available on your profile and set up a Key Performance Indicators (KPI) tracking.
The main indicators for monitoring the performance of your posts and stories are:
- Impressions: this is how often users have seen your post.-
- Reach: this indicator shows how many people you have actually reached with your post.
- Engagement: this KPI shows the interactions users have had with your posts (likes, comments, reposting of your hashtag by other users, etc.)
- Click-through rate: this will inform you on how many people actually clicked on your ads with a link to your website so that you can monitor the conversion rate of your business.
Need help with promoting your company on Instagram? Legiit has your back!
As you have clearly figured out, creating content on Instagram requires dedication, creativity, analytic and social skills, as well as adaptability and time commitment.
But it pays off because this platform is so beneficial for your brand image and for developing your business, no matter its current size. For more Instagram marketing tips, explore our blog. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all those features and can’t fully commit to growing your business on Instagram, find people to outsource this to instead of giving up the idea completely. The freelancers on Legiit are at your disposal to help you establish and/or execute your Instagram marketing strategy for 2024. Check out their services now!
FAQ
How Instagram can benefit your business?
This growing social media platform has attracted 25 million businesses and 2 million advertisers so far, but the number keeps on growing as we're writing this.
Instagram has the required qualities to build your brand image, build a community and generate serious revenue. The average engagement rate on this platform is 1.6% per post. By comparison, Facebook and Twitter have engagement rates of 0.09% and 0.048% respectively.
What content works best on Instagram?
Instagram is full of millennials. These digital natives alone represent a huge market with trillions of dollars in purchasing power.
They love new technologies, are eager to spend on them. But how to attract their attention and make them want to invest in you? By showing up as an authentic, engaging, and humane brand. Instagram is the best lever to reach out to them directly and intimately.
Can I promote on Instagram without Facebook?
You need Facebook Ads to launch and manage your Instagram campaigns. You have two main options:- Use the "Promote" button at the bottom of each post (provided you have converted your account to a professional one)
- Use the full Facebook ads module and choose the "Instagram" ad placement when setting up the campaign
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