It’s no secret that social media channels are strong in building a sense of community within your market. Amongst these many channels is Instagram, which focuses on visual imagery to broadcast products, personal lifestyles, services and more. But how is Instagram contributing to your business? Or how could it contribute? Let’s look at a few simple ways that you could be benefiting from Instagram. 

1. This is where users tend to browse, reach them in their downtime 

Recent data shows that Instagram has 1 billion monthly active members on its platform. With this statistic, it’s likely that your consumers are on the platform at some point within their journey to a conversion. Although social channels aren’t always last touchpoints within conversions, they generally play a large part of the pathway in terms of awareness. Your posts should spark conversations, be relevant to your ideal prospects and build a positive perception of your brand (which leads perfectly into point number 2…).

2. Build a community around your brand 

When reaching your users, it’s important to build engagement around your brand which creates the foundation of your community. For example, having users tag their friends and respond to your posts helps marketers to measure engagement with the brand and therefore the likeability of your company. When building a community, for a lot of organisations, hashtags are beneficial. This is a way for you to be able to aggregate all conversations, posts and comments that refer to your brand. 

The first step is creating a hashtag relevant to your company. Generally, using your name as a hashtag is a good first step. From there you can build out a hashtag library relevant to your market.

Hot tip: Only use hashtags relevant to your brand and/or post as using irrelevant hashtags may lead to lower user experience and lower placement in the IG feeds. 

3. Track ROI on your ads through Facebook 

The benefits of Instagram ads is they look almost identical to a standard feed post. What this means is you can use it to your advantage for appropriate product placement in your prospects feed. Once you start to gain traction on your ads and conversions, you are able to measure and optimise them through Facebook Ads Manager. 

If you are an eCommerce organisation, the perks of this mean that you can track the dollar value of all of your ads to the tee. Alternatively, setting an estimated customer value can give you an idea of how your ads are performing. 

If you haven’t heard about the Facebook data-driven attribution model – contact our team now to find out! It could save you hours upon hours of time. 

4. Continue building and developing your brand 

By remaining consistent across all of your channels and visually engaging with your customers, you will continue to develop and build on your brand. When using visual stimuli for your users, they will begin to associate the perception they have of your channels with your company and therefore your products. Take, for example, the iconic, fluorescent, yellow ‘M’ that I’m sure you would pass 3-4 times a day when driving anywhere. When you see this ‘M’, 9 times out of 10, you will immediately think of McDonald’s and whatever your perception is of the fast-food chain. Now, this is a more extreme case, however, the logic is still there – consistency creates triggers in users minds and perception is what they associate with those triggers. 

If you’re looking to build out your Instagram strategy but are unsure where to begin, contact our team of specialists to help you out today!