Whether you sell a product, have a store, or you want people to recognize your brand, it’s time to create an Instagram account. To get you started, our Marketing team at GCS Malta put together 5 tips to help you get started.
1. Understand your audience
Your content should be target towards your target buyer. Take time to figure out who your existing audience is and try to envision who you’d like them to be. When using Instagram for marketing you need to take into consideration whether they are potential buyers or can help you build your brand in some way.
Here’s a way you can learn more about your audience:
Try Instagram Insights
This tool offers some interesting insights into the people following and interacting with your account. These include:
Impressions: How many times your content was viewed
Reach: Total number of unique accounts that viewed a piece of content
Website clicks: How many clicks the link in your business profile has received
Follower activity: How often your followers are on Instagram daily
Video views: How often your video content has been viewed
Saves: How many people have saved your posts
Insights also include demographic information for you to be able to see where your followers are coming from, their age, and their gender.
2. Talk with them, not at them
It’s crucial to engage with your followers and spamming them with sales posts will lead to a decrease in engagement. Try out these methods to increase interaction.
Share their images
It shows appreciation from your side when they post great content themselves. It will build a better image for your brand as it shows you listen to your audience.
Hold contests
The best way to get interaction is to simply ask for it. People love the chance to respond, and a little healthy competition goes a long way.
Easy Instagram contests include:
- “Caption this image or Best caption wins…”
- “Share a time when…”
- “Tell us how this image makes you feel”
To track responses easily, make sure you use a unique hashtag for each competition.
3. Use relevant hashtags
Hashtags help you organize and categorize images and video content to find content more easily. You can almost say they’ve become mandatory, if you want people to find your content. Here are a few hashtag best practices:
- Don’t overdo it: five targeted hashtags are better than 25 random ones.
- Avoid overused tags: adding #love or #instagood is as good as useless.
- Don’t spam: keep them relevant to the image.
4. Know when to post
According to a recent poll the best time to upload on Instagram is between 7-9 pm. However, we don’t suggest relying on a few pools. Find out the best times to post for your target audience. To do this, you’ll want a social listening tool that monitors Instagram engagement. These track your Instagram posts and provide results on which post performs the best, based on the date and time. If you don’t want to make use of this tool, here are some uploading tips from the team:
- Aim for non-work hours (lunch and evenings)
- Weekends if you’re a B2C company; probably not for B2B
- Wednesdays and Thursdays seem to be best for engagement
- 3-4 pm is generally the worst for engagement
5. Add Calls-to-action
CTAs (Calls-to-action) is a statement designed to get an immediate response from the person reading or hearing it. It’s used in business as part of a marketing strategy to get your target market to respond by taking action. A good CTA tells them what to do next. Here are some examples:
- Link in bio. Instagram only allows one link to be uploaded on your account – the one in your bio. Therefore, tell your followers where they can find it.
- Promo Codes. This is a perfect method since it gives you the opportunity to track the response.
- Like vs Comment. It’s a simple way to increase engagement.
Why GCS Malta?
GCS Malta’s Marketing team can help you sustain your business growth through promotion and finalizing a business strategy. Contact us now on info@gcsmalta.com to get you started!
