Instagram marketing tips for business that you can’t afford to ignore

1. Use a business account

Just in case you skipped over the section above and plan to dive into the rest of the Instagram marketing tips while using a personal account, here’s why you should reconsider.

A business account gives you access to features you can’t use with a personal account, including:

• Instagram Insights
• Instagram ads
• Instagram Shopping
• Primary and secondary messaging inboxes
• Contact information and a call-to-action button on your profile

2. Clearly define your goals

All social platforms are tools. But you can’t use those tools effectively unless you know what it is you’re trying to build.

Instagram marketing can mean different things to different marketers. Are you looking to:

• Create an online presence for your business?
• Increase brand awareness?
• Get new leads?
• Establish your brand as an industry leader?
• Sell products directly from the app?

3. Know your audience

A little preliminary research can help you figure out who you can best reach when you’re thinking about how to market on Instagram. For example, our Instagram demographics shows that:

• The most active Instagrammers are between 18 and 29.
• The United States is the largest Instagram market.
• More urban residents use Instagram than their suburban peers.

4. Optimize your profile

In just 150 characters, your Instagram bio needs to make a great first impression, convey your brand personality, and tell people why they should bother following your Instagram account.

That’s a lot to ask from a small space.

Fortunately, you also get a few other fields on your Instagram profile to showcase what your brand is all about and make it easier for people to find you. These include:

• Your name: 30 characters, included in search.
• Your username: AKA your handle. Up to 30 characters, included in search.
• Your website: A clickable URL you can change as often as you like.
• Category: A business feature that tells people what you’re all about without using up bio characters.
• Contact info: Tell people where to find you.
• Call-to-action buttons: Give Instagrammers a way to interact with you directly from your profile page

5. Create visually compelling content

Instagram is a visual medium, so your posts have simply got to look great. You don’t need professional photography equipment, but your photos and videos do need to be sharp, well-lit, well-composed, and in focus, at a minimum.

If you’re using images other than photos, like infographics or animations, make sure they’re crisp, clear, easy-to read, and eye-catching.

Even more important, your visual content needs to be compelling. Great photos are nice, but if they don’t tell a story, or get viewers excited, they’re not going to engage followers.

Not sure what to post? Here are a few ideas:

Behind-the-scenes posts: Give followers a look at your office, your storefront, or your manufacturing process.

Quotes and text-based images: Play with text to create visually interesting content with no photos required.

Regrams and UGC: User-generated content is by nature authentic and compelling.

Instructional posts: Teaching followers how to achieve a goal is about as compelling as it gets.

Videos: The maximum length of a video post on Instagram is 60 seconds, but you can go much longer with IGTV.

Reels: A short new type of Instagram feature

9. Use hashtags wisely

Hashtags are a key way to increase your visibility and discoverability.

You can use up to 30 hashtags in an Instagram post. But, realistically, you probably don’t want to do that.

We recommend using between five and nine hashtags per post. More than that can look like hashtag stuffing, a spammy tactic that turns followers off. Worse, if you use irrelevant or repetitive hashtags, users can choose not to see your content for that tag.

To get the most benefit, choose hashtags that:

• Are relevant
• Are specific to your niche
• Do not encourage follow- or like-swapping (think #like4like or #followme)

10.Post at the right times

Did you know that the best time to post on Instagram varies based on your industry?

We analyzed 258,956 posts from 11 different industries and found that there really is a best time to post, even though Instagram feeds are no longer chronological.

Here are the best times to post for each industry we analyzed:

• Travel and tourism: Friday, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
• Media and entertainment: Tuesday and Thursday, 12 to 3 p.m.
• Food and beverage: Friday, 12 p.m.
• Retail: Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, 12 p.m.
• Professional services: Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, 9 or 10 a.m.
• Non-profit: Tuesday, 10 a.m. or 4 p.m.
• Non-retail e-commerce: Thursday, 4 or 9 p.m.
• Pharma and healthcare: Wednesday and Sunday, 9 a.m.
• Personal care: Thursday and Friday, 1, 2, or 3 p.m.
• Technology: Monday and Tuesday, 2 p.m.
• Education: Thursday, 4 or 5 p.m.

11.Expand your audience with Instagram ads

The surest way to get your content in front of a new audience is to run an Instagram ad.

Back in Tip 3, you defined your target audience. Now you can use that information to target your ads based on:

• Location: State, province, city, country, and so on
• Demographics: Like age, gender, and language
• Interests: Such as other accounts people follow, apps they use, and ads they click
• Behaviors: Both on and off Instagram

You can also upload custom audiences of people you have existing relationships with, and use these to create lookalike audiences.

You can advertise in the Instagram feed, Stories, or Explore.

We do that for you in NGDC

12.Refine your strategy with analytics

No matter how good you already are at Instagram marketing, you can always be better. The best way to improve your results is to learn from what you’ve already done.

And the best way to do that is to study all of the information available in Instagram Insights.