Instagram is one of the world’s leading social media platforms enabling brands to easily gain traction and increase leads. The popular photo-sharing platform, launched in 2010, uses imagery to position brands who can capitalise on a vast pool of some 300 million users. These users can, in turn, easily become important leads.
Most Instagram users use the platform to post amateur videos or photos. From delicious meals to their latest home wear purchase, there are millions of ideas floating around this platform for you to feast your eyes on.
However, Instagram isn’t just an easy way to while away some time – it is also an incredibly powerful tool for businesses to market their brand and increase leads. With some expertly shot images and some captivating videos, you will soon be earning more engagements, which could quickly translate into higher lead conversions.
Here are our expert tips on how to use Instagram to generate leads:
1. Identify your audience
Instagram is home to a massive community of users from across the globe, so knowing your target audience will make it much easier for you to tactfully post images to the right people. Learn about your customers’ tastes, interest and hobbies, as this will give you with a much more strategic way to create buzz around your brand and generate a following.
2. Maintain consistency with your identity
It’s tempting to try different things with each post, but consistency is very important in maintaining brand awareness and complementing your brand. Everything from your profile picture to your brand description and tagline needs to be streamlined with your company philosophy in mind. By ensuring that everything is uniform across each platform, this makes your brand easily identifiable amongst the crowd. Starbucks is a good example of staying recognisable via consistency: their logo, tagline and images are consistent across their social media platforms, thus helping their loyal customers to find their brand.
3. Post videos!
Video-sharing on Instagram lets you share video clips from as little as 3 seconds to more than 60 seconds long while there is also the Instagram stories feature which lets you post photos and videos that vanish after 24 hours.
More and more businesses are reaping the benefits of Insta-videos. Research shows that the time people spend watching videos on Instagram has increased by more than 40%, and adding videos to your existing campaign will definitely drive higher favourability in your brand versus those brands that avoid video. Countless brands use video on Instagram with amazing results, including Oreo, Dunkin’ Donuts, NASA, Buzz Feed, Ben & Jerry’s and many, many more.
4. Use hashtags
Hashtags are really important in reaching the right people in an organised and strategic way. Simply find the keywords that relate to your industry and use them along with your photos/videos to tap into a large audience who are seeking your professional goods or services (RiteTag is a great tool to discover the latest trending hashtags).
5. Create interesting captions
Along with hashtags, it’s important to create interesting captions to support your photos/videos and give them meaning. Oreo yet again do an excellent job with their captions, informing their audience about different elements of their cookies in an engaging way that boosts audience interest.
6. Measure your success
As with Facebook and Twitter, Instagram offers businesses the right tools to measure their campaign success. By measuring your success you will be better able to analyse the search behaviour of your leads and discover which photos or videos are creating the highest engagements (and then create more of the same!).
7. Always respond to your audience
Finally, your Instagram followers are your potential customers so always respond to questions or queries about upcoming events, sales, offerings, your products/services and so on. This not only increases engagement levels but also raises awareness of your brand and keeps your business at the forefront of peoples’ minds, which will soon lead to stronger leads!
How can we help?
If you need help with your next digital marketing campaign, get in touch. 8 Ways Media is a leading digital marketing agency with a special focus on branding, web design, User Experience and SEO. We’ve worked with countless brands, large and small, helping them to adjust their approach to marketing and branding for even greater success.
Related articles.
