Instagram for Business Guide: Top Strategies for 2024 Success
Instagram for Business Guide is essential for companies looking to thrive on Instagram in 2024. With over 200 million businesses on the platform, it’s a powerful tool for marketing and engagement.
Instagram has become a go-to platform for businesses, offering high ROI and significant investment opportunities. In this guide, we’ll explore how you can effectively use Instagram for business to promote and grow your brand.
How to Use Instagram for Business
Let’s delve into the six strategies you’ll need to employ to get the most out of Instagram.
1. Add value with your content.
Instagram is a visual platform. To attract an audience, you must deliver high-quality, thoughtful content.
Creating valuable content that attracts and engages your audience is essential. Consider how you can delight your customers while staying true to your brand. For example, Hot Pockets, known for its microwaveable sandwiches, uses humor to engage its audience, often posting relevant memes or funny quotes.
Brands need to add value to Instagram’s community rather than using the platform solely for advertisements. This is critical for long-term success.
2. Maintain a consistent theme.
Imagine each Instagram post as an individual page of your website.
While each post should be good on its own, creating a cohesive theme is vital to maintain audience loyalty. Using a consistent voice and aesthetic across your Instagram page is a top strategy for Instagram marketers this year.
Consistency in hashtags, captions, pictures, and videos helps attract your most authentic audience. For example, MVMT maintains a consistent feed with similar filters and a darker, edgier aesthetic. Its captions and hashtags also reflect this theme, creating a strong, genuine connection with its followers.
3. Engage with your audience.
Engaging with your audience helps your followers feel valued and more connected to your business.
There are plenty of ways to engage with your audience. You might reply to comments on your posts, participate in comment threads, run contests or giveaways, use Instagram Stories polls, or give shout-outs to followers on your Stories.
Halo Top Creamery does a fantastic job of engaging with its audience by frequently posting cute ice cream pictures with captions like “Ice cream is better with friends. Tag a friend you’d like to eat this with.” This strategy helps grow their audience and demonstrates a genuine commitment to connecting with their followers.
4. Consider influencer marketing.
As a consumer, you’ve likely seen the recent influx of influencer marketers on Instagram — and for good reason.
Social media marketers say that Instagram offers the second-highest ROI of all platforms when working with influencers. Leveraging the power of an influencer, who is already authentically connected with their audience, can spread brand awareness and drive sales.
Micro-influencing is a strong opportunity for brand endorsement. Influencers have cultivated an engaged, loyal following, and by identifying the right influencers for your niche, you’re more likely to find followers who will truly enjoy and support your products or services.
5. Build an ad campaign.
There are two reasons you might use Instagram ads: to spread brand awareness or to increase sales.
It’s critical to focus on one goal when creating an effective ad campaign. An Instagram ad aiming to sell a product will look vastly different from one intending to attract followers.
For instance, Greenchef’s ad featuring images of delicious food and a “$40 OFF” discount is likely a high-converting ad aimed at getting people to buy their product. On the other hand, YouTube’s ads featuring well-known singers entice followers to simply follow YouTube Music’s Instagram channel.
To implement an effective campaign, decide what you’re hoping to achieve before you begin creating it. Create high-value visual content and A/B test multiple variations of the same ad to figure out what works best for your business. Use Facebook Ads Manager to narrow in on your target audience, choose your ad objective, and analyze ad performance.
6. Utilize shoppable posts.
If you’re using Instagram for business, Shoppable Posts is one feature you’ll want to know well.
It allows you to create posts and tag your products and services to create a seamless shopping experience directly on the platform. This feature reduces friction for your followers, increasing the odds of turning them into customers.
Before you begin executing these strategies, you’ll need one thing: an Instagram Business Profile.
A business profile legitimizes your Instagram account and enables you to add critical information like your company’s business hours, location, and phone number.
Pros and Cons of an Instagram Business Profile
Here are some helpful pros and cons to determine if a business profile is right for you:
Pros
- Access to metrics on how your posts and stories perform.
- Ability to track how your followers engage with your content.
- Access to features necessary to run ad campaigns.
- Gain feature for adding URLs to Stories to send warm traffic to your site.
Cons
- Being labeled as a business.
- May experience less organic reach and visibility.
- Must also have a Facebook account to access ad features.
For most brands, the benefits of a business profile outweigh the cons due to the additional features and analytics. However, it’s important to consider your goals before taking action.
How to Create a Business Instagram Profile
To create a business profile on Instagram, first create a personal Instagram account and then switch it to a business profile.
If you already have an Instagram account, skip to the next section for instructions on making the switch. If you don’t already have an Instagram account, there are two ways to get one:
- From the computer
- From a mobile device (IOS and Android)
For detailed steps, check out our comprehensive article on how to create a business account on Instagram.
How to Switch to Your Business Profile
When you have an Instagram set up, follow these easy steps when you’re ready to make the switch:
1. Go to your profile on the mobile app and select the hamburger menu (three stacked horizontal bars) in the top right corner.
2. Scroll down to “Your insights and tools” and tap “Account type and tools.”
3. Under “Account type,” select “Switch to a professional account.”
4. Click “Continue” in the pop-up menu.
5. Select the best category descriptor for your account, like blogger or digital creator, then click “Done.”
You can also toggle the “Display on profile” button so the category you choose is visible to your profile visitors. The button is pictured below.
And here’s what the button looks like on a profile:
6. Next, choose whether you’re a creator or a business.
The descriptions under each type let you know what’s most applicable to you based on the category you chose. Once selected, click “Next.”
If you do not have a Facebook Business Page, you will need to create one before completing this step. If your Facebook page is already linked, move on to the next step.
7. Follow the prompts to continue setting up your account and customizing your profile.
8. Select Done.
You’re now ready to begin implementing your social media strategy on Instagram.
From here, you’ll want to determine the audience you want to target, the aesthetic and tone you want to convey, and the content you want to create.
Top Instagram Promotion Tactics of 2024
Here, we’ll review some of the top Instagram promotion tactics gleaned from our 2024 Instagram Engagement Report.
Audience Interaction
Marketers’ primary goal on Instagram in 2024 is increasing engagement, so it makes sense that the most popular Instagram marketing strategy is interacting with audiences.
Interacting with your audience offers so much more than just engagement. It helps build a sense of community with your followers and allows you to get to know them better.
Content Engagement
Audience interaction takes the top spot for the most popular strategy, but survey respondents say they plan to invest the most money in creating content that encourages engagement on the platform.
Creating content that encourages engagement offers the highest ROI. Engagement on social media signals that your content is resonating with your audience. Whether it’s an in-feed post, a Story, or a live stream, engagement can be a great indicator of your page’s health.
To make your content more engaging, try creating content that champions your products or services. Our research shows that this type of content performs the best on the platform.
Funny content also offers high performance, as it tends to be relatable and usually gets someone to stop scrolling and pay attention.
The format also influences engagement, with most marketers posting images more than anything else. Seventy percent of marketers surveyed post images on the platform, saying it has the highest ROI of all content formats.
Videos are another effective tool, and the data shows that sharing video content brings in the most reach and impressions of all other formats.
Product Advertising
As Instagram shopping continues to grow, it’s no surprise that marketers’ second goal for 2024 is advertising their products or services.
Our research shows that running advertisement campaigns is among the top five Instagram strategies, getting the most investment in 2024. Sharing content that showcases products or services offers the highest ROI of any content type.
Instagram shopping tools are still evolving, but 71% of social media marketers who sell products in the Instagram app say the features have high ROI. Most survey respondents also say that 25-50% of clicks on shoppable and linked posts lead to purchases.
Over to You
Whatever your goal is, whether it’s increasing brand awareness or generating more revenue, using Instagram for business gets you one step closer to achieving it. While not all of Instagram’s tools will offer a high ROI, they are all worth trying to see what works best for your audience.
For more tips and insights, visit our blog or contact us via email at info@07hm.co.uk or telephone at 01702 410663.
