While most social media marketing strategies should incorporate posting across all or most of the best-performing platforms, Instagram offers ways of marketing creatively that cannot be ignored.
The photo-sharing platform excels when it comes to organic advertising, letting followers engage with influencers and content that they deem authentic and trustworthy.
As a result, Instagram can be a real booster for a business, and so it’s important that your company makes the most of it. Here, we take a look at the ways that you can use Instagram creatively to get your user engagement up.
01. Themed Grid
There are many examples of Instagram grids that look beautiful. They are planned and executed with precision and style, and they really stand out amongst the quickly thrown together feeds.
An existing follower may not visit your grid very often, but it is the first thing your potential followers will see when they click through to your page. It is imperative that your grid reflects your brand.
There should be an identifiable theme, whether that is the type of content you post, the frequency with which logos and other brand images are mixed in with photography or illustration, or even the colour and font used on each square.
It is likely that your company has engaged a designer and advertising team to come up with images and logos that represent you in public. Using these images to your best advantage on Instagram will have far-reaching benefits.
A social media executive must be able to take this aesthetic and apply it to each social media platform, and especially to Instagram, which is the home for visual content.
02. Stories
This brand identity should continue across your Instagram stories. Stories are useful because they are passive viewing for the follower, but will build brand loyalty.
If used correctly, you may even find that your followers are hunting your stories out, looking for new and creative ways to use your products in order to get featured, or investigating if you have anything new coming out in the near future.
Brands that use stories simply for advertising will find that they lose this engagement fairly quickly. Instagram followers have little patience for inauthentic content. They are much more likely to engage and trust your brand if they can see the people behind the product. The human touch is invaluable.
As with your grid, stories should be consistent with your aesthetic. This means that if a particular font is used in your marketing materials, it should be used here.
Stories should be thought of as an extension of artistic responsibility, so your designer should work quite closely with your social media marketing team to produce these temporary posts.
Finally, accessibility on Instagram is absolutely vital. Stories without accessible captions are likely to be skipped, and if you produce enough of these then you may also lose followers.
03. Ask a Question
When we talk about using Instagram creatively, asking a question is surely a great way to go about it. Once you have decent number of followers, the posts with questions tends of get a lot of engagement as it gives users the option to participate and respond with their views.
It is also a very effective way to build a brand. You can restrict yourself with the questions around your business niche so that you have perfectly targeted audience for your business.
We often think that only the experts do well on social media, but that’s not the truth. Being amateur is good at times and you can share the things that you are currently learning to showcase your progress.
There will be many users who are probably on the same page and learning new things as well. So, you can share the mistakes that you make along the way and motivate other users.
For example, if you have just started with yoga or any other fitness related practice, you can share your daily activities that you have done and what you have learnt.
05.Consistency
This is a key word for traditional marketing, and it’s just the same for social media marketing. An Instagram user scrolling through their feed should recognize your content even before they notice the user name.
They should be so familiar with your aesthetic and brand identity, that they could pick your post out of a selection if there were no other identifying features. Consistency means brand awareness, identity, and confidence.
Your schedule should also be consistent. The best bet is to post on your feed every day, though don’t be tempted to take this further and overshare. You can use these Instagram scheduling tools to be active round the clock.
Using stories for content that isn’t right for the grid means that you will engage users in various ways on the platform. This gives your brand a couple of opportunities every day to get it right.
Conclusion
Any social media marketer should be able to identify your brand’s aesthetic and ethos. They can then plan, produce and schedule content that is engaging and consistent, and that lets your followers feel that they are getting value from your account.
There are so many ways to use Instagram creatively to boost engagement and convert to sales, so make sure to be creative in order to use this platform to its full potential.
