Instagram used to mean selfies, photos of brunch and too many inspirational quotes to count. Its purpose has since shifted, however, and Instagram is now one of the most powerful marketing tools available to businesses of any size. With over 700 million active users, promoting your brand or business on Instagram is one of the most effective ways of reaching a massively diverse audience. If you’d like to know how to target a specific segment of this audience and how to create powerful, impacting and meaningful marketing strategies for your business using Instagram, take a look at the helpful tips below.
Instagram is primarily a visual engagement tool since it lets you upload images and videos for your followers to view. This is an ideal arrangement for showcasing products using still, tastefully composed images, or showing products and services in action using videos of up to 60 seconds. In addition to simply uploading content, Instagram also allows you to edit your photos and videos using a variety of filters or more specific parameters. This means that you can tweak and alter the photos you want to upload to perfection before sharing them with the wider Instagram community. A hashtag system utilised by Instagram makes tagging and searching for certain categories easier, meaning you can link your specific product or service with a hashtag for ultimate visibility.
Business profiles on Instagram permit you to offer contact information, meaning users can get in touch with you or your team directly and easily. One of the other advantages to using the business profile is that it allows you to access statistics and analysis tools. This feature, called Instagram Insights, means you can view a lot of different data such as your followers’ demographic information or how well your individual posts are doing and how far they have reached. This is an invaluable tool for a business, especially when it comes to understanding your audience and figuring out which posts are the most effective, how far they have reached, and the number of interactions the post has collected.
As part of their integrated social media campaign for the promotion of Captain America: Civil War, Marvel put together a team of graffiti artists and hired them to paint one of the film’s iconic fight scenes across the side of a building. This was documented and then made into a time-lapse on Instagram. This fit the medium of Instagram perfectly, and showed a slice of what fans could expect from the film. It also managed to transcend the digital medium by becoming a constant fixture for people passing by the building the murals were painted on.
Adidas cleverly used the public to take part in their Adidas Neo marketing campaign. Instagram influencers and the general public were invited to create Adidas-inspired posts and upload them to Instagram with the hashtag #MyNeoShoot. Adidas also called on Selena Gomez, one of Instagram’s most popular celebrities, to help get a buzz started and get people posting photos. The users with the best content stood a chance to win a professional modelling shoot and have their content shared with Adidas’ huge following. It was a massive success, generating over 71,000 mentions and acquiring over 41,000 new followers.
