Sam Makad
Sam Makad is a business consultant. He helps small & medium enterprises to grow their businesses and overall ROI. You can follow Sam on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin.
Instagram is a go-to platform for marketers. With over 500 million active daily users, Instagram is a perfect marketing platform for small businesses.
Instagram is the biggest audio-visual social media platform with over 800 million users. It has over 500 million active daily users making it an effective marketing platform for small businesses. You can turn this huge user engagement into real customers for your small business. The good thing with Instagram for business is it that is not reserved for any particular brand.
Whether you run a spa, a coffee shop, or you sell clothes, there is an Instagram audience waiting for you. Instagram is a great platform to market your products and services and provide support to your customers.
So, how do you use Instagram for your small business?
1. Open a Free Business Account
If you are still using your personal account for your business, you are missing out. There is a significant difference between a personal account and a business account. An Instagram business account gives in-depth analytics, which helps to improve your marketing efforts.
Reasons why you should have a business account:
● It is easier to drive traffic to your business website
With a business account, you can easily convert followers into leads. A business allows you to put a link on your profile contact button. Your business site is now just a click away.
● More detailed contact information
A business account allows you to have a more detailed business description. You can add your email, business hours, location, direction, and phone numbers.
● A business account offers improved analytics
With a business account, you have access to more in-depth analytics. Analyzing your performance allows you to get a good ROI on your social media marketing strategy. With this, you get real-time analytics on how your posts and stories are performing, see how often your followers contact you, when they comment and how they find your brand.
● Paid advertising is easier
With a business account, you can easily set up Instagram ads. Paid adverts are a crucial part of an Instagram marketing strategy for small businesses. To advertise on Instagram, you just need to tap on the ‘promote’ button, set your call to action message, and you are good to go. Isn’t that simple?
2. Increase Your Instagram Followers
Of course, for your Instagram marketing strategy to be effective, you need to have a big audience who you can turn into real paying customers. Here are ways to increase your Instagram followers:
● Set up a proper business account - with your business logo as the profile photo (or your photo in case you don’t have a logo for business), a great bio, and a link to your business site in the bio.
● Post consistently but relevant content
● Use proper hashtags
● Use great photos and videos
● Engage with your followers - like their comments and respond to their comments and questions
● Promote your business account on other social media platforms
3. Promote Your Business with Paid Adverts
Instagram ads will do the magic for your small business and drive sales up. There are four types of ads formats;
● Photos ads
● Carousel ads
● Stories ads
● Video ads
Follow these steps to create an Instagram ad:
● Choose the post that you want to be promoted.
● Choose the objective of your ad - you can choose to get more profile visits, increase visits to your website, or reach people near a specific address.
● Set your desired audience, call to action, budget and ad duration
● Evaluate performance - you can get real-time information on how your campaign is doing.
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