In almost every update, Instagram keeps getting better and better for brands. Despite a few hiccups here and there, the visual platform serves as one of the most convenient and efficient platforms to showcase your products and services. Through their screens, you can already give potential customers a taste and experience of your brand.
Building your online presence on Instagram, however, isn’t an overnight job. It’s an entire process on its own of planning, creating, and observing. Just like any business deals, you’ll have to invest time, effort, and energy on it before you reap the returns. With the right strategies to help you plan, create, and optimize, you can build your Instagram campaign efficiently.
Here are some tips from Social Media Examiner to help you build an amazing and effective Instagram content strategy.
1. Establish Your Instagram Theme
Every time someone opens their Instagram, they’re expecting to see visual pleasantries on their feed. And this is where establishing your brand content theme comes first and foremost. When establishing your theme, there are three things you need to consider: color, filters, and type of content.
First, you have to choose which colors you want people to associate with your brand. And then, use these colors to predominate your posts. Then, choose your filters to help you develop a signature style. Make sure it goes well with your chosen colors of course. And last but not least, think about what type of content you would want to post. Would it be products, people, or scenery? Though you won’t have to stick with one type of content, it helps to have a general idea of what you’d have to make.
Central to all this is branding. However, don’t make it your limit. Don’t be afraid to experiment and mix it all up. Take the Instagram accounts of Canva and Lancome. Both brands dabble in a variety of posts as well as different color schemes. But, both brands maintain their identities. While Canva is modern, fun, and professional, Lancome is classy, luxurious and chic. And they achieve these through their own clever mix of colors, posts, filters, and such. Find what works for you and work until you polish it.
2. Plan Your Instagram Marketing Content
Two things you need to keep in mind at this point are your primary goals and the time you can dedicate to Instagram. Big businesses usually have employees dedicated to this. But if you’re a small business, it might be time to pull out a huge lump of time management and planning skills.
A key to building a great Instagram brand profile is to keep things interesting and different every day. Holiday and novelty holiday posts like world cupcake day or world best friend day are great sources of content inspiration. Another type of posts you can sprinkle on your feed are motivational quotes like what Dove does. You can also add casual animal posts, pet posts, and memes to generate more engagement. Get a general idea of the content you’d want to create and how to keep the interest of your audience.
To help you keep your Instagram in check, get the help of organizing tools. Some tools you can use are spreadsheets, Google sheets, or Trello. There, you can quickly organize your posts, put out content ideas, collaborate for new content, and more. Though these won’t directly do the posting for you on the scheduled dates, you can easily see an overview of how your profile would look like. You can easily make adjustments. And it’ll help you map out when and where to put your posts.
3. Create Your Instagram Content
After you’ve set out your overview plan, it’s time to create your posts. And the most important thing to consider here is your purpose. If you’re just starting out, you might be looking to increase your followers. And you could achieve this by creating the type of content people love to see like pet photos and motivational quotes. If you have a great following already, you might be looking to boost sales. So, your focus here would be promoting your services and products.
When creating your content, always ask yourself what you want to achieve. And of course, consider using the best specs for your post. Make sure to optimize the size of the content for the platform. There are tons of places to get clear and free images from—Unsplash, Pixabay, and Pexels. And there are also quick and easy editing tools like Canva that you can use to create clear and effective content.
4. Schedule Your Content
Scheduling is not only efficient but, it also helps you reap the greatest returns from your posts. There are a lot of studies out there citing the best times to post. However, the results are largely based on your target audience. The best way to get the optimal posting time for your brand is to monitor the activity on your posts. Experiment a little. Then, check up on which hours and days you get the most engagement on your posts.
Once you’ve settled on a schedule, you can choose to get the help of third-party apps to keep your posts on schedule. Tools like SocialPilot can help you schedule posts on multiple platforms at a small price. And it also has features that can help you further improve your content.
5. Optimize Your Content
Before you click the share button, the last step you have to do is to optimize your content to maximize the reach of your post. And the best way to do this is to use hashtags. They help you reach wider audiences and provide you more opportunities to attract followers. Research on what hashtags you can use. Then, save relevant ones for future use. Also, Don’t be afraid to go beyond the popular oversaturated hashtags.
Some kinds of hashtags you can use are industry hashtags, location hashtags, and holiday hashtags. To reach a more specific group, you can also use niche hashtags or branded hashtags. These help you avoid getting buried under millions of other posts. Use a huge variety of hashtags on your posts. Experiment and constantly look out for which ones work best for you.
Lastly, don’t forget your captions. Match it up with the content you’re posting. If you want to drive them to your bio, make it short. If you want to educate, you can afford to make it longer. And don’t ever ever forget your call to action. Make it clear, plain, and easy to follow.
Whether you’re a small business or a big business, there’s a process to building an Instagram profile that yields great results. And it does definitely take time and effort. But once you start then master the game, it’ll be a lot easier for you to play on your own terms. So hang tight and start the grind on Instagram.
