Instagram For Small Business: Effective Growth Strategy Explained | GuideMeHow

You already run a small business, or have been thinking to have one? Yet with, so much going on around the world, and on your mind, the hesitation whether to be on Instagram or not has been on its peak.

In spite of all the naysayers and doubts in your head, you came through and decided to create your own

Now you are looking to scale it over social media, namely Instagram to help increase the number of potential customers and sales.

Audience identification and target

Of the primary and preliminary steps to use Instagram for business, one is to identify your target audience, whom you are going to serve or sell your products.

It is of the utmost importance for you to know where you are heading if you aim to reach your destination. As the saying goes, “A ship without a rudder docks no harbor”.

Even though this quote was just made, it carries with it a lot of loads and heavy meaning when it comes to identifying your target.

This calls for another one of Instagram 101 for business points: which is to understand you, target clients. What do they need and what they are looking for?

This is easy to accomplish by doing market research, and #research. What do we mean by this?

Instagram goals are as important as life goals when it comes to making a business out of it. What are Instagram goals you say?

The best way to set Instagram goals, in fact, any type of goals, is the SMART method. If you have not heard about the smart way of setting goals, here it is:

There are a few variations of the SMART system. However, regardless of how one has explained. It is important you grasp the concept behind it.

Setting the goals in digital marketing should include the so-called “ Funnel approach” which is the journey your follower takes to become your client.

Let us elaborate on this: there are many types but the ones that are consistent in all of them has the four stages:

Awareness: brand awareness, follower growth, post reach

Engagement: engagement rates based Likes, comments, shares

Conversion: comprises of metrics like CPM if you used Instagram ads (which you should) also can tell you about the click-through rate, bounce back rate.

Customer: action is taken

Your aim should be to analyze the data, and find out what percentage of your followers are at what stage of the funnel, and try to turn them into customers.

It was crucial for us to mention the smart goals for it helps you to go about your Instagram plan. Planning is part of every business whether small, big, personal, or professional.

The planning process requires the following:

1. availability of information
2. clearness and soundness of information
3. specificity
4. precision
5. accuracy

There is no need to worry about how you are going to make sure all these components exist in your planning, because we have already told you, and you have already read it and know it by now.

If, in case, it is still not clear here are some tips to rewind:

• You need to research your niche. Despite that, the first aspect of planning might not be a problem the soundness and correctness are. Looking for the info in the niche gives you just that, plus the specificity.
• The precision and accuracy of the information acquired can be determined by engaging with your ideal customer.

Instagram Bio/Link

Filling the bio with the right words and keywords is very important although many people fail to do so. When someone lands on your page, he/she checks you out. It is important to strike with the right idea of what you do from the start in as few characters as possible. Thus, to fill it strategically!

Your checklist in writing a bio on Instagram shall consist of explaining the three questions: WHO, WHAT, WHY plus the keywords.

Who obviously is you, but it cannot simply be your name and last name. It is far more than that.

Are you a creative person, or a business mind, maybe a party lover, you get one chance to get it right and you need to use it wisely and express it straightforwardly.

What, is again as you might have guessed. It may seem simple, but again it is not. Because you could be a copywriter or a painter. You need to get a bit creative if you are a creative person.

If you are not, then you need to channel all the creativity that exists in you and bring it into play. Instead of simply writing that you are a copywriter, write è “a wordsmith “. Sounds unique, does it not? Well, you get the idea.

Following upon “Who” and “what”, explaining “why” they need to buy your product or use your service comes about right at this point.

Conversely, this is also not quite straightforward. It is recommended that you express this “ why” through the means of telling what it is exactly that they can get from you.

It is in a way “how”, but from the customer point of view, meaning they need to know how you can help them.

You have gone all the trouble of presenting yourself to the best of what is required, “ strategically “. Now you need to capitalize on that. Thus, invite them onto your webpage.

It is hence important to ensure that you have a website. Obviously, your website should also be organized in such a way to attract visitors once landed. However, this is a topic for another discussion.

Having the right business logo is as important. A logo that clearly defines what your business is about is one of the aspects of optimizing your bio.

Content creation

Creating content is when one might think as unnecessary to jot about, for it may seem self-evident. There is yet so much that goes here that it is hard to decide what to start with.

The quality of the content, be it photos or videos, is definitely the start. Years ago, when the internet was just being born, you could spit out anything that came to your mind and you would be bombarded with so much traffic it would make you feel like the next superman on the moon.

Now, it is very competitive whichever platform you are on, especially Instagram, most extraordinarily Instagram, if you do not have a pair of enticing racks and athletic body to show off. Even then, it is arguably the most competitive platform.

It is not to be sexist or demotivate for you if you have neither of the above mentioned. It is merely to raise awareness and caution to the highly competitive market, thus by doing so, to increase mindfulness when it comes to keeping vigilant eyes for your content.

Post content that truly has the power to appeal to your audience, and appeals to it. For this, you need to know who your audience is and what they are looking for. It is something that you must have already done when setting up your account and made your plan.

Just posting is not enough of an effort to attract visitors now. You also need to be engaging with your audience, or vice versa.

These are some of the strategies you can use to drive engagement up:

A checkup question: Have you heard about a follow-unfollow method to increase followers?

No? Keep reading. We will go about it in detail.

Yes? Keep reading. Our follow-unfollow method is different and effective.

Back to the tips:

1. Once you post, engage with whomever comments. The way the Instagram algorithm works is that if your post is engaged the right away, it thinks it must be interesting and will show it higher up on the feed of your followers which in turn will drive more engagement. One hour is a must.
2. We will go over the hashtags more in detail later on in this post. For now, you need to keep in mind that using long-tail hashtags helps, you drive more engagement: you want to do some giveaways… thus; #giveaway comes to your mind. Instead, try #Instagramgiveaway, or #instagiveaway. You need to see which one of them has fewer costs associated, which is where you have more chances of showing up higher.
3. Did you know that photos with more faces get on average 38% percent more views than without faces? So, try to put a face on your business or post people and with people. This has been the secret for many years. Now it is in your hands how to put this secret for better use. Ours was to share it, yours is to use it!

Many other methods that could be applied to drive more engagement, however, keeping at least these three in mind should fill in the gaps you were previously missing.

Aesthetic Visuals

This could be somewhat included in the previous section of the post, however, in of itself this being very important it had to be excluded.

While the quality of the post could mean many things, aesthetic visual could mean only one, which is that it needs to be pleasing to the eyes.

There is no need to remind you how much color affects both customer decision making and recognizing your brand.

It is therefore important that you have a color that is cohesive and consistent among all the posts you have on your feed.

It is also recommended to have some presets for when you want to edit your photos, and you are going to want to edit your photos if you want to get the right aesthetics.

The presets are sort of themes you have prepared or bought prepared that are going to help you put every picture into that linear thematic color scheme you adapted to your Instagram business model.

It is easy to set them up once you already know what you are planning for, and since we have discussed planning earlier in the post, we will only but mention planning for the theme of your posts when planning. In fact, planning is going to come in every aspect of this business.

Now the video contents come into play. They are the best examples of Instagram’s visual aesthetics. They alone cannot be the most necessary thing obviously. Although when utilized optimally can be fruitful.

Those one-minute videos have been proved very effective to heat up the engagement, and responsiveness from the followers.

Getting them in line with your theme and at the same time making them entertaining, is the best way to keep them following and coming back for more.

Instagram stories are used by more than 400 million people every day. About 40 percent of people surveyed said they became more interested in the product after seeing it on the story. One-third of every story is posted by a business or for business purposes.

Instagram stories are the best way to include your call to action. If a follower has been following you for a while and had not taken, any action then you are not using the stories to the best of what is possible with them.

These are the components of a successful stories campaign. Of course, you can add more things if you wish.

While stickers help your story stand out, your Geotags help it to stand in a certain niche you aim at.

Colors, overlays, and edits of any sort should be applied to theme it correctly and rightly to the theme of your feed which makes it look professional and more appealing

The text can be anything, but as a business, you are advised to make it the call to action icon of your story. Simply write “swipe up” or “get your free copy” if you are giving away a book, and many more possibilities.

Hashtags/Captions

“ Hashtags “ plain clear topic that is rather clear without much of a discussion. Yet for this sake of making this post full of meaning and utility, we will run over it shortly.

Keeping in mind the above tips of Long-tail hashtags, and let us build on it.

In addition, including the relevant hashtags as the first comment on your posts is another good way to be consistent in your visibility.

If you have acquired a certain number of followers, then it is even better to create a hashtag of your own. Something that speaks your language and conveys your message. This is a very good strategy to stand out from the rest of the community.

Calling for meaningful, and active engagement can also be achieved through captions; in fact, a lot can be achieved through captions and hashtags when utilized wisely and scientifically.

We say, scientifically because after years of seeing why a certain post is doing fine while the certain others are not, has given certain insights and clarity into the matter.

The so-called secrets that many claims are, in fact, not secrets those are the age-old practice that proves to work time and time again.

One of the practices is writing compelling captions. Tips:

• Story (not just any, an interesting, and enticing one)
• Questions (don’t be afraid to ask questions)
• Humour (the right kind immediately increases the mood, which is going to affect how they engage and react with your content)
• Gratitude (everyone hates those complaining whiners)

Correctly structuring any of the tips above, already calls for more engagement.

Surely you have encountered more captions that do not follow this, yet are wildly successful in moving the crowd.

That is why it is important that you understand that captions work a little differently for Influencers than they do for businesses, while there is an overlap and quite the similarity, the reason is the followers.

It is for this reason that we advised you to understand your audience and cater to everything in consonance with them.

A few other tips to keep in mind whether you are a business or not:

Instagram captions is not a place to hinge someone through many lines of equivocally tricky words and keep them reading until the end. Many have neither the patience nor the will to do it.

Being very straightforward and giving out important information, in the beginning, is the way to go.

Very important that you do collaborations when starting out, asking those who have a certain number of following to mention you or feature you.

To keep doing this even when you have acquired a rich number of followers is still a good strategy since it not only helps the mentionee, but also you too.

Giveaways/Promotions/Contests

Let us start with some of the most popular and widely used concepts. The idea under the first concept is to win something by liking, comment, or doing both at the same time.

This great strategy is hassle-free and easy to moderate. It not only increases brand loyalty but active engagement in your post.

However, you do need to follow up with whatever you said, you would do. That is why it is recommended that you offer a limited amount of goods, with time constraints unless you are trying to free up your old inventory.

Another great way is to do the trivia. To ask simple questions about your brand and reward the ones with quick to answer with some products or discounts.

Trivias are great to spread awareness of your brand even further, and let your followers show their knowledge about you and your brand.

Although, if they are not quite active on your feed and do not know enough, some might consider checking up on your company and then taking part, which is even better for you are going to be turning more passive followers into active, which might, in turn, become potential leads.

While there are many different ideas and possible ways to do contests, giveaways and alike, except the two given above. So let us go over one in detail so that when necessary you could easily adapt it.

Your first step should be to determine your goal.

• Is it to generate more engagement only?
• Is it to grow your following?
• Is it to increase the potential leads?
• Is it simply to sell something?

This is very important to identify early. Imagine you are doing a contest and one of the rules is to tag a friend. This might be useful to increase followers, it sure is not going to help you with your conversion. As friends of your followers are likely to have different interests than followers themselves.

Now you need to plan it appropriately by choosing the right type of prize, for example, if you are doing a giveaway, relating it to your business and a worthy cause is the best way.

You should not give away iPhones if you are in the retail business. It will neither be relevant nor will it bring the type of value your followers expect.

Of course, the iPhone in of itself is a valuable thing, but you do not want your leads to get something just free and forget about you. In an example of retail, the best strategy would be to give away T-shirts with some inscription that means something to you, your business and follower alike.

Remember we talked about creating your own hashtags? This is the part where you can put that into practice and squeeze the most value out of it.

At this stage, you need to determine how your followers and Instagram users will take part. Is it by liking, commenting as we talked about, Or by posting a photo of themselves doing a certain action you propagated or just by hashtagging you?

The rules of the contest should be very clear and easy to understand and be made clear from the beginning.

Using the metrics/analytics

Finally, we have arrived at the most important part of your Instagram journey for your business. The metrics!

As a new business, you should keep close on your insights, what posts are doing fine and why they are. And the measurement of everything that happens on and off-page Instagram account.

To make it easier for YOU, we have put together some indicators, and explanation to go with:

Let us first make the difference clear between reach and impressions, whether you are wondering or not.

Reach is a unique view on a certain post. Impressions are the total number of views on a certain post.

Impressions could be increasing even if one person has viewed it many times, while reach stays the same.

It is thus, very important for you as a new business to focus on increasing your reach, the more unique accounts have seen it, the more they are aware of you.

Engagement rating has always been an important part of Instagram analytics, with Instagram hiding likes, it became even more important than ever.

In spite of the fact that there are now many applications and themes and stuff like that, which show you engagement rate and other necessary information.

We recommend you do it on your own since it does not require advanced knowledge of mathematics. It also sticks to your mind and helps you further in making decisions regarding your posts.

The formula you can use is ER (engagement rate) = (likes + comments) / followers x 100

In simpler terms, you need to add the number of likes and comments from a specific post then divide them by the total number of followers multiplying it by 100 you get your ER.

Keep in mind the engagement rate is going to be different on every post you have, it is for this very reason you are actually calculating the rate to see which posts are doing better.

Instagram stories are one of the most useful elements in Instagram marketing strategy these days, you should be taking advantage of correctly. You might need to look thoroughly at:

Understanding of how, and in what ways you can hook your audience usually comes from there. As most businesses include their call to action here. If there is not so much responsiveness then you know you need up your game.

Saves are a unique feature in Instagram analytics that are highly significant for you as a business and for the Instagram algorithm in deciding whether to show your photos.

Saves tell the algorithm that the user has a high interest in your content. That is why you need to create the best and most valuable content that ever existed on the planet of Instagram.

It also gives you the clearest data on which of your posts are working and which are not. It also determines what level of your followers are genuinely interested and ready to do business with you, or not.

If you were wondering, why the growth rate is so far behind the other metrics. That is because growth is utterly important when you are new business; however, it stops being of that much of importance once you have acquired a certain level of following.

It is more important to have engaging and more active followers then millions of passive. It does not matter whether you reach 100 people and turn 10% into clients, or reached 10 people and turned 100% of them into clients.

This is still important to keep an eye on since now you can actually see who unfollowed you. It usually does not happen because of one bad post. However, noticing the reactions early can keep you from facing an avalanche of unfollows.

We mean by traffic, not the traffic that is coming to your Instagram account but the ones that are leaving your websites from here. It is important to analyze it because it is not easy to track it if followers are just copying and pasting the link.

If you intend to grow your Instagram followers count, there are numerous ways to do it, yet one that has proven to be the most successful is the one that most has heard about as well.

Remember the follow- unfollow we mentioned above?

Although it seems straightforward and easy to understand by the name, there is a trick to it. So let us break down the steps:

You need to repeat the process with 3 to 5 accounts daily. Remember to not keep doing it to the same account over and over again for it does not give you the most exposure.

Killer copy

Every single business needs killer copy these days, for writing a simple caption will not intrigue the virtual passerby, or without the epic storytelling, users won’t react, and followers won’t buy without emotions being touched.

It is therefore important you learn to write the best copy. Do not worry we will give you the tips that are going to make it easy, and simple to write the most killer of all copies.

It is also helpful to increase other components of your analytics, such as engagement rate, shares, saves, and perhaps sales.

Adding consistent value to your killer copy makes it even more outstanding than, it eventually turns your Instagram page alone into a sound business. So how do you add value to an already killer copy?

Well, by including interesting facts, information, how-to guides.

It is no surprise that you might have heard about the influencers and people making their living off social media and Instagram.

As such, adapting their strategy to move YOUR business would only be logical and a fit for small businesses.

Incorporating storytelling in your feed is the greatest way to do all that has ever mentioned here. As humans being we grew up on stories, which is why we cannot resist a good story whether it is written on an Instagram page, or on a blog.

Stories that relate to your audience is like the elixir to the poisoned mind. However, since it is a social media medium, you need to keep them short; users will not have the wish to read otherwise.

Before we conclude, go ahead and ask yourself, when was the last time you encountered a page where you read something, and immediately think to yourself that is me, or that does sound like me?

The answer to that is definitely not today, or yesterday, maybe not even a week ago. It is rare to come across a business that does this so well.

To wrap up

We believe anyone who has read this post, can and should become the next big business on Instagram, for all the secrets, tips and tricks have widely been laid out here for your reading pleasure and as means to your success on Instagram.

To rewind what we talked about in short:

• Identification and target
• Bio/ Link
• Content creation
• Aesthetic Visuals
• Hashtags/Captions
• Giveaway/promotions/contests
• Using the metrics/analytics
• Killer copy

Adhering to these principles will give you the clearest guidelines to steer your Instagram business towards profitability. Consistently implementing and improving upon them might turn your page into a business on its own.

Originally published at https://guidemehow.com on March 11, 2020.