Instagram Marketing 101

Oh the lovely world of Instagram, hot take… a marketers favorite platform! Instagram is perfect (free!) hub for reaching new audiences, creating relationships with your current supporters, getting higher engagement rates, and, most importantly, the best for getting creative! We will be breaking down Instagram today, how to use it to its fullest potential, and why it's the perfect tool for small businesses and influencers. 

Let's Start with the Basics...

Instagram has features such as the normal feed posts, stories, reels, live, messaging, and shopping.. Let’s deep dive into the purpose of each of these and what they are good for, from a marketing perspective. 

• Feed Posts: Super important! These set the tone for your page and tell your brand's story. Here you post visual content like photos, carousels, other graphics, and even videos. Creating an aesthetic with your brand kit and highlighting your campaigns will set your brand’s tone for viewers. Feed posts are like first impressions.

• Stories: These are perfect for temporary posts that you still want to feel meaningful, authentic and create personal connections with your audience. Stories are at the top of your feed, sometimes its one of the first things people will look at. You can also engage with your audience more through interactive features. You can also save them as highlights on your page to keep them around for more than just 24 hours.

• Reels: Creative short videos that can be meant for entertaining, educating, and building familiarity and connections with viewers. Perfect for gaining awareness organically and allows for a much wider audience reach. 

• Live: Build Community! Allows your supporters to engage with you in real-time so they can ask you questions about your brand directly, and you can show how to use your products or announce your new launches. It’s real, it’s raw.

• Direct Messaging (DMs): Here, you can do your customer service and talk to folks directly. Instagram also offers broadcast channels so you can have a “group chat” feel with your supporters. 

• Shopping: Allows users to shop from you through Instagram. When making posts featuring your products, you can tag the product so users can click on it and buy it from the post.

Instagram Business

Besides generating organic traffic, Instagram has all the perfect tools for small businesses to thrive. When you switch to a business account, you unlock several features that allow your business to stand out above normal Instagram pages. For example, the easiest way to get people to know what your business is is to pick a category to display on your profile. If you're a coffee shop, you can pick coffee shop or even cafe, and it will display it below your name. Our personal favorite feature is the professional dashboard. The dashboard has the following tools: 

• Provides monthly insights regarding metrics like views, interactions, new followers, and the content you shared

  • Ties it all together in a monthly story-style recap

• Gives you practices to try out

• Inspiration from other accounts in the same category as you, and what general content your followers are enjoying

• Create ads

• Try out Monetization

• See what audios are trending

• And much more!

Pro Tip: Be consistent with posting, make a content calendar! Now that you know all the possibilities and ways to promote through Instagram, use these tools to guide and plan out future content. When figuring out posting frequency on Instagram, use this guide: 

• Stories: Twice a day

• Posts: 3-5 posts per week

• Reels: 1-2 per day

Make the most out of your Instagram pages, and most importantly, be creative and authentic. As I mentioned earlier, Instagram is typically one of the first impressions people will have of your brand. Make it warm and inviting! For more Instagram and other social media tips, follow Creativa!