Instagram is a social platform mainly used to share visual content and help your brand get recognized while your audiences engage on other social media platforms. Above all, Instagram makes people better understand your brand and increases interaction through the comments section. Besides having authentic and curated feeds, Instagram stabilizes your brand image to a great level. Higher engagement levels are a green signal for a wider brand reach among a massive audience and convert them into potential buying customers. The five key elements of Instagram branding that you need to use properly are profiler photo, username, handle, bio & links, and highlights.
Now, let us look at some of the key Instagram practices in detail about establishing your brand on Instagram.
Establish Business Goals
The first step to market on Instagram is to establish business goals that you want to achieve. These goals may vary from one marketer to another, and the following are some of the types of goals:
- Boost brand awareness
- Improve audience interaction
- Sell products
- Gain customer satisfaction
- Expand brand reach through collaborations
Branding strategies play an important role in your journey to achieve your goals in a much smarter way.
Develop A Brand Persona
When it comes to social media branding, developing buyer personas is an inevitable part that businesses and marketers must never ignore. A persona represents key details about your customers, such as their background, goals, challenges gathered from market research, and real-time about existing customers. Developing a buyer persona makes content creation and distribution in the right social media platforms and several other digital marketing campaigns much more effective. Doing some groundwork about your target audience and existing customers is what is involved in creating buyer personas. For example, brands having a new business profile on Instagram could create a persona considering the personal information about customers like age, gender, financial capability, etc.
Validate Your Brand Persona
Once you complete developing your buyer persona, you need to make sure that it is right by subjecting it to validation from your customers. In other words, you can get feedback from your customers and see how they perceive your brand and Instagram content. The result of the validation process will get you the answer to the following questions:
- Do the customers resonate with your buyer persona?
- Does the persona answer your customer’s questions and solve their issues?
- Can they feel that the queries associated with the persona are associated with them?
The positive responses of customers can be interpreted by the shares and comments you receive in your posts. Had you got positive responses, you can be sure that engagement levels are quite high.
Now you can ask them directly to share your content with their friends without hesitation, leading to more reach on Instagram and other social media channels.
Build A Brand Tone And Voice
Instagram is a visual social platform that allows users to share images, photos, and videos. So you need to focus on three key elements while creating content: brand key visuals, voice, and tone. Brand key visuals are the graphic elements you use for marketing communications, and they must be unique, simple, and clear for your audience to understand. These visuals can make your brand identity stronger and more popular among the social media community. Voice represents how you want your brand to be known to people of this world, your language, personality, and the image you want to create amidst your audience when your brand name flashes their eyes. Finally, brand tone defines the energy that enhances your brand voice and how you want to communicate. A calming brand tone gives a positive and inviting feel to your audience.
Post consistently
Making changes in your brand voice, tone and visuals might confuse your audience. So it would be best if you were consistent in all aspects, namely brand visuals, voice, tone, posting times, posting frequency, and the quantity of content you publish to sustain the brand feel that your audience has upon you.
Explore Various Ways To Engage Your Audience
Instagram likes, shares, and comments are different ways of how people interact with you. These interactions are a potential tool to measure the overall performance of your content. Still, these interactions do not necessarily get people to buy your product, whereas they contribute a lot to increase brand awareness and push customers almost near the buying funnel. This implies that we need to increase interactions beneath your Instagram posts, possible by using catchy hashtags, combining humor content, and encouraging user-generated content, keeping the audience engaged with your brand. Missing out on important factors while posting content often results in lower engagement levels when you can get automatic likes for Instagram to boost content performance and widen your reach.
Curate Your Content
Content curation involves searching and gathering content from the web and presenting it in an organized way, and this process is more important for your content marketing strategies. There is a wide range of sources like social media posts, RSS feeds, blogs, news websites, and websites of leaders and Influencers from where you can pick the best and relevant content for your followers.
Research Your Competitors
Keep in mind that your competitors glance at you, and you, too, need to glance at their marketing strategies and make use of their right branding plans along with your own to spice up your marketing campaign. Some marketers even combine the best strategies of two or more of their competitors to increase their audience.
The Takeaway
Social media is a more powerful tool to boost your business in this digital marketing world. Keeping in mind the above-mentioned tips can take you a long way regardless of whether you are a small or a medium-size business owner or an established brand or a creator, or an Influencer. Experimenting on the good best practices and sticking with applying the best practices for your brand is what gets your brand heard loud amidst the competitive space.
About the Author:
Amelia John is a Social Media Content Specialist at Sociaboost who creates curated content on all things related to Social media. She possesses sound knowledge to knit effective marketing strategies for companies of all sizes. Cooking is her favorite free time activity.