Do you want to integrate Instagram into your marketing campaign? Instagram has become a great marketing platform for businesses, and you can establish engagement with the right marketing tactics. This social media platform has become part and parcel of our daily life. Marketers use Instagram for marketing businesses effectively to build brand reputation. If you have an online business, then you can follow these incredible tips for your marketing campaign.

1. Develop a marketing plan

Developing a successful marketing plan requires a streamlined thought process. The first thing you should do is come up with a definite purpose, clear understanding of your goal and objectives for the marketing plan.

Is that enough? Creating a marketing plan is not enough, you should have an organized plan.

You should have an idea of how long you are going run an Instagram campaign. What will be the frequency of your posts? Do you want to post original content? What kind of images or photos are you going to post? Who will be your target audience? Ideally, you should have answers to all these questions. Plan effectively and make sure that you have enough resources to launch the marketing plan.

2. Get ready with a measurable goal

Your primary goal is to develop an interest in target users within a specified period. Create a predefined goal for your business as well as for the marketing team. Having a predefined and measurable goal helps the marketing team to achieve the target within the stipulated time. When you have a predefined goal, it will be easy for you to prioritize the campaign activities and make necessary improvements based on the engagements.

3. Identify your audience

If your business is looking for involvement from the right audience, it is essential to know the pulse of your audience. Identifying the target audience of your business is very important for a successful marketing campaign. Consider carrying out market research to identify the audience for your business.

Why is it important?

Because if you have to develop a content strategy designed to get engagement, it is necessary to know your audience. After which, you must develop content based on their interests to get maximum engagement and thereby business leads. When you know your audience inside out, it will be easy for you to customize marketing campaigns based on their requirements.

4. Develop an impressive brand story

The marketing campaign you are going to launch should contain a brand story that is impressive to the targeted customers. Create unique and engaging content for your business and audience in every posting. To create engaging posts, you have to be a refined storyteller. Bring in emotions to your posts to attract the audience. For example, sharing good news with the audience has a good chance to bring in traffic to the website.

5. Organize and schedule an Instagram marketing campaign

Just like the traditional marketing campaigns, you cannot run Instagram marketing campaigns endlessly. Hence, it is necessary to organize and schedule the marketing campaign with a definite beginning and end date. By having a proper end date, your marketing team will get a clear idea on how to schedule each campaign without delay.

A well-organized and clear marketing campaign helps to measure performance and instills confidence among the members of the marketing team. Based on the performance, they can change the posting time, content types, images, and videos that bring up the overall performance of the campaign. The marketing team can monitor the traffic metrics to get measurable results. Comparing your competitors’ marketing pipeline with yours is a good idea to come up with new methods that work for the campaign.

6. Use of right hashtags

A hashtag plays a significant role in the success of Instagram marketing. Use right kind of hashtags for your post to increase the engagement for your posts. Use customized brand hashtags for the exclusive promotion of your brand. The brand hashtags should be unique, catchy and simple. Brand hashtags enable the targeted customers to locate your brand on Instagram, which helps to get recognition among the customers.

7. Wait for the right time

Every business has a specific set of audience depending on the products/services offered. Hence, the audience reaching your posts will be different and from different geographic locations. Plan the best time to post when the audience is active on Instagram. Posting at the right time brings more traffic and higher engagement, which is beneficial for your business.

Not just the posts but also launching the marketing campaign at the right is critical for the success.

8. Call-to-action

Posts containing clear call-to-action help the followers to take action based on your requirement. Create a call-to-action that is clear, concise and actionable. If you are looking for the traffic to your website, then you can link it to your website. Whatever is your CTA, always try to keep it as authentic as possible.

9. Consider influencer marketing

Influencer marketing brings in more engagement to the business. For this to be successful, you have to collaborate with the right influencer. Before approaching an influencer, decide on how much exposure your brand requires to reach the customers. Select influencers who have similar views and value as your business.

The selected influencers should have a good number of followers ranging from 5000 to more than a million. Depending on the reach you needed for your brand, you have to choose the type of influencers.  Most celebrities have followers of more than a million and macro-influencers will have 50,000 to 300,000. Micro-influencer accounts have 5000-50,000 followers, and sometimes they buy Instagram followers.

You can ask the influencers to try out the product for free, offer a fixed budget for each posting created and published for the brand, a percentages of sales or giveaways, or  a commission based partnership . By choosing the right influencer, the value of your business will increase by gaining enough engagement to their sponsored post.

10. Run various contests

An ideal marketing tactic to get high engagement numbers quickly is to run a contest on Instagram. Contests help to bring excitement to your followers, which in turn help to promote your business.

Comments-to-enter is one of the popular Instagram contests that encourage maximum participation. In this type of contest, the participants have to like photos, follow an account or tag friends, etc., in the comment section. Sweepstakes, giveaways, and photo contest are other methods to bring the attention of the targeted audience.

11. Share customer feedback

For every business owner, the customers are the backbone of the business. So, you should build great relationships with both existing and new customers. If the followers are commenting on your post, spend some time to respond to their comments. Add a personal touch to your response and ask how they feel about your service. Share the testimonials of your existing customers so that potential customers know the value and trustworthiness of your business.

Set clear, measurable and time-bound marketing goals for your Instagram marketing campaign. Grab the attention with a compelling story and enjoy a successful marketing campaign!