The Ultimate Instagram Guide To Power Ahead Of Your Blogging Competition

The Ultimate Instagram Marketing Guide

As you are probably aware, Instagram just crossed 500 million users and proved the social media community why it’s a giant force to be reckoned with. In fact, the network is even bigger than Twitter and LinkedIn. The numbers continue to grow rapidly and are expected to double by 2020. So if you are looking for new customers, you must put your business on the Instagram map. Period.

What does Instagram growth mean for the blogging community? Contrary to what most people thought earlier, Instagram is not just a place for Influencers but also for bloggers and business owners who are hungry for more traffic and engagement. The platform offers a great opportunity for quality blogs to get more likes, shares, and new followers, which is big business especially for the ones that are generating revenue from banner ads and affiliate product selling.

Let’s take a look at some reasons why Instagram marketing is very important for your business and how you can use the platform to improve your blogging success.

Why Instagram?

One of the most striking things about Instagram is that, unlike Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, it’s a powerful visual platform where words are expressed in beautiful photos and videos. After all, multiple studies have proved that visual content is easily recognized by the human brain than text messages.

Why You Need Instagram for your blog promotion

Whether you are a health and fitness, automobile, fashion, social media, or any other niche blogger, you need Instagram to get more hits than what you are currently getting. Popular bloggers from around the world use Instagram as a platform to connect with readers, peers, competitors, and influencers to create an extra opportunity to make money.

How Instagram affects the business and credibility of blogs?

Well, the answer is pretty simple. Blogging success depends a lot on the size of your following and how your followers are reacting to your posts. Instagram gives you the golden opportunity to show your great posts to thousands of readers, influencers, businesses, and brands that could be interested in an advertisement opportunity as well.

In a survey conducted by Brand Watch, it was found that 48.8% of the world’s most popular brands have an Instagram presence and the numbers are expected to touch 70% by the end of 2017.

You too want to be a part of the crowd and make some noise. Don’t you?

Instagram for business has a lot of direct benefits. Of course, the biggest of them all is the engagement factor. When you keep your audience engaged rather than just posting and not focusing on making them stay, you sure start getting better response in the form of likes, shares, and comments. That’s what the number one goal of your blog promotion should be if you want to make it big on the Internet.

Recent studies have shown that Instagram has an engagement that is 10 times more than that of its parent site Facebook and 84 times higher than its closest rival Twitter.

So, if you are not promoting your blog on Instagram, you are seriously missing the engagement factor.

How To get results with your Instagram promotion

As a blogger, the number one thing you need to focus on is the content. Not just content writing, but also content marketing. This requires a clear-cut strategy. Let’s take a look at some strategies that you could use for your instagram promotion so you can start generating more traffic, leads, and sales.

Instagram Marketing Strategy

The first step to planning is to determine your marketing goals. Figure out whether you want to increase your blog traffic, spread awareness, or sell your products.

Once you’ve determined the primary goal of your promotion, the next thing you need to do is identify your target audience. Instagram is a great place to attract youngsters to your blog.

Here are some interesting stats you might want to know:

• Instagram has 55% female users and 45% male users.
• 33% of Instagram users are in the age group of 25 to 34, 34% of its users are aged somewhere between 18 and 24, and teens aging 12 to 17 make up 20% of the Instagram population. Talking about the older generation, there are 5% of 500 million users aged between 45 and 54. So, the numbers clearly indicate that Instagram could be a great a place to attract young readers to your blog.

So, in the above two steps, we have found out your marketing purpose and target audience. The next thing is to find out their interest. In other words, let’s discuss some methods to attract them and follow you on the platform.

The truth about youngsters is, they love colors that are fun and interesting. On the other hand, aged people would get attracted to something emotional and profound. Assuming that you will be targeting the younger lot, it makes sense to say that adding more visual content like photos, graphics, and animated videos can help get some serious attention for your promotions.

Source: Sprout Social

When you entice them and keep them glued to your profile, you will automatically see your likes, comments, and shares rate shoot through the roof.  Even choosing to buy followers on Instagram could be beneficial for your campaign as it has worked for many brands. People recognize you as a popular person when you have a massive following on the platform.

In addition to using your own creativity to crafts great posts, it also helps to find out what your competitors are doing. This is what we call market research. That includes finding out the most trending topics in your industry, the latest news that is doing the rounds, analyzing posts that are sparking a lot of conversations/debates, and curating quality content.

Knowing what’s working and delivering it to the audience is almost guaranteed to give you great results. To go a step further, you can even try to identify what’s missing in your competitor’s campaign that your prospects would love and deliver the same to suit their preferences.

To sum it up, your Instagram marketing campaign should consist of:

1. A strong content marketing strategy.
2. Regular posting (at peak intervals).
3. Creating a content calendar.
4. Visual content to engage your audience.

Instagram Marketing – More Tips

Check out some helpful tools like ScheduGram, Hootsuite, and Later to schedule your posts for the peak time when your followers are most active.

Don’t forget hashtags. To increase the visibility of your posts, make sure to include up to 15 hashtags that are closely relevant to your products/services and that are trending in your industry. Having 30 hashtags would look spammy. Stick to a limit and make sure you choose the best hashtags in your posts. This will ensure that your posts reach your target audience when they search for it.

Tagging! When you tag influencers and popular accounts in your posts, you will have a better chance of being seen by relevant people who will appreciate the good work that you do.

Another thing to keep in mind is following people. This will help you update yourself about the latest industry trends and changes that are taking place, which you might otherwise not have the time to monitor with Google searches.

Last but not the least, see to that you monitor your results. Experiment with different strategies and keep improving so you will get better results over time.

Iconosquare  is one helpful tool that you can use to measure your marketing performance. If not this one, try other resources like Sprout Social and Dash Hudson.

CONCLUSION

It’s clearly evident that Instagram is a powerful social network where you can promote your blog or business and get thousands of followers in a quick time. But again, your success depends on two main things: identifying what your target audiences expect from you and delivering it in the best way possible. Instagram is inferior to none when it comes to helping blog owners gain more attention.