7+ Best Tips to better Instagram marketing strategy to drive more sales

Born in 2010, Instagram has been become a more and more popular photo-sharing platform and is increasingly known as a hub for selling products as well as doing business online. Therefore, Instagram marketing strategy is necessary if you want to promote sales on this platform. In this blog, we are sharing with you 7+ Best Tips to Better Instagram Marketing Strategy to Drive More Sales for your business.

1. Switch to a business profile

The first step you need to do before creating an Instagram marketing strategy is to switch your account into a business profile. It is because turning into a business account offers you huge benefits.

It is easy to switch to a business account with 3 steps as below:

Step 1: Navigate to your profile on Instagram (for mobile), and choose
Switch to Business Profile under Account Settings.

Step 2: You will then be asked to log in to Facebook within the app. Click Continue to connect your Instagram account to your Facebook Business Page.

Step 3: Click Login with Facebook to log in with your Facebook account.

Next, you are asked which contact information you want to pull from your Facebook page, such as phone number, email address. Now, you succeed to turn your personal account to the business one.

Below are some great benefits that an Instagram Business account offers you:

1.1. Easily engage community

Before Instagram business profiles were released, the only way followers could engage with a business outside of Instagram was to click their website link in their profile. With the support of Instagram business profile, a contact button will appear in your profile. Followers can click on that button and then choose whether they want to email you, call you, or find your location on a map to get in touch with you right from your Instagram page.

1.2. Easily launch ads

Previously, ad creation could only be enabled through Facebook’s advertising tools. But now, thanks to Instagram business account, it is easier to create and run ads on Instagram without the need of using Facebook’s advertising tools.

Just need to click into the post you want promote and then selectPromote.

Here, you can select text for a action button, choose a specific audience, set your budget, and choose a time period to launch your ads.

1.3. Conveniently access to analytics

Instagram Business profile also allows you to access Instagram analytics tools which are called Insights and offer you a convenient way to get a quick look at how effectively your Instagram content is working.

To access your Instagram Insights, click into the bar graph icon next to your settings icon from the top right of your business profile, then you will be taken to your Instagram Insights.

Here, you can get detail analytics for impressions, reach, and follower information within the past week, but the tool will only show you analytics for individual posts created after you switch to a business profile. From that, you can track metrics and understand your audiences.

2. Determine your target audience & increase followers

Determining specific audiences is another crucial factor directly affecting your Instagram marketing strategy. By understanding your audiences, define their age, gender, location, interests and even the time they are active before creating content, you will know how to appeal them and turn them into your followers, which may lead to better marketing results and help to broaden your brand on Instagram.

Once determining your ideal audiences, you need to increase your followers. Without lots of followers, it will be struggling for you to get your posts seen and then generate sales.

There are a lot of ways to attract more people to follow you on Instagram.

The first method is to send out messages to your email subscribers and offer them an incentive if they follow you. For example, you may send out emails 2 or 3 times per month to tell your subscribers that if they want to see more frequent discounts and promotions, they will find them on Instagram. If they are interested in your brand, they will immediately follow your Instagram profile.

The second way to drive more Instagram followers is that you should have an Instagram badge on your website. When visitors come to your website, they will see your Instagram account and if they are interested in your brand, they definitely follow you on Instagram if they already created their own account.

Another great idea to get more followers is following other people who are your target audiences. In this way, you may generate new leads and even increase sales. But how to find people interested in your industry? A time-consuming but practical method is to find accounts similar to yours by searching for Instagram profiles that post content related to your industry. For example, you sell hiking and camping equipment so you need to find those whose industries are similar to yours and look through their posts. You may see that they have more than 300 thousand followers and most of their posts are related to outdoor locations across the world.

You may believe that people following this account would be interested in camping and hiking and then follow them. After that, the followers will get a notification and may check out your page. If they enjoy what you post on your profile, they’ll be likely to follow you back. Once you add tons of new followers, it’s going to be much easier for you to promote sales with your Instagram strategy.

3. Create a content strategy

3.1. Don’t be too “salsey”

The next important part needs considering if you want to boost sales is content strategy.

In fact, you are selling, so you need to promote sales with product promotion posts. However, you should not make all posts direct product promotion. That may result in counter-effect. According to SPROUT SOCIAL, a social media management and optimization platform providing a single hub for social media publishing, analytics and engagement, 46% of users will unfollow a business on social media if it posts promotions too frequently. Since they feel annoyed if seeing too many promotion posts on social media. Besides, whenever you post a promotion, do it casually and don’t need to put words in all capitalized letters and avoid tons of icons in the posts.

Therefore, you should integrate to post many kinds of content. For instance, you can post behind-the-scenes shots to introduce and showcase your office, or employees, the element behind your business to give followers the outsiders and inside look of your industry.

In this section, we would like to advise you to avoid controversial and sensitive topics such as religion, politics, and race which may offend your followers, chase them out your profile and result in lower sales.

3.2. Add pictures and videos to your story

Story is a great place to add daily content. As mentioned before, you should not post too many promotion posts regularly, but you can post various content such as offering discounts, running contests, asking questions using the Poll feature, or showing what you do in the office, with images and videos to your story multiple times per day for the followers to have your brand on their minds, and then be more likely to buy your products. Because what you post in your story will not flood the timelines of followers.

However, you should not post more than 20 different pictures and videos to your story every day because they are just live within 24 hours and the followers won’t look at each one, which is a waste of your time and resources.

For example, to leverage your store to get more engagement, you can use the Swipe Up feature to promote traffic to your landing page. When you create a poll on your story, your followers can cast their votes right away. After someone has voted on your poll, they’ll see which option has received more votes and if they view your story again later, they’ll see the updated results. Also, you can swipe up on the screen to see who voted on which option.

The new Instagram algorithm will prioritize accounts that post stories. The more you post stories on Instagram, the more your posts will show up in the feed. Besides, the more you do live videos, the better your strategy will get, and the better you know what time and which content works best for your account. That will help to boost traffics to your account, especially if your account gets featured in the Top Live section which displays the best Instagram Live content currently being offered.

3.3. Encourage UGC

An awesome way to expose your brand to a wider audience is to encourage UGC (user-generate-content) by holding contests.

This type of promotion will naturally encourage users to post photos and videos related to your brand to their personal profiles. So UGC is considered the most authentic form of content, helping you build trust in customers and drive more conversions in a time-saving way.

Here’s a great example: Below is a post of a follower writing about Airbnb to share their satisfaction about Airbnb’s service.

And here is a user-generated content Airbnb got from one of their followers to prove positive customer experiences.

Potential customers understand that using Airbnb services not only helps you save money, but also offers you comfort. When other people see this, they’ll be encouraged to share it as well as submit their own photos for the chance to be featured on the page.

As a result, your brand rapidly gets exposed to various types of users who follow your followers. Knowing how to go viral on TikTok is also a good way to increase followers of your brand using UGC content.

4. Tips for producing posts

4.1. Write capturing captions

Captions is also a vital aspect when you create content for better Instagram marketing campaigns. The best captions are clear, consistent, easy to read, memorable, show off your brand’s personality, entertain the audiences and compel people to take action.

In fact, captions can be up to 2,200 characters in length and up to 30 hashtags. However, if you want to engage followers, you should keep your caption brief, just 125 characters or fewer including emoji and hashtags to get it entirely displayed, and also place the most important and valuable information first. Because for posts in feeds, only the first three lines of a caption will be displayed. If the captions are longer than three lines, people will have to tap “More” to read the whole thing. In other words, most users scroll through their Instagram feeds and ignore your post if they don’t find it interesting to read more, which will do no help for your conversion promotion.

Moreover, you also need to identify your brand voice that describes your business and helps to make your brand recognizable among others. In general, most Instagram users don’t like a formal or serious tone; hence, you should try to keep your caption brief, funny if needed, and show your brand personality.

Besides, you can encourage engagement by asking for people to leave a comment, tag their friends, or weigh in with an opinion by a call-to-action.

To get success with this method, your content post needs to be compelling for the followers to do as you expect. You can run a comment-to-win contest with a cool prize for the winners, which is too good to refuse. Eventually, you can get your brand explored with continuous comments.

4.2. Wisely add relevant hashtags

To grab attention on Instagram, hashtags are a potent tool. If hashtags are used well and appropriately, they can drive plenty of new visitors to your posts, profile, and brand. But if the hashtag is misleading, overused or irrelevant to the content, it can be extremely counterproductive. It is because when a user follows a hashtag and sees something irrelevant to what they expect, they may opt for Don’t Show for This Hashtag option, resulting in less often for your posts to be shown and reducing your engagement.

To get the best effectiveness of using hashtags to draw more attention, you should consider the notices as follows:

• Use hashtags that are specific, concise and relevant to your post and target audiences.
• Don’t use too many hashtags since they crowd your content and make it difficult to read.
• Separate your hashtags from the rest of your caption by burying them beneath periods and line breaks to make it easier for users to get your message. Because Instagram just shows the 3 first lines of captions, the hashtags won’t be displayed to users unless they hit “More” option. Plus, if you’ve written an engaging caption with a call-to-action or question, people may get distracted by hashtags and forget to complete your desired action.
• Don’t put all the hashtags in your captions. Instead, type them in the comment section right after publishing the post. They will be hidden and just displayed to the followers if they click into View all comments.

5. Create a posting schedule

Content scheduling is another Instagram content marketing strategy. It means that you need to prepare the time and frequency to publish your pre-made content.

There are different benefits that you can achieve when you handle your posts in an automated way. First, with the right tool, you can schedule your content automatically posted in an appropriate calendar, so that you can save a lot of time and spend that time doing other duties that support your business goals. Furthermore, building a posts calendar, you can avoid the moments when there is no content to post by preparing content for a whole week or month at once and then upload it to the scheduler, instead of coming up with content each day.

There are a variety of great social media scheduling tools supporting you to make a posts calendar such as Later, Buffer, Agorapulse, etc. Among them, Later maybe the best choice because it comes with a lot of outstanding features and offers users great benefits in comparison with other choices.

Later is a useful scheduling tool that you can use to organize, upload, and automate, and preview posts on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.

The greatest feature of Later is that it’s free if you have up to 30 scheduled posts per month. However, as a business, you may consider the premium package to get more planned posts and schedule videos. Later offers 4 upgrade plan levels so you can choose which one appropriate with your profile and your business.

Besides, Later also provides users with two primary benefits. The first advantage is that it allows you to preview your posts to see how they look to the followers when published, and then edit posts if you want. The second benefit is that you can synchronize your images directly from services like Dropbox and Google Drive, which means that you can directly take the images from storing services to post in Instagram without the step of saving images to your camera roll on mobile phone. It is really beneficial to you in terms of time and resource.

In addition to the main advantages above, Later premium packages offer users multiple awesome features like Instagram stories, multi-photo posts, tag locations & users, hashtag suggestions, advanced Instagram analytics, best time to post, share calendar, and so on. These outstanding attributes will significantly help you optimize your content post and make your marketing campaigns more successful.

6. Partner with relevant influencers for a wider reach

Paying money for incorporation with a relevant influencer, having followers that may be interested in your product or service, is a proven way to grab attention to your brand.

However, not all influencer partnerships can work effectively for you; hence, you should consider some following aspects to choose the best influencer to work with before making decision.

• How much I have to pay for their incorporation?
• Are the brands and products they have previously worked with similar to mine?
• Is the influencer suitable with my industry in terms of values, aesthetics, and personality?

If you opt for the inappropriate influencers, especially those who are in trouble with bad scandals, they may make your brand go down even ruin.

To choose the best influencer, you can use influence.io a useful tool assisting you to easily find and connect with influencers who would like to work with businesses. As for how to use influence.io, I did mention it in section 3 of 9 Best Tips to Increase Traffic to Your Online Store, so you can look through it to get the instruction.

7. Track Progress with Instagram Insights

An indispensable part when running Instagram marketing campaigns is that you need to test, analyze, and optimize your content.

As I said earlier, Instagram business account has its available analytics tool, called Instagram Insights which shows you detail analytics for impressions, reach, and follower information within the past week, and allows you to track metrics, understand your audiences, and gain a basic idea of what’s working and not working for your audience. From that, you can optimize your content, time to post, post methods, etc, to suit your target audiences.

Nevertheless, the tool just support for individual posts of business profiles. To take further analytics, you can use Later, the tool for scheduling post and supporting advanced analytics in Instagram as mentioned above.

When it comes to Instagram analytics, the 2 most important attributes you should notice are follower growth rate, engagement rate. To get the analytics results of the features above, you need to take the Later Plus plan at least ($9/ month, paid monthly and $7.5/ month, paid yearly). In detail, with this Later package, you can:

• Learn more about how your posts are performing and discover which type of content gets the most Instagram engagement by seeing the total and average number of posts, likes and comments, and the posts generating most like for the last three months through your Instagram account summary. Then you can optimize content post to boost your Instagram engagement.

• You can also analyze audience engagement for each post published through Later. Your dashboard will list all of your posts and show you the number of likes and comments in each post. You can click on each post to view your engagement activity over time.

• Analyze your overall Instagram performance including follower growth and audience engagement by tracking your Instagram follower growth for the last 3 months and seeing how many followers you’ve gained or lost each day, and how quickly you’re growing.

• Track your traffic from Instagram with Linkinbio, a landing page that resembles your Instagram feed and displays your posts as clickable images, making it easy to build a clickable, shoppable feed that links your audience straight to your product page, blog post, or website. From that, you can see exactly how many clicks each post is getting and understand which content is driving the most traffic. However, this function just work if you choose Later premium plan ($19/month)

Spending time testing and tracking your Instagram posts can easily keep you on top of your best performing content and ultimately discover the perfect recipe for Instagram success.

Final words on Best Tips to Improve Instagram marketing strategy

All in all, Instagram has become increasingly popular and dominated the social media world. But if you need to take advantage of this platform to broaden your brand, you need to master some tips to better Instagram marketing strategy as mentioned earlier.