The most effective way to build brand awareness is through social media and digital marketing. It is also an excellent platform for gaining new customers. Getting familiar with the many social media platforms available is an important part of social media marketing. 

More than a billion people use Instagram every month. Instagram marketing is certainly worth it. Additionally, this gives your brand another avenue to engage with your audience, and many have also benefited from direct sales through the platform. Therefore, Instagram marketing is worthwhile and, although it may not be suitable for everyone, it is worth examining. So let’s get into all things Instagram!

What Makes Instagram So Great?

For brands, Instagram is a fantastic social media platform. Consumers find that the scrolling feature is easy to use, while videos and photos are more digestible.

Marketing on Instagram is worth the time and effort since people spend a lot of time there. Nevertheless, it takes strategy, just like with other digital channels.

Check Out Instagram’s Features

If you’re building a marketing strategy for Instagram, make sure you use these features.

Instagram Stories

Instagram stories are an excellent way to stay in touch with your audience. Thanks to updates like the ability to mention accounts, add stickers, and tag products, you can also promote products with them. In addition, it allows brands to interact with their audience on a one-to-one basis.

IGTV

By allowing brands to share longer-form videos with their audience, IGTV takes stories to a whole new level. 

Hashtags

The use of hashtags is a big part of Instagram. #Hashtags help connect people with similar content. With hashtags, users’ posts are visible to others who use the hashtag, which makes it easier to engage with brands and other users.

How to Measure Success

Increasing your audience size and becoming more influential requires tracking the right metrics. You don’t want to spend hours on an Instagram marketing strategy without knowing how successful it is.

Monitoring your Instagram insights is a helpful way to see how well your Instagram marketing is working. You’ll see not only who’s interacted with your posts and stories, but you’ll get a better idea of who your audience is and what they like.

You can check whether your strategies actually work by looking at the numbers. Reading all the numbers and graphs may seem overwhelming, but it’s really helpful. Decide which metrics to pay attention to so you feel more prepared to deal with the data. Go to “Account Insights” to check this data.

The Most Important Metrics

1. Impressions

A post’s impressions refer to the number of people who have seen it. In addition, it includes posts without comments or likes. The data lets you see how well your content is doing on Instagram.

With hashtags, you can reach more people and get more impressions. Pay attention to your posts to see what trends work best for your content. On the Activity tab, you’ll find your reach and impression rate. It basically shows how many people have interacted with your content. Keep in mind that this section only shows data from the last 7 days.

2. Engagement Rate

Likes, comments, shares, and saves are what determine your engagement rate. You can see how your followers engage with your content by checking out the engagement on individual posts. This can help you improve your marketing strategy to produce more engaging content.

When you are starting out your Instagram account, you need comments. Make sure to respond to your comments. As a result, you will build relationships with your followers and your engagement rate will increase. You should have an engagement rate of at least 2.5%.

Influencer marketing relies heavily on engagement rates. Using this metric, you can identify the influencers who reach the target audience and predict engagement on sponsored content.

3. Trending or Branded Hashtags

Instagram is well known for its hashtag culture. Instagram posts with at least one hashtag received 70% more likes and 392% more comments than posts without hashtags, according to Agorapulse. Hashtags act similarly to keywords for search engine optimization.

List all the hashtags that get the most engagement and post more content relevant to those. You can encourage user-generated content by creating your own hashtag. No tools are needed to monitor the results. Simply search for your own hashtag and see what comes up. To drive awareness to your hashtag and increase loyalty to your page, you can repost them from your account.

4. Click-Throughs From Your Bio Link

Instagram has only one clickable spot, the bio link in your profile. This is a great opportunity for your brand to get noticed. With a single click, your followers will be taken to whatever page you wish.

You can get leads here as well as encourage people to go to your website. Keeping an eye on how many people click your bio link can tell you if your followers are interested in what you’re offering them.

5. Follower Growth

Basically, the follower rate shows you whether or not people are paying attention to your content. However, while having a lot of followers might add credibility, it doesn’t tell you much about how effective your marketing campaign is.

Your follower count changes over time, which is more relevant in determining your Instagram performance. This can be easily calculated. Simply divide the number of new followers from the start of the month by the number of followers you had before.

6. Story Engagement

Instagram stories can either be photos or videos, but they only appear for 24 hours. The ease with which brands can make videos has enabled them to include stories in their marketing strategies.

Stories last only 24 hours, making it nearly impossible to measure engagement. It’s still possible to get a decent picture of how your stories are doing by combining a few data points.

Here are some ways to track how successful your Instagram stories are:

• Unique Views

You can see here how many people have viewed your story. Views for each of your stories can still be tracked if you’ve uploaded more than one.

• Completion Rate

This data shows how many people view your full story. You will have to figure this out on your own. You can calculate this by dividing the number of people who saw your last story by the number who saw your first, then multiplying by 100.

• Direct Messages

The data displays the number of people who messaged your brand directly from the story. Since users can’t share or like them, you get the closest idea of engagement. Calculate your engagement rate by dividing the number of direct messages by the number of views.

Don’t forget that your stories won’t have any historical data, so make sure you track your performance. You have to keep track of engagement by hand.

Final Thoughts

The Instagram platform makes it easy for you to connect directly with your customers and expand your reach. Nowadays, consumers want authentic connections with brands, and they want to see a human side to companies. Instagram is a very effective way to accomplish these goals. However, you must know how to measure success.

If you are ready to create a full digital marketing strategy for your brand, call us today at 314-537-7974!

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