3 Essential Terms for Effective Instagram Marketing

 1. Make it easy for business (and yourself) to advertise on Instagram

You may want to find Instagram accounts to get brands to advertise on your channel and increase your traffic with Instagram accounts and make your branding efforts.

Ivan Kostadinov, head of money search at Local Reputation, suggests that you

3 Essential Terms for Effective Instagram Marketing

 Tips from Pro: Ivan Kostadinov

Be more active and post more often or at least regularly because people are really checking out beautiful stuff on Instagram.

Hashtags are also a big deal. Each niche has its own syntax - a set of words that people use to describe this particular topic.

So it is wise to search for those terms and add them to the Instagram post [so] if someone wants to review related posts they click on the hashtags listed above (this is sometimes quite a hassle because of #somehashtagsarereallyreallylong).

The advice given in the previous points applies. You really want to choose brands and businesses for their influencer marketing campaigns.

As I said at the beginning of this section, you may want to advertise yourself on Instagram, and in that case, Kostadinov brings work to his client as an example:

Kostadinov explains:

Our goal was to create a good presence on Instagram and we needed to find a food blogger with a substantial number of genuinely active followers on this social network. As you can see 28k + followers and thousands of people regularly like her posts on @poppy_loves_london, she is quite active and her followers like her posts and endorse their food preferences.

We were also pretty persuaded when reaching out to her, and in fact, we didn't contact other bloggers because it wasn't her or anyone else - her Instagram [account] was good.

So yes, if you are aiming to increase your Instagram presence then go to influencer marketing but do good research because you don't want any blogger/influencers, you need the right one.

Like Kostadinov, be selective in your search for the right Instagram account to advertise, because if you focus too much on your influence, you'll reduce time, money and resources in promotional campaigns that won't work.

If you don't want to do the target manually, you can still advertise on Instagram's News Feed.

2. Get active in the blogger's communities

As Tanya de Cruzif explained in the Point #XUXX interview, and as I said in my post-Free Traffic Methods WHSR posted here, Facebook groups are completely dedicated to the Instagram campaign.

One of the largest and most active groups in this sense is Instagram Posse, a community of Instagrammers who help each other grow in terms of engagement and followers. As of September 2016, the group count is 9,000+ members in the beauty, travel, and parent niche. Instagram Posse works for the convenience of users with comment pods to build engagement, 30-day challenges, and account reviews.

The group has its own hashtags on Instagram to increase community engagement. In fact, hashtags also make it to platform communities and exist for bloggers a lot: #blogglyslife, #problogging, #businessbloggers, #bloggingbotcamp, and so on.

Be aware of the requirements and regulations that each community comes up with. For some example, Instagram Post has rules against self-promotion, ‘follow me’ requests and business solicitations. Other communities allow some self-promotion, but you still have to follow the host rules.

Keep an eye on Instagram contests and linkups - they are great opportunities for networking. You can create groups, competitions, and linkups.

3. Use Instagram Search Wisely

Look for hashtags, audiences (most likely, they have a verified icon next to their name, like @businesssider), and small accounts in your own niche or industry.

The first result of an Instagram search always returns the most active hashtag, followed by the most active accounts. It's good to start with these high profiles and then narrow them down to hashtags and accounts - usually linked to posts you see - in small numbers.

This is not to say that your search on Instagram should focus more on hashtags than accounts because hashtags are the center of Instagram activity and where you can find people on your site.

How to Boost Your Instagram Follower Count?

In June 2016, Neil Patel published an interesting infographic about how he earned his first 1,000 followers.

Infographics report 4.21% of every follower engagement on Instagram - more than Facebook and Twitter.

In addition to the advice already given in the post you read, here is the pulp of Neil's guide:

Make sure you have at least 7 pictures before promoting your Instagram channel

Connect your Instagram account to Facebook for extensive coverage

Write @ quotes in posts and comments on other Instagrammers

Post a feed of Instagram posts on your site (via hashtag)

Post on Sunday for more engagement

In fact, the best thing you can publish on Instagram relates to social events, lifestyle photos, and any visuals involving people and everyday objects.

Aaron Lee from PostPlanner also posted a case study of the growth of his Instagram followers, and you can see more of the advice reflecting on the points discussed in this post.

Notable advice from Lee's post is:

Sometimes businesses try to create their own hashtags, which usually don't work. If your business doesn't have a large following, use popular hashtags like #tbt, #photooftheday, and #love to promote your posts.

To increase engagement and exposure implies that you run a competition, which is good once you have a loyal following (at least 100 users).

I would add that you can still create your own hashtag, but you can always include it with popular and relevant hashtags that will help with exposure. Since their experience with hashtags is a bit different, you may have already read the same advice in the sense of this type of interviewer you mentioned earlier.

In # 9 you learned that communities and Facebook groups exist to help you naturally increase the number of your followers through communication and relationships. Sheila Flores, whom I have mentioned many times in this article, is one of the successful Instagrammers who use Facebook groups to build their following - indeed, I met her in the Instagram Posse group (quoted in # 9). As of September 2016, their @chef account counts 13k + followers.

As a suggestion, I recommend you stay away from the fraudulent habit of buying followers. Instagram users are shaking their heads, so their trust in your channel is likely to sink their nose if they notice trends in that sense. Targeted ach treach is still your best bet.

Instagram Analytics: Measuring Your Success

When you upgrade your Instagram account to a business profile, you will be provided with analytics tools (Instagram Insights) to measure your Instagram success.

Each post and story gets its own metrics, and you can also get your followers (statistics, location, hours, and days they are most active on Instagram, gender and age distribution) and the ways they interact with your content. The visual aspect is strong so you can get an overview of your engagement at a glance.

The screenshots above show some of the features of a business profile with insights: Your profile page tells you how many unique visits you have received in the last 7 days, comes with single post engagement numbers (likes, comments, collected items), and the global reach of that post.

You can also use Google Analytics This hack to measure how much referral traffic you receive from your blog to Instagram, and how it has increased since you started your Instagram marketing plan. You should see the percentage and number of referral traffic from the Instagram hike.

Finally, you can manually collect data as I explained in an article I wrote in May on social media and blog metrics.

The data you want to collect from Instagram includes:

Likes

Comments

Click

@ Proposals

Followers

Overall engagement (most liked/commented / visual clicks and high engagement time of day)

Conversions (increase in sales/downloads/pageviews after you share branded content on Instagram)

Go back to your spreadsheet monthly or at the end of an outreach/engagement campaign to see the changes your efforts bring into the game.

Instagram Wise Pearls (Takeaway)

To sum it up, Instagram is a great platform to use your marketing efforts if your target audience is vision-based and can produce attractive, friendly images to support your brand.

Sheila Flores reminds you that your Instagram is based on the success

Instagram is the most social network with 500 million users worldwide. Think about how much traffic your blog can get if you use it the right way! And how do you get traffic? Being recognized. And in order to do this you need to have this clarity: define you're established, share quality content, stay engaged, and consistent. Follow these steps and you will have good exposure at any time.

But accreditation alone does not work. You need to provide value to the viewer or follower. Flores adds:

Find accounts: Like and Comment. If they care about their account on Instagram. It takes time for a new Instagrammer, but if you do it the right way, your following days are rapidly increasing. And that means that every picture you post gets you more exposure. Once you get a big exposure, your account will be of great value.

The value you provide requires quality, brand images, and/or videos to attract users' eyes and take them to your blog. You also need hashtags that help drive traffic to your Instagram content. Minuca Elena says:

Include high-quality photos in your blog posts and business them with your logo and post title. Add a clear call to action when you share them on Instagram. Use the right hashtags to help attract the right readers. Don't use hashtags that don't matter to your content because it's popular. Also, be careful not to have too many hashtags. Three or four is enough for each photo.

And the content (brand) you are talking about should be shared with your audience's desires and needs. In the words of Mark Warkowski:

Our biggest success is with creating engaging images that speak to our audience. Memes, inspirational quotes, pro tips, infographics - these are the visuals we use to influence the target audience. All of our images are watermarked with the logo and website name, which promotes brand recognition and increases traffic to our site.

Also, likes and comments. Liking and commenting are the heart of all relationships on Instagram, but only work when they are real. Tanya de Cruz Shares:

I’ve commented a lot on other people’s posts. Often these comments are used interchangeably with comments! Also, Facebook groups really help. I always participate in threads where you have to like and comment on some pictures in each other's feeds.

But what’s equally (or even more) important is: I don’t participate in the FoxXNXlo threads. They seem appealing because you get a lot of new followers easily. But Instagram suicides with followers who don’t really care about your feed. Instagram thinks your feed is not interesting enough to show to your followers. If more people are engaging with your content, then most people on your follower's list will actually see your posts in their feed.

About the power of visuals on this platform, she adds:

Post pictures that feed your follower's curiosity. Your posts should be a little teaser for your blog articles. How to do it better depends on your niche. If you have a food blog, you can post your recipe on your blog and your followers on Instagram will yearn for this recipe. If you have a travel blog, you can show your audience a wonderful picture of New York's skyline overnight and let them visit your blog for the bars and clubs you recommend. If your blog has more abstract content, such as giving advice on blogging, Instagram doesn't look like the most logical platform to encourage you. But you can too! You can share quotes from your articles and use the description as a mini-blog. If they want complete, comprehensive advice, they need to visit your blog. The possibilities are endless.