Does your business have an account on Instagram? If not, you might want to consider having one. If you are a retailer, if you have stores, if you want people to recognize your brand, then it’s time you create an account on Instagram for your business. Social media for businesses has become too popular to ignore. It’s directly in the hands of your buyers wherever they go. Everybody is active on social media on their phones these days. Out of all the social media platforms, you may wonder why you should be on Instagram? It’s exponential popularity, the young demographic followers, potential influencers, and of course the 1 billion active users worldwide. India has the second highest monthly active Instagram users with a projected number of over 75 million.

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Social media for businesses has proven to be vital for building virtual communities allowing them to be expressive about their demands, feedback, and reviews through posts and comments. Such insights are indeed important for businesses to have if they need to come up with marketing strategies and branding tactics. Here are some of the best Instagram marketing tips your business needs to follow in 2019.

Tip 1: Switch to a Business Profile ASAP

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Before you actually think of having an Instagram marketing plan, ensure that your account is a business account. Instagram introduced business profiles in 2016. Since then, social media for businesses developed new opportunities for marketing purposes. Many businesses have switched their personal account to a business account to gain advantages of sales promotions through Instagram.

Access to Instagram Insights

For a user with a personal account, Instagram provides very limited analytics and performance statistics. A feature called Instagram Insights provides business account users all the essential data about the performance of their Instagram posts. It provides valuable data to help you determine the kind of content your followers appreciate and prefer to view.

A business account on Instagram gives you details about your post-performance over the last week: change in follower count, number of posts, profile views, website clicks, email clicks, bookmarks, impressions, and lot more. You also receive details about your follower demographics—their age, gender, locations by cities and countries, and when your followers are most active.

Ability to Add Contact Button

This is a useful addition that makes Instagram for businesses more beneficial. Users with business profiles are permitted to add a contact button to their profile. When a follower or another user clicks on the contact button, you can either provide them with an email address, a phone number that gets direct calling access, or a map displaying your business location.

Ability to Advertise and Promote Your Posts

Business profile users can set a budget to promote their posts in order to reach a larger audience. If you have the budget you could also sponsor posts. Since Facebook and Instagram are linked, you could build your ad campaign on Facebook and choose where you want it to be placed. Instagram is one of the options that will pop up.

Tip 2: Partner With Influencers For a Wider Reach

The fastest way to reach potential customers is through influencers who already have a built audience with a large following. Many individuals buy products listening to the reviews of the influencers they follow. The influencers promote the products on their stories, posts, highlights, their bio description, and live videos where their followers could simple click or swipe up to reach the link for buying the product directly. If you partner with the right influencer in your industry, you can get your brand out to the right kind of audience.

Tip 3: Collect User-Submitted Pictures

Need to engage with your audience? Well, there’s an easy way to create great content for your Instagram posts without much hard work! Through user-submitted pictures, you can leverage hundreds of people to create useful content for your brand. Also, your followers will appreciate user-generated content because the posts are authentic and unpredictable. Huge cosmetic brands like MAC and Kylie Cosmetics use tons of user-generated content that many influencers and regular users post and tag them to flaunt MAC products. Also, photography brands like GoPro influence people to submit their pictures which they feature as posts and tag the photographer as well. (Pretty much like the screenshot below)

Tip 4: Create #Hashtags Exclusively For Your Brand

If instant engagement is what you’re looking for, come up with interesting and interactive hashtags. Creating a hashtag for your brand is essentially free advertising. Brands like RedBull, Coke, Dominos, etc. have created campaigns with hashtags that have gone viral. #GivesYouWings has about 345K posts and counting.

Customers and influencers can use your campaign hashtags to post user-generated content. This allows followers to view all posts related to your brand and hashtag. It also allows you to easily browse through images that you would want to repost from your Instagram business feed.

With 61M posts, Chanel is leading with their hashtags. Of course, it is a huge luxury brand that doesn’t really need to campaign but still uses Instagram for marketing. Smaller brands won’t really experience a lot of engagement but can certainly target the right kind of audience that is capable of generating hot leads.

Instagram has dominated the world of social media for businesses of all sizes. It’s a go-to place for image/video sharing where billions of likes are handed each day. The opportunities with Instagram marketing is limitless and with innovative, creative marketing strategies your brand post is the next thing we would be writing for! Yes, you could personalize and promote your brand on Instagram with visuals + content from social gurus to see your follower numbers rise up and receive relevant leads!