If you’ve been on Instagram a while or are just starting out and are a bit stumped as to how to grow your business using Instagram then here are some easy tips to get you results.
1. It all starts with the customer
One of the key things for any successful marketing is to understand your customer. A lot of businesses tend to forget to real nail who their customers are. They have an idea of who they are but they don’t really get to know them. You might wonder why that is important? For social media, it is really important to create quality content that resonates with your target market. If you don’t fully understand your customers how can you appeal to them? One way to get a deeper understanding of your customers is to create customer avatars. These are detailed profiles of your ideal customer. By creating them and thinking about what motivates them it helps you to understand why they would engage with your business. Once you understand your customer that’s when you can think about the content that might appeal to them. If you want to start creating user personas then I have a free template here
2. Create content that resonates with your target audience
You might love talking about dogs however if that’s not going to appeal to your target audience then that content isn’t the type of content you want to be sharing on your business Instagram profile. It’s great to share something about you, and that includes your dog but if you’re a tutor and every post is about your dog then you may gain followers that are dog lovers but they aren’t necessarily interested in your tutoring. That’s why it is so important to understand your audience so that you can create content that they will value. The benefit of creating content that is of value to them is that it builds the know, like, trust principle. This principle is that people do business with those whom they know, like, and trust.
3. Building an engaged community
Instagram is about connecting people not collecting people so building an engaged community is really important. Once your followers are engaged with your content that’s a clear example of how they know, like, and trust you! How do you get engagement though? Well, you need to be engaging yourself too. That means commenting and liking other people’s posts as well and responding to comments on yours. People often wonder who they should be engaging with, which is again linked to your user personas/avatars because once you understand your target customer you’ll gain an understanding of what else they might be interested in, and that gives you an indication of types of accounts they may be following. For example, if you are a wedding cake designer you would want to engage with other accounts in the wedding industry as your target customer might well be checking them out too but also because building relationships with businesses in the same type of industry as you can lead to great referrals and collaborations.
Making sure you start off with these three things will really help with growing your business on Instagram. I will also say that if you want growth, you need to remember to show up consistently. You can only build an engaged community if you show up regularly.
Once you understand you, customer, create content for them and start engaging you will start to reap the benefits. I know this from having managed multiple Instagram accounts and I always use start with these 3 things in mind.
If you need any more help or direction on how to grow your business via Instagram then you can DM me on Instagram @socialfactorHQ or contact me here