5 Exclusive Instagram Marketing Tricks For Beginners

Written by Christus Published on May 17, 2020

Instagram has gained much popularity amongst the social media platforms over the past few years and today, Instagram is contributing as a major power player in the field of social media marketing.

Instagram Marketing is growing day by day

However, there was a time when Instagram used to be the younger, immature sister of Facebook where people would filter their pictures and just communicate with their family and friends.

But now the scenario has changed and most of the businesses have adopted Instagram as one of their main revenue-generating tools.

Additionally, today Instagram has over 1 billion active users out which 25 million are business profiles with over 2 million advertisers.

If you are thinking of taking your business online or maybe starting your online business then Instagram could be an ideal platform for you.

Here is a definitive guide for Instagram which you must follow in order to attract the audience and to become a successful Instagram marketer.

Why should you be using Instagram for marketing?

We can say that Instagram acts as a staple of many small businesses’ marketing campaigns.

Moreover, it sponsors a large and diverse audience that would love to engage with the brands directly, resulting in the high engagement of the audience.

Various researches and studies also show that this engagement can be translated directly into the sales and leads resulting in enormous revenues.

Researches also show that:

Around 80% of the users follow at least one brand profile on Instagram out of which 60% of the users have already accepted that they have discovered new products or services through this platform.
Almost 72% of the users have already purchased a product that has appeared on their Instagram feed.

Also, people are happy to follow their favourite brands and business profiles on Instagram, and they have been discovering and purchasing the products and services on the platform very actively.

That’s truly a big opportunity for the e-commerce businesses to grow their audience along with their revenue.

Furthermore, Instagram is also putting continuous efforts to embrace e-commerce which has resulted in the emergence of Instagram as a perpetual platform for online businesses.

Instagram ads are truly impactful in reaching a wide audience with excellent results and high engagement opportunities.

After a business profile reaches a threshold of 10,000 followers on Instagram, they acquire “Swipe Up” links which they can add to their Instagram Stories to directly drive the traffic to the site they are promoting which was otherwise difficult to do on the other platforms.

Advertising on Instagram

Instagram was quite slow to emancipate the advertising privileges to all the users for a while, but at present if you are having a business profile then you can run an advertisement easily on Instagram.

It took little a bit of time for Instagram to release the advertising privileges to all the users but the advertisers have 5 ad options today including:

Photo Ads: These ads are your typical Instagram post format that you can find easily on the platform.
Video Ads: Video ads are same as the photo ads, but with a video instead of photo.
Carousel Ads: These ads are in the slideshow format in which multiple images can be inserted and promoted.
Stories Ads: These are the ads which appear on the stories of the users at the top of their Instagram feed.
Collection Ads: These are the ads that take your users directly through your product offerings.

Why you should be investing in Instagram Ads?

According to a research conducted by Instagram, around 60% of people accept that they often discover a variety of new products on their Instagram feed.

And almost 20% of users frequently visit or follow a business profile every single day or a two.

Additionally, 33% of the most admired Stories on Instagram are shared by the business profiles just like yours.

Hence, we can say that spending a handful amount of money for a post will definitely escort to more exposure and following for your brand.

As well as you can gain more control over who can see your post which could be the best thing, Instagram can offer to their users.

Instagram can also be used to drive traffic to your Affiliate Marketing Campaigns to earn an extra income

Cost of Advertising on Instagram

Instagram marketing is based on the CPM (cost per impressions) model. However,

it’s surprising to know that Instagram ads on an average receive much higher engagement as compared to Facebook ads and in addition to that

Keith Baumwald, founder of Leverage Consulting also stated that Instagram ads are slightly costlier than Facebook ads.

Moreover, Keith also claims that since the ads are so highly targeted on Instagram that you could even end up paying an amount of around $5 an Impression.

Furthermore, the average CPC(Cost Per Click) value on Instagram is $1.28 whereas the CPC value on Facebook is $0.51 which is just half of Instagram’s CPC.

Therefore, from this data, we can conclude that the figure tends to be higher for Instagram users between the age group of 18 to 44.

How to optimize your Instagram Profile using Hashtags?

Using hashtags under every post is a popular and most common practice done by the business profiles on Instagram to optimize their profile

So that the posts can reach a larger audience and attract them towards their business profile.

People can even follow the hashtags of their interest. This is an effective and significant solution for the users as well as the businesses because they can see interesting content even without following any account specifically.

How to use different types of hashtags?

You need to use the correct Instagram hashtags in order to fully expand your reach and get the most out of the Instagram marketing, including the maximum revenue and audience.

There are generally 5 major types of hashtags that plays a very crucial role in expanding your e-cmmerce business:

Branded Hashtags: Most of the brands on Instagram usually have a unique branded hashtag. These brands often attach their branded hashtags to almost all of their posts.

You can also encourage the users to attach it to any posts for sharing Fan-made content. For example, Adidas can use their branded hashtag as #adidas.

Contest Hashtags: Contest hashtags are usually a part of the branded hashtag that is often created by the brands for a specific contest or a giveaway on Instagram.

These hashtags are usually used for the purpose to easily identify the contest entries for either photo submission contests or to generate the overall contest awareness.

For example, hashtags like #instacontest or #giveaway can be used.

General Appeal Hashtags: We can often find a variety of hashtags that are very admired on this platform by a large and diverse audience.

These hashtags can also help you to reach a significant amount of audience on your posts because they’re more likely to be sought out.

For example, #supercars, #fitness are some of the general appeal hashtags that you may find on Instagram.

Niche-Specific Hashtags: Almost all the businesses on Instagram usually have specific phrases and keywords that are mainly relevant to their target audience only.

These hashtags won’t get you much reach as the general-appeal hashtags do, but they may help you in getting the most relevant traffic to your business which could be more effective.

For example, #smartphone if you are selling a mobile phone or related items.

Timely Hashtags: These hashtags can be used for upcoming or ongoing events or festivals.

Timely hashtags are most effective when you factor in selling the focused occasions or holidays like Christmas or maybe a holiday trip to Singapore.

People are most likely to search the content that’s trending right now.

How to give the Followers an inside look by posting Stories?

According to research, almost half of Instagram’s active users are often found engaged with viewing or posting Instagram stories every day.

On top of that, it is also found that almost 66% of the Instagram users believe that stories are a very effective and impactful platform where the consumers and brand can interact easily and conveniently

You can also use Instagram stories to entertain your followers or even to show behind the scenes look about the progress of your business.

But it does not stop for so less to offer, you can do a lot more with the Instagram stories.

After all, by adding stories to your Instagram profile you have more chances of interacting directly with your followers.

You can add various tags and stickers in your stories or you can ask some questions about your business or customer satisfaction whether by-polls, rating or by answering the questions

So that you can connect directly with your followers quickly and efficiently.

Moreover, you can even highlight your Instagram stories if you want them to stay on your profile for a longer period.

How to use all the tools that Instagram offer?

Since the birth of Instagram in October 2010, they have been making continuous changes to their applications at an ever more pace which means you have huge opportunities

And you can do a lot of things on Instagram which generally includes beautifying your photos, tracking your performance and stay on the top of changes.

Here is the list of some of the most popular Instagram tools that you must use to navigate your way through the app:

Know all of Instagram’s filters, Special effects and Editing tools:

You have a gather a creative team which can help you to manipulate your photos in order to get the most visually captivating results.

I would rather prefer to manually edit my posts by brightening them or adjusting the saturation and contrast of the photo or maybe from time to time using the tilt-shift to create an artistic, hazy background.

Try the suite of business tools offered by Instagram to help your business get a better understanding of its performance:

The most common analytics tools of Instagram mainly involve the account insights such as the number of impressions, reach of the profile, views on the profile, click on the website, and even clicks on the email.

All the business profiles on Instagram have access to this feature, doesn’t matter whether they’re paying to the advertiser or not.

Business profiles on Instagram also get the benefits of insights into their following

Which mainly includes the gender breakdown, age range, top locations, and the days and times of the week your follower base is most active on the platform.

Always stay Insta-smart: At present Instagram is growing rapidly, and the advertisers have experienced a huge success rates through this platform so far.

Instagram has already offered a lot of opportunities as well as support to various businesses on the platform.

Moreover, they have a fully different section which is offered to their dedicated business owners and marketers.

So in my opinion, you should be subscribing Instagram for the business blogs in order to stay ahead of the competition.

How to Build a Complete Marketing Strategy on Instagram

Instagram is the most promising and definitive platform for the eCommerce businesses and from my personal experience, I would recommend adding Instagram to your business’ marketing roster.

You can discover a lot on Instagram to successfully operate and grow your e-commerce business.

You just have to embrace it fully by exploring several divergent features joyfully by posting regular content that could attract most of the target audience

This will Help Maximize the sales and revenue of your business and you can even engage with your audience much easily and conveniently.