Using social media for your business comes with a lot of benefits, and one of them is that it allows you to reach new potential customers, discover new ways to approach them, promote your brand, and grow your business. Right now, Instagram is one of the major platforms, successfully used by countless businesses across the world as a marketing channel.
However, simply setting up an account for your business is not enough. If you want to improve your chances of converting users into paying customers, you need them to be able to find your account, follow you, and interact with your content.
In this article, we’ll give you a few tips on how to grow your Instagram audience.
Create a Strategy
Like with other types of marketing, when you work on your Instagram account, you need to have a clear strategy. This will help you be consistent and always offer content suitable and valuable to your targeted audience.
One of the things that can help you develop a successful strategy is to research your competitors. This can show you what kind of content works or doesn’t work for your type of business, so you can avoid mistakes. It can also help you define what you can offer that will make people want to consume the content you create.
Focus on Long Lasting Relationships
This relatively new way to connect with potential clients opens up incredible opportunities. However, a large audience on Instagram is about much more than simply having a big number of followers who see your posts. It’s about finding your company’s potential to attract people and, ultimately, increase your profit.
That being said, achieving a large audience isn’t enough to make your account a successful one. Instead, you should focus on achieving organic Instagram growth. Some businesses decide to buy followers, hoping that this will make them popular, and from there they can start growing. However, fake followers and bots can harm your brand.
Organic Instagram growth will result in real connections, long-lasting relationships, a high conversion rate, and increased sales. In other words, growing your Instagram audience the right way will help you grow your business.
Be Valuable to Your Audience
Today everyone is constantly bombarded with content shared by people and companies trying to sell them something, on Instagram and beyond – on other platforms, on their search engines, on TV. So, the most important question to answer is this: how can you stand out and make people choose your brand in the middle of all of that clutter?
The best approach is to run your profile around one clear idea: connecting with your followers on a personal level. Unlike traditional marketing channels, Instagram allows you to have direct contact with potential customers and get constant feedback that will tell you how well you are doing.
Your goal is to find what connects you and your target audience and offer content that will be valuable to them. The content you create and share should make your audience curious, and promote your brand in an inspiring way. This way your followers will see you not only as someone who wants to sell them something but also as someone who can offer them something of value.
Inspire Engagement
With the right Instagram strategy, you can gain followers that will engage with you, respect you, you can get new customers, and even loyalty. However, to get any of that, aside from providing quality, you should also make sure that you show your audience that you appreciate them.
One of the basic ways to do this is to answer their comments, even negative ones, tag them in your comments, have a conversation with them in a thread, etc. And while you shouldn’t try to answer every single comment, followers will appreciate that you did to talk to at least some of them. Moreover, you can encourage user-generated content by organizing contests or challenges and giving them prizes.
Use Hashtags
One tip always given when it comes to growing an Instagram community, is to use hashtags, and this is because they work. However, there are right and wrong ways to use hashtags. A popular one that has nothing to do with you, might not attract the right people to your post. Too many hashtags can look cluttered and unappealing. Instead, find hashtags that are popular among the people that might be interested in what you are selling.
Conclusion
Instagram is a great platform for businesses, and using it right can attract organic traffic, and help you increase your profit. However, don’t limit yourself only to Instagram. Being present on several networks can bring you even more traffic, just don’t forget to adapt your content according to the preferences of the users of the platform in question.