7 Key Elements of an Effective Instagram Marketing Strategy

To ensure your business is up for optimum social media marketing success, it’s vital to develop a clear and documented strategy. Unfortunately, most businesses and marketers don’t have a documented plan. Instead, they develop content when needed, post it, and wait for positive results. According to a recent study, about half of marketers reveal that they have challenges developing social strategies to promote their business goals.

Lack of knowledge in creating social strategy creates an excellent opportunity for individuals looking forward to standing out from the crowd on social platforms. By planning your strategy, it’s easy to focus on your objectives and develop content to help you achieve your goals.

Stay put as this article outlines key elements of an effective Instagram marketing strategy to help you grow your business.

1. Create An Audience Persona

Reaching out to your audience is the most effective way to market your business on Instagram. However, if you don’t have an intuitive idea of who to target, creating an audience persona is important.

Audience personas are your audience’s detailed demographics, including their fears, interests, behaviors, and needs. Figuring out your audience helps you understand how to reach out to them via Instagram, making your organic Instagram growth more effective.

2. Identify Your Business Goals

Every detail of your Instagram strategy contributes to the goals you set. It’s impossible to progress without figuring out what you’re working towards. Check closely into your organization’s requirements and decide how you want Instagram to contribute to achieving them. At the end of the day, you’ll come up with various personalized goals—several things that every company should include in their strategy. For instance, retaining customers, increasing brand awareness, and reducing costs are essential for every company.

Go with two primary and two secondary goals since too many goals might distract you, and you might not achieve any.

3. Research Competition

When it comes to Instagram marketing, researching competitors notifies you of their activity and gives you an idea of what’s best to incorporate into your strategy to make it successful. When researching your competitors, begin by compiling a list of up to five competitors. Check how successful their marketing is and analyze their content strategies. Investigate how many followers they have, how frequently they post, and when.

Also, check the type of content they post, its context, and how they respond to their fans. However, the most important activity to check is engagement. While page admins might be the only ones able to calculate the engagement rate of a specific update, you can get a glimpse of what they’re seeing. For instance, if you’re looking at a competitor’s 30-40 Instagram updates, divide the total number of engagements by the absolute number of fans. You can use this formula on all your competitors’ social files.

Remember, the calculation’s objective is to give you a general picture of what your competitors are doing and compare your differences and similarities. Sometimes, you may want to hire a social media marketing company to help with your Instagram growth. In that case, check their reviews to ensure they can do what they claim.

4. Create A Content Strategy

Social media and context go hand in hand. Lack of great context makes social media meaningless, and with a lack of social media, your content remains unknown. Use both to reach and convert your expectations.

Three significant components play a considerable role in any social media content strategy: frequent posting, posting time, and content type. The type of content you post on your Instagram page depends on the form and context. Form refers to presenting that information, either by text alone, links, images, or videos.

Context should align with your company’s voice and platform trends. Therefore, it’s easy to figure out if your content should be serious, funny, educational, or highly detailed.

Several studies stipulate the time you should post on social media for a positive outcome. Nevertheless, it’d help to use such studies as guidelines instead of rules. Keep in mind that your audience is unique, so you need to figure out at what time to post.

Frequent posting is essential as the content. You don’t want to annoy your followers by keeping them waiting.

5. Budget

The next step is figuring out how much money you’ll spend on your Instagram marketing strategy. On average, the share of the general marketing budget allocated to social media is expected to rise from 10% to nearly 25% in the next five years.

The amount of money you plan to devote to your Instagram will depend on various factors. Perhaps you’ll need to buy from higher-ups or your budget is restricted since you have a small business. Regardless of these factors, itemizing your planned expenses will direct where all the money goes.

6. Assign Roles

Figuring out who’s responsible for what improves productivity and prevents confusion and overlapping efforts. While things might be messy at first, your team will understand their roles and what they should do as time goes by.

Plan the execution process when each team player knows what they’re supposed to do. This can be planned daily or weekly. Avoid monthly plans since many things can change, making you and your team rank behind when adapting to the new changes. You also might consider using tools such as ActiveCollabo or Basecamp to manage and assign tasks to your team members. Such tools will save you a lot of time while helping you remain organized.

Remember, it’s vital for each team member to understand the course for you to be on the same page to better your marketing strategy.

7. Track Analytics

Tracking analytics is among the most important things to concentrate on to improve your Instagram marketing strategy. Analytic tracking paints a clear picture of what content and promotions work and which don’t. This enables you to improve and adjust for positive results.

Conclusion

Your Instagram marketing strategy isn’t a permanent thing. As time goes by, you discover some things are working while others aren’t. Therefore, you should quickly adjust and adapt as quickly as possible to incorporate new changes in your strategy.