There’s a right and a wrong way to do everything, including social media.
If your goal is to create an Instagram campaign that catches the attention of your audience, you need to do it right.
For those who are unsure where to start, check out these six ways to improve your Instagram campaign and captivate your followers.
No two social network platforms are alike, and what works on Facebook or Twitter may not work on Instagram. To ensure that you land your Instagram campaign successfully, follow these six tips for maximum engagement.
To improve the reach of any Instagram campaign, it helps to know the best time to post on Instagram that you’re likely to receive engagement from your followers. Naturally, posts published when the majority of your audience are scrolling will get more likes than when everyone is asleep.
In order to find the right time for you and your audience, connect your business Instagram to a free tool that helps you decide the best time to post.
Similarly, planning Instagram campaigns around the day of the week will also resonate with your followers and result in higher engagement.
For example, if your audience is predominantly business focused, #MondayMotivation will go down a treat, whereas if your followers are mainly students, you could create relevant campaigns around exam times or deadlines.
Following on from this line of thought, knowing your audience inside and out will improve your Instagram campaigns significantly.
Missguided is a brand on Instagram that is highly in tune with its audience demographic.
On Fridays, they post content related to going out partying, while on Sundays they post about hangovers. Despite being a fashion brand, their content encapsulates all interests of the people they want to buy their clothes. Humor, self-love, and pop culture are just some of the topics they create campaigns around in addition to their products.
The result is an Instagram account that feels more like a lifestyle blog than a brand, improving customer loyalty and engagement.
Image courtesy of Missguided
Think of ways your brand could create Instagram campaigns catered to the interests and hobbies of your audience demographic without explicitly selling or promoting a product.
Remember: even if you’re selling to other businesses, you ought to still be thinking of and reaching out to the people working for those businesses.
As humans, we are naturally drawn to stories and the art of storytelling. Stories resonate with us more than facts — they make information relatable and businesses that tell them more personable.
Use your Instagram campaigns to tell meaningful stories rather than simply selling! These campaigns could be in the form of:
Using user-generated content, you can share your customers’ stories on your own Instagram account. This is a great strategy as your audience will likely relate to them and their story, and it’s a nice way of showing customer appreciation.
When a waiter at a restaurant tells you the dish you’ve ordered was inspired by the head chef’s grandfather, it makes you more invested in the food you’re about to eat. Same goes for any historical story about a business!
Celebrate the people behind your brand by sharing their interesting stories in your Instagram campaigns. Has someone done something impressive in their work or personal life you could craft a story around? Or maybe you just want to give a brilliant member of your team a shout out!
Heard an inspiring story recently that relates to the ethos or values of your brand? Tell stories on Instagram that your audience will find inspiring and link them back to your team, business or mentality.
Image courtesy of Innocent
Another strategy to improve your Instagram campaigns is to plan them around upcoming social media holidays.
These time-sensitive trends get a huge amount of reach and engagement on Instagram, due to the spike in hashtags around that time.
There are different categories of timely hashtags to plan Instagram campaigns for:
Look at upcoming social media holidays and think of how you can create relevant Instagram campaigns with content relating to them! This also gives you plenty of time to plan and helps structure your content schedule.
Image courtesy of Coopuk
| Related: Should your brand be using a social media calendar? Odds are the answer is yes. |
The good thing about planning Instagram campaigns in advance like this is you can invest time to make sure the content and messaging is really high quality.
To take this even further, it’s important to manage your content efficiently and schedule Instagram posts ahead of time.
Posting consistently on Instagram is important for both audience loyalty/community building, and also for the Instagram algorithm. If you post sporadically, the algorithm will flag you as an inconsistent user and your posts are likely to be shown lower down in your followers’ feeds or shown to a smaller percentage of your audience.
Being able to see and work collaboratively on your content calendar will ensure the consistency of your Instagram campaigns, as well as generally save lots of time to focus on other areas of Instagram marketing such as content creation.
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TIP: Using social media monitoring software can help you post when your audience is online and active, even if it means you aren't.
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For the same reason that posting consistently is a good strategy — because people like to see regular content — creating a series is a great idea for an Instagram campaign.
There are many ways brands run campaigns like this on Instagram. Whether it’s publishing a certain type of post on a certain day of the week, or showcasing different areas of the business with different videos or gallery posts.
Your audience will become used to seeing these types of posts, and engagement will naturally improve over time as your followers become invested in the series.
With this type of Instagram campaign, create a relevant hashtag that you include on every post. This will not only group the posts together on Instagram if someone clicks on the hashtag but will also create a sense of each post being part of a wider series.
Image courtesy of Pretty Little Thing
There you have a few ways to improve your Instagram campaigns which will result in increased engagement and community loyalty!
Try to take these ideas and put your brand’s own creative spin on them to make truly unique and effective Instagram campaigns for your audience.
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Now that you mastered Instagram, check out other social network software your business can use to connect with your audience.
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