13 Best Instagram Marketing Tips That No One Will Tell You

30 minutes per day.

That’s the number of time people spent on Instagram in 2020. While in 2019, the number was only 4 minutes per day. That’s a 13.8% increase in just one year! 

The stats above show how Instagram has become one of the most popular social platforms in today’s era. With more than 1.16 billion advertising audiences, the potential of Instagram marketing has increased massively. 

However, creating a great Instagram marketing strategy is not a child’s play. You have to learn the nitty-gritty of this platform before running ads or posting content. 

That’s why we’ve compiled a list of the 13 best Instagram marketing tips that no one will tell you. Whether you’re a newbie or a pro marketer, these tips will act as your guide. So, without further ado, let’s dig in. 

13 Powerful Instagram Marketing Tips For 2021

1. Know Your Audience

To have a killer Instagram marketing strategy, you need to post engaging content. To post engaging content, you have to know what your audience likes to see. 

And to know your audiences’ likes and dislikes, you need to know them first. You need to know their interests, behavior, demographics to post the right content. 

Unless you know what motivates them, what keeps them awake at night, what their pain points are, you’ll fail miserably at creating a successful marketing strategy. 

So, it’s crucial for you to learn how to know your audience on Instagram:

Make a Larger Persona

For crafting a successful Instagram marketing strategy, always start with making a larger persona. If you have a buyer persona(profile of your ideal customer), then you’re already one step ahead to define your Instagram audience. If you don’t have a buyer persona, ask yourself:

• What’s my product?
• What audience do I want to target?
• What problems my audience is facing?
• What solutions my product can offer?

Having a clear idea about this question will help you know your audience better. 

For instance, Tello’s Instagram bio states that they clearly know their ideal audience and how their product can help them.

Check Your Instagram Insights

When researching your audience, Instagram’s demographic Insights can work like a charm. With Instagram Insights, you can collect data on your audiences’ gender, age, and location.

From the data, you can find out who is your ideal audience. For example, suppose your target audience is millennial men, but Instagram insights tell you that most of your audience is middle-aged women. In that case, you need to rethink your Instagram marketing strategy. 

2. Switch to Business Profile 

Before getting your marketer suit on, you need an Instagram Business account or Creator account. Over 200 million Instagram users visit one business profile daily. If you already have a business account, this step isn’t for you. So, skip ahead to the next tip! 

Assuming you’re a newbie to Instagram, here’s what you need to do switch to a business account:

Switch to an Instagram Business Account

• Sign in to your Instagram account.
• Head to the top of your profile and tap the button in your right-hand corner. 
• Select Settings (for some accounts, the switch to progressional account option will be given right under the settings button).
• Select Account.
• Now, tap on the Switch to Professional Account option.
• Select Continue.
• Then Select your business category and tap Done. 
• Click OK to confirm
• Select Business and follow the instructions.

For a more detailed guide, you can visit Instagram’s help center. 

With an Instagram business account, you’ll get access to Instagram Insights, ads, shopping, contact information, call-to-action button, primary and secondary DMs. If you’re an influencer, it’s best to switch your account to a creator profile. However, a business account is the best option for marketers to brainstorm new marketing strategies and ideas. 

3. Optimize Your Instagram Profile

First impressions matter, and your Instagram bio is the perfect place to make that impression. Instagram bio offers a small space to convey your brand image. In just 150 characters, you have to tell your audience what you do or what your product is. So, you have to make the most of it by being clear and concise with your word choice. 

Spotify, for instance, did a great job with its Instagram bio. Their bio directly tells what they offer clearly and crisply.

Here’s a heads up: Sometimes, just the Instagram bio isn’t enough to convey your entire business or services. In such cases, you can always add your website link to help your audience understand your business. 

4. Consistency Always Wins

To be successful on Instagram, you have to master the art of consistency. After all, you can’t market your products or services properly by posting random content that doesn’t represent your brand personality. 

Consistency can make your brand stand out from the crowd. It can create a better image in your audiences’ minds. Moreover, the Instagram algorithm loves consistent accounts. So if you want to be successful with your Instagram marketing strategy, maintain consistency. 

From your Instagram feed to colours and fonts, you need to keep everything consistent.  In short, make sure to plan your entire feed focusing on your brand image. 

When it comes to posting consistently, it’s best to plan a content calendar. With a content calendar, you can post your content regularly at the right time, without wasting much time. You can use tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, and Post Planner to plan and schedule your content in advance. 

Always remember to keep your brand voice consistent on Instagram. Whenever you interact with your audience via comments, DMs, or captions, maintain your brand voice. 

On Instagram, Nike is one of the top names. With more than 168m followers, they’re proudly winning their Instagram marketing strategy. If you look closely at Nike’s Insta feed, you’ll notice they keep their feed consistent.

They highlight different sports, athletes, and their products in their Instagram posts. Nike also consistently maintains their motivational tone of voice in all their posts. 

5. Engage With Your Audience

It’s crucial to post quality content to grow your followers. However, if you ignore interacting with your audience, you’ll lose your brand presence on Instagram. 

So, make sure to be consistent with audience engagement. Respond to comments, follow accounts in your niche, like, share and engage on your followers’ posts. If your targeted audience, competitors, or followers share a post relevant to your niche, reshare it on your feed. 

Encourage your audience to comment on your posts, tell them to share their feedback. Also, ensure you’re acknowledging their feedback in a positive manner. Hosting polls and quizzes on stories can also work like wonder to increase engagement. 

Brands like Etsy showcase their customers on their Instagram profiles. Etsy shares motivational stories of real-life business owners to engage with people. 

Just like Etsy, you can also promote your customers’ stories to build a better relationship with them.fapple 

6. Run Giveaways to Expand Your Reach

One of the best tricks to level up your Instagram marketing is giveaways. Giveaways are the perfect way to grow your fan following.

If you don’t know what an Instagram giveaway is. Let us back you up with some definitions:

Instagram giveaways are limited offers or promotions from brands. By running giveaways, brands offer a service or product to a few lucky followers according to specific guidelines. 

If you’re already using Instagram as your marketing channel, you’ve probably come across different giveaways offered by brands. Although you can run giveaways for any purpose, the main reasons you must consider are:

• To increase your audience engagement
• Grow your followers
• Increase brand visibility

No matter for what reasons you run giveaways, remember it’s a great way to expand your reach. 

Let’s take Stoka Bar’s Instagram giveaway as an example. They gave an opportunity to their audience to win 40 free crunchy and tasty Stoka bars. This giveaway contest helped them gain more followers and reach on Instagram. 

7. Make Use of Instagram Reels to Explode Your Reach

If you think Instagram reels are an alternative to TikTok, we’ve to stop you right there! 

Instagram reels are much more than just an alternative. Reels are an amazing option to showcase your products and tease your audience with upcoming content and post-user-generated content. 

Also, using reels, you can update your audience with your brand news, trending events, and much more. Here are some more ideas you can use to create reels and market your products: 

• Reels are great for sharing educational content. For instance, if you’re a digital marketing company, you can share reels of marketing tutorials. If you’re a skincare brand, educate your audience by creating reels on skincare routines, tips for glowing skin, etc.

HubSpot is a great example for sharing educational reels on their Instagram channel. 

• As we mentioned earlier, reels are the perfect choice for launching your product or showcasing it to your audience. 

Apple is a good example of showcasing their products using reels. 

• You can grow your Instagram business account by sharing behind-the-scenes reels. Sharing behind-the-scenes videos can help your brand build trust and relationships with your customers. 

For example, if you’re a restaurant owner, you can share reels on what goes inside your restaurant’s kitchen. Share the process of making foods, how you maintain quality, how you choose fresh materials from the market, and how your staffs work collaboratively. 

8. Use The Power of Stories

If you’re thinking about using Instagram as your marketing channel, never underestimate the power of Stories. Half of Instagram marketers or business owners use Instagram stories to engage with their audience and market their products. Stories are no doubt one of the crucial parts of Instagram’s marketing strategy. 

According to eMarketer, in 2018, the US marketers allocated around 31% of their Instagram budget on stories. Moreover, in 2019 Facebook stated that the number of advertisers on Facebook and Instagram story ads was nearly 3 million. 

And don’t just look at the old stats!

According to Instagram Stories Benchmark Report 2020, brand stories have an 86% of completion rate. 

So, it’s needless to say Instagram stories have massive potential as a marketing tool in the upcoming years. Just make sure to make the most of your Insta stories by using them in the right way. For instance:

• Have a brand message to share? Tell it using stories.
• Want to create some hype before launching a new product? Use Instagram stories to create excitement in advance. 
• Thinking about going live? Why don’t you announce the date and time before going live?
• You can even reshare your Instagram posts on stories to gain more engagement and expand your account reach. 

For example, Subway uses Instagram stories to share fun quizzes, employee photos, recipes, photos of their sandwiches to engage with the audience. They also use highlights albums to share these stories.

9. Experiment With The Types of Contents You Post

Instagram is not just about posting aesthetic photos. If you want to create a stellar Instagram marketing strategy, experiment with different types of content. For example, video, reels, IGTV, and Stories. 

Don’t stick with one type of content. If you want to grow your audience base, share mixed content. Some audiences like to see more reels from your brand, while others like to read long captions. Whatever you post, make sure to experiment accordingly. 

You can take examples from any brand here. Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Sephora, and Lakme all post mixed content on their Instagram profiles. 

Every type of content on Instagram comes with its own benefits. So, if you want to know which type of content works best for your brand, the best option is to post various kinds of content. 

10. Run Sponsored Ads

The most obvious and surefire way to market your content on Instagram is through ads. 

According to Hootsuite, the potential advertising reach on Instagram is 1.16 billion users. With billions of users, Instagram advertising is definitely a great way to reach millions of audiences. 

Here are some more reasons to convince you why Instagram is the best place to run sponsored ads:

• You can easily run targeted ads using your Instagram insights such as location, demographics, behaviours, and interests. 

• Facebook and Instagram are connected. So, you can leverage your Facebook advertising experience to run ads better on Instagram.

• Instagram ads are an engaging and cost-effective solution to get a higher conversion rate.

• You can use stories, reels, posts, and videos to promote your products or services. So, when it comes to ads, Instagram gives you a lot of creative freedom. 

• You can easily manage everything about your Instagram ads in the Facebook ad manager.

11. Write Outstanding Captions

We know that Instagram is a visual platform. The better your feed looks, the better it will grab attention. But, that doesn’t reduce the value of captions. Just like your entire Instagram feed, captions should reflect your brand personality. 

Instagram lets you write captions freely up to 2,200 characters. You can use this space to enhance your content further. 

You can experiment with the style of your captions. If you usually write long captions, switch it up with shorter, crispy ones. Using Instagram captions, you can share your brand story, product story, descriptions of your products, answer audience questions, and much more. Your captions should be informative, compelling, and relatable. 

For example, National Geographic is popular for writing long and informative captions on its Instagram handle. 

Pro tip: The attention span of people is getting shorter each day. You have to grab their attention quickly with your captions. So, make sure to add a hook within the first two lines of your caption. 

Also, it’s best to keep the captions short (125-150 characters). However, if you have something interesting or engaging to say, don’t hesitate to write freely. 

12. Partner with Influencers in Your Niche

Partnering with an influencer in your niche can help expand your Instagram reach. 91% of companies using influencer marketing consider it to be effective. 

The first step to getting started with Influencer marketing on Instagram is to reach out to a few influencers who have an audience relevant to your niche. Most Instagram influencers have a loyal audience base. So, if they promote your products or services, it will reach a wide range of audiences. 

Here’s an example of Lays using one of the greatest Argentine footballers, Lionel Messi, to promote their product. 

13. Analyze Your Competitors

If you haven’t analyzed your competitors on Instagram yet, you’re really missing out! Especially if you’re just starting out with your Instagram marketing strategy, analyzing your competitors can help you post better content. 

So, go ahead and stalk some of your business rivals’ profiles. Peep at their top-performing posts and activities. But before stalking your competitors, make sure to ask yourself these questions: 

• What are they doing well that you could implement?
• Where’s the opportunity that you could capitalize on?
• What content is their audience engaging with?
• What content type are they posting?
• How frequently are they posting?
• What hashtags are they using?

Analyzing your competitors’ profiles will help you track recent events, trends, best tricks, and practices. 

Final Words

We’re going to wrap this post with one final message: Experiment! 

Instagram is a powerful platform for marketing. With the help of Instagram, you can accomplish engagement, reach, strong relationships, and better conversion. All you need to do is experiment with different strategies.

Experiment with each tip to understand what works best for your business. Lastly, if you have a growth mindset, it’ll get easier to use Instagram as your most preferred marketing channel with time. 

I hope you found these Instagram marketing tips useful. And if you did, don’t forget to share it with your friends.