Are you posting regularly to Instagram and still confused about taking your brand or business to the next level with this platform?
There are over 1 billion Instagram users, and it’s ranked 6th most popular social network by the users. Influencers and organizations are turning to this mega platform to generate reach and grow business.
Creating an Instagram marketing campaign isn’t that easy. Instagram has the highest engagement among other social platforms.
Setting targets to choosing an effective hashtag, here are eight strategies to create a successful Instagram campaign.
Table of Contents
S.M.A.R.T Goals
Always start your Instagram campaign with a goal-driven strategy. Otherwise, you’ll waste money and time without making valuable efforts.
When setting a goal for your campaign, be smart; specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, & timeline.
If your goal is to drive people to your local store or offline courses, choose your strategy wisely. But, if you want to spread brand awareness, you have more open options.
For example, if you want to increase your followers, be;
- Specific: Who do you want to reach? What do you want them to do? Be precise in your targets. Make sure you have a single goal and that all your campaign content is unified to support it.
- Measurable: How will you know if you’re successful? Establish a baseline for your current followers and engagement so you can track growth.
- Attainable: Is your objective realistic? Goals take hard work to achieve, so they should be reachable.
- Realistic: Be realistic in your budget, and don’t go for wild plans. Estimate, do your research that how long your campaign will take.
- Timeline: The time limit of your campaign should be based on your goal and the estimated time to achieve it.
Knowledge about your audience
The first step to creating a successful Instagram campaign is to know about your target audience.
To tap into ultimate success, you should understand their needs, interaction and trust level.
To check your followers, Simply Measured is the most comprehensive tool and helpful with many social media activities. It allows you to see exactly who’s following you and what the reason is.
You’ll be able to check,
- What strategies your competitors are using
- Engagement from your previous posts
- Feedback on what’s working and what isn’t.
This helps you to get a much deeper knowledge of your customer’s engagement. Now you can reach out to them with an effective plan.
If you want to learn about your valuable followers, SocialRank is the best tool to check it.
With the help of this tool,
- You can track the engagement of your followers
- Location of your followers
After analyzing the interest of your followers, you can go for engaging content based on their interest.
Create a Post
Once you’ve sound knowledge of your target audience, it’s time to create an appealing post or a message.
According to Sprout Social, 51% of millennials on Instagram are interested to know about your brand personality.
- Decide your tone: The first most important part of your campaign is how you interact with your followers, i.e., a formal, friendly, or casual one.
- Needs and Desires: After your audience research, look to find your followers’ more profound wishes and desires. It’s an effective way to reach out to your followers in a way that inspires them to achieve their dreams.
- Broad Perspectives: Instead of promoting your company for your own sake, promote for a cause your followers believe in. For instance, what characteristic does your business help them act on?
Don’t rely solely on Instagram
Instagram is most popular in the U.S., with 120 million users, followed by India (80 million users), Brazil (77 million users), Indonesia (63 million users), and Russia (44 million users).
But to be successful with your campaign, don’t just rely on Instagram.
This is one of the biggest mistakes marketers make, running a campaign only on one platform. Instead, promote your campaign on all social media channels.
Four ways to do that.
- Build a custom landing page: To effectively reach your target audience, build a landing page for the campaign that represents the style and branding you’re going for on your Instagram campaign.
When your followers find the direct link to the Instagram campaign, they’re more likely to follow and take action. When promoting a new image on Instagram, always add a link in the bio to buy it.
- Instagram on your website: Linking Instagram with your brand website is essential to drive more sales. With a lot of product promotion on Instagram, your website’s can engagement will increase.
SnapWidget is an app to help you include your Instagram feed on your other website.
- Promoting on all channels: You need to promote the content on your website to make your campaign successful.
Simply link the campaign to the main menu of your website.
Think about hashtags
All Instagram campaigns need hashtags.
Creating a hashtag is easy, but driving new customers to promote your brand via that hashtag isn’t easy.
These strategies and tips can help you to decide what type of hashtag will work best to promote your campaign.
- Short and easy hashtags: The best campaigns use short and simple hashtags.
- Memorable hashtags: Calvin Klein used a long hashtag and was successful, such as the #MyCalvins campaign was a tremendous success. The reason is, it’s easy to remember.
- Unique hashtags: The biggest problem with a campaign is having your hashtag used for many causes.
For example, a general tag like #wizarding or #harrypotter & #wizarding would have been used in many unrelated posts, but creating a #WizardingWednesdays is something unique.
- Brand-related hashtags: Just like Coca-Cola’s #ShareACoke, use your brand name with the hashtag.
Use Multiple hashtags: According to Marketo’s report, posts with multiple tags perform better. The more people will find your posts with multiple hashtags, and now the more chances are, they start using your branded hashtag.
Partner with influencers
Influencer seems an odd term, but these users have an organic and large audience on Instagram.
So, promotion via influencers remains the most popular and effective way to make your campaign successful.
Influencers can connect you to their large and engaged audience and add authenticity to promote your campaign.
For instance, Naked Juice ran an Instagram campaign to raise awareness about deserts. For every picture posted with the hashtag, they donated 10lbs of food to needy people.
Here are the most effective ways to run an influencer promotion campaign.
- Choose right influencers
There are 3 criteria to find the right influencer.
- Make sure your influencers impact your followers.
- Choose the influencers based on high engagement, not a big following.
- Make sure your influencers represent your brand well. Better to go through his/her posts to have an idea.
- Be clear on how they can help
Figure out exactly what part your influencer will play in the campaign. To make it more clear, there are two ways an influencer can help your campaign.
- Consider a sponsored post by your influencer.
- Ask your influencer to take over your Instagram feed.
Run a contest
Contests quickly go viral on Instagram if it’s user-generated content (U.G.C.).
To create a good contest, consider the following factors.
- Legal requirements
Depending on the country or state, consider having a lawyer look over the contest before you start.
Clearly state the prize, winning criteria, and delivery of the award.
- Prize
To run a successful campaign, create an exciting prize that includes your brand. For instance, Cellucor offered branded coffee mugs.
Entries
You can ask your followers to enter by following, liking, tagging, and sharing a post. In this way, you can build brand awareness.
- Winners
There are 3 effective ways to decide the winner of your contest.
- By votes: you can award prizes with the most likes & comments.
- By judgment: Set criteria and let the jury decide the winners.
- Random selection: For a random selection, you can use the tool Random.org.
To avoid complaints about your results, brief your audience about the contest details at the start.
Instagram ads
If you have enough budget and want to expand your campaign quickly, consider Instagram ads. When correctly targeted, Instagram ads help to connect with new customers.
According to a report, Instagram’s potential advertising reach is 1.16 billion users.
Moreover, Instagram is the 3rd in youth advertising reach, leaving behind Facebook (123 million) and Snapchat (91.9 million).
Facebook started incorporating its ad into Instagram, and you can easily target users on Instagram.
Ads have helped the campaign become even more effective.
Bottom Line
For a successful Instagram campaign, you need to understand your audience.
The report shows that 81% of people use Instagram to research products and services of brands.
So, with catchy posts, attractive images, and a well-rounded plan, you can easily create a fruitful campaign that brings you the required results
Add short, easy, simple, and call to action hashtags. The “Share a Coke” campaign became a raging success in America because of its call-to-action advertising.
Let us know about your next Instagram campaign strategies?
