Can You Use Instagram To Grow Your Business?

Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms which can be found on the internet. It can be addressed as the queen of social media.

The availability of over 1.074 billion users in 2021 shows the power of it. If you are running your own business there is a great chance to reach such a huge active user base through Instagram marketing.

So simply, the answer to the question “Can you use Instagram to grow your business?” is yes.

But it needs some patient and dedication to doing so.

There are different marketing strategies where a marketer can use Instagram to promote a product or a business.

What Can We Do on Instagram as a Normal User?

Instagram is a place where anyone can create a free account and connect with other Instagram users. You can create relationships and share photos, videos and information through Instagram like other social media. But there is a separate marketing technique where a marketer can follow to promote any business. Learning those techniques and following them will help you to grow your business.

There are few different types of accounts that you can create on Instagram. They are business accounts, creator accounts, or personal accounts. Creator accounts have the features like shopping from creators but there are no business features. Personal profiles are for personal usage. But business accounts have all the tools which are essential for a business social media account and features like auto-publishing.

So it is better to go for a business account if you are willing to grow your business through this platform. There are so many ways where you can share your business among others and bring the business into the world.

Things to know Before Start Marketing through Instagram

Before starting the marketing campaigns, there are few things to do. As stated previously, first patient and dedication needed to be developed in you. Then you have to understand the target audience of your business. For example, if you are willing to promote your merchandise, then you have to reach the people who are interested in buying such merchandise. Then you can create a dedicated page for your business including the business name, information, and links to the shops. The page needed to be created in a professional manner.

You need to create a follower base and keep the page active. To create a follower base you can interact with other people who are related to your niche. Keep in mind that you have to always go for the most matching audience. You don’t want to get the attention of people who are not interested in your products or services. The follower base must be active and engaging with your content. Then only you can grow your business page. You can share the updates of your business, products and services through your page. Your followers will see them and interact with the posts and videos, if they liked to buy them from you, they will. This is the simple way of marketing and gathering an audience for a business. But we need to go more than that.

How to Market through Instagram?

There are numerous ways of marketing where you can follow to increase the reach and the engagement of Instagram users. For that, you need to reach the ideal audience. Hashtags are extremely valuable when you need to reach that ideal audience.

Hashtags

When marketing hashtags is a topic that no one can avoid talking about. The hashtag is a combination of letters, numbers which are preceded by a # symbol. These hashtags are used to categorize the content on Instagram. In other words, hashtags are the sorting process of Instagram. You can add hashtags in your posts and videos so that you can reach the people who are searching for the same hashtags. Using 3-4 popular hashtags, 3-5 moderately popular hashtags, 3-5 niche specific hashtags and 1-2 branded hashtags in a post is a good and optimized way to reach a big audience for a long period of time. Reaching your posts means engagements. Engagement means click and clicks means conversions. So reaching a good audience is highly important.

Instagram ads

Instagram ads are very sharp marketing too when it comes to Instagram marketing. Here also you have to understand the target audience of the ads and run them accordingly. Otherwise, your whole ad campaign will end up being a fail. You can create an eye catching post or a video as an advertisement and start an ad campaign according to the budget. You can select the target audience type, country, age ranges and such like options to reach the most ideal audience according to the promoting product or service. Then Instagram will boost the reach of that post or video. That will cause more engagement on your posts. People who are interested in buying that product or service from that large targeting audience will click on the ad and buy it from you. So you have successfully converted a normal Instagram user into a customer through Instagram ads.

Influencer marketing

You can use this method to reach another person’s audience on Instagram. Here you can find influencers on Instagram who have grown a big audience and you can pay that influencer and ask them to promote your products or services to their audience. That’s how influencer marketing works. First, you need to contact them and then tell them your idea. If he or she liked to do the deal, you can reach their audience easily. But before paying for an influencer you need to find the most ideal one. If you are selling merchandise on Instagram, you have to find someone who is already engaging in that field. And also it is important to check whether their audience is organic, active, and real. If that influencer has a considerable amount of audience and meets all of the above points, you can start promoting your business, products or service with them.

Using Instagram Stories and Live

Through Instagram you can share stories related to the business. These stories disappear in 24 hours. But they are highly efficient to grab a good audience. Going live is another method to interact with the audience and also it helps to grow the audience too. You can also make your own AR Instagram filters related to your brand and let others use them too. It is a new way of sharing your brand with an Instagram audience. There are so many tools like them on Instagram where you can use to increase reach, engagement, and conversions.

Checking Insights

If you don’t have this insight feature, you need to convert your account into an Instagram business account. Instagram business accounts have the ability to check how their posts and video shared on Instagram are performing. This feature makes it easy to understand the reach and engagement easily. You can find which posts are performing well and which are not. After that, you can create more and better-performing posts and videos so that you can enlarge your audience and provide them quality content.

Host giveaways

This is also a great technique of taking the attention of others. You can announce that you are giving away some of your products to some random followers. So the people who see this giveaway will follow you to win that giveaway. You also can ask them to share, comment and like this giveaway, if they want to win. It is a great way to reach wider and wider audience. After running the giveaway for some days, you can choose the winners and give away what they win. And also don’t forget to share the giveaway winners too. Doing so will help to show that your giveaway is trustworthy and real. And after every giveaway doesn’t forget to say that you are hosting more giveaways later.

Bottom Line

Following such techniques to reach a good audience and take their engagement is very important as a business. So here it is crystal clear that you can use Instagram to grow your business effectively. However, running these Instagram campaigns need to be done correctly. Otherwise, you will lose your time, effort, and even money.

As said above understanding the target audience and finding ways to reach them is the wisest decision. There are so many methods to do so. Following them will convert normal and random users who scroll up and down on Instagram to real customers. You can even contact them through Instagram to build a relationship. It will also lead to turning those previous customers into returning customers. Take the reviews of customers and try to grow more.

Be friendly when communicating with customers through Instagram and don’t do any bad things with the business account.

Reputation is very important for a business account. So you need to create a good reputation on the business through Instagram too.