Sunday, March 10, 2013

Marketing your Brand on Instagram

With Instagram, it’s the visual web that's now leading the trend since two years. Instagram, with more than 100 million users, is the most popular photo-sharing app that has effectively turned every user into an amateur photographer. But within the thousands of silhouettes and hundreds of painted nails snapshots, lies a powerful marketing tool that most of the brands often ignore. Yes, Instagram is the best marketing tool for your brand, if you wish to showcase the visual side of your company. Just one shot of your product can lead to greater brand awareness scoring tons of likes and followers.

Instagram users generate content that pave way for brands and businesses to bind the ultimate power of sharing photos, by increasing the customer relations for enhanced feedback loops. Here’s how you can market your brand on Instagram:

Calendar:

Images are the ideal way to communicate with your customers and clients. This makes Instagram the best distribution channel for visually alluring content. When you are launching a new product or hosting an important event, a photograph of the particular product or the event preparation can let out more information than your press releases. To make your photos more successful, create a calendar and post a minimum of 2-3 photos every week. When you post a photo, you need to describe the type of content you are creating. Before you start posting, you can select a specific theme and create your content accordingly. I have listed a few ideas for you to get started:
  • ·         Photos of your products
  • ·         A sneak peek of your upcoming products
  • ·         Some good behind the scenes shots
  • ·         Creative photos of various uses of your current products
  • ·         Snapshots from your future marketing ads
Focus on Hashtags:

Hashtags are a great way to sort your photos on Instagram and are essential when it comes to promoting images. With this, people can easily find the brands and businesses related to their interests. All you need to do is choose popular hashtags that can make your photos rank among the best. While choosing, check out for a few specific hashtags and try sticking to them, rather than having 50 hashtags in your comment area. You can have your brand name or the name of your best-selling products as hashtags. Creating various hashtags that can build your business or brand network can be good practice.

Be Interactive:

Whether you are active on Instagram or not, your clients and customers are already talking about your business and your products. So there's no other better place to start a conversation. Interact with your customers and comment on your customers' photos or posts about your business. Instagram is also an opportunity for you to engage with your customers. Try to show some interest in your customers’ photos by liking it or commenting on it and this can help in increasing your popularity. In simple words, the more social you are the more people will love your brand.

Post Engaging Content:

Do remember the fact; around 250 million photos are uploaded every day on Instagram. So it's important that your photos are original as well as visually stunning. Furthermore, your costumers love to look at different photos related to their interests. So ensure you post relevant and engaging photos that can spread your business and build your Instagram network. At the same time, you should maintain a frequency in posting, as if your customers are following many people, then your posts can easily get lost in the stream of pictures being posted every minute. So it’s better to plan and work out accordingly.

Set Up Events:

It's more like taking advantage of the appropriate moment. Whenever, you have any new activities or events coming up, you can create different hashtags to increase anticipation among people and ultimately boost the number of people attending your event. And during the event, you can upload photos and post content related to it regularly to let your customers know about the event.

It’s not just these, there are a lot more things you can try while marketing your brand on Instagram. In short, Instagram is indeed a great way to increase your brand awareness, customer engagement and drive more traffic to your website. So, it’s time you get started now!



Andrea Walters, a freelance writer for www.satellitesales.com – The Lowest-Priced Satellite TV in America. www.satellitesales.com