Faraz Butt
There are many factors responsible for the success of your Instagram marketing campaigns. The content strategy is among the most important because otherwise, you will not stay on track regarding your content goals for boosting brand awareness and customer engagement.
A casual approach to posting content on Instagram can get you a few likes now and then, but you will not be able to give you the impact that your brand needs to become more visible and allow you to build an engaged community of users. To make your brand campaigns on Instagram successful, you will need to create an effective content strategy that takes into account several factors that impact customer engagement.
Timing and Frequency of Posting
By following a regular posting schedule, you will ensure that your followers have you on the top of their minds and are more likely to buy your product than that of competitors. However, you must take care not to flood the feeds of users with too many posts as then you run the risk of annoying them. For the best effect, you should post when your followers are the most active on Instagram. While there is a lot of research regarding the best times to post, you should experiment to see at what times you get the best engagement and then stick to posting at those times regularly. Creating a calendar for your shared content and making use of an automated content scheduling tool can help you to ensure that you can publish on the desired dates and times without needing to manually intervene.
Use Different Themes for Your Content
Instagram users are forever looking for variety in content. It is, therefore, necessary, for the brand content strategy to embrace diverse types of content to prevent followers from getting bored and looking to others for the variety. For example, brands looking to boost their reach and get new followers can think of using a basket of content, including videos, live streaming content, Instagram Stories, carousel posts, and more present content.
Develop a Unique Style
One of the most effective ways of boosting your content visibility is to develop a signature style that identifies your brand and makes it easy for followers to spot your content in their cluttered feeds. Adopting a color palette drawn from your logo colors, using emojis, the hashtags you use, the filters you use, and the way you compose your text, all go to create posts that are distinctive and help you to achieve consistency.
Standardized Rules for Engagement
Developing a set of guidelines specifying how you will interact with followers on Instagram can help you to like and comment as well as respond to user feedback in a way that is uniquely yours. These guidelines will act as the bedrock of your brand personality and voice. Remember, even you are very busy; you should never try to compromise in any way regarding your engagement. Never make the mistake of automating the process. If you want to create a buzz around your brand, you can, however, consider buying likes from a reputed agency like Blastup.com.
Ensure Visual Consistency
Instagram revolves around visuals. While you must ensure that your photos are of very high quality and are relevant and original. Also creating ensuring cohesiveness will help you to reinforce your brand identity. Some of the ways you can do this include standardizing the filter so that all your posts have a similar and easily recognizable style. The more distinctive and recognizable your posts, the better will be their visibility as your followers will be more likely to stop scrolling their feeds and view your post and engage with you. You can either use the native filters available on Instagram or import pictures that have been edited and filters applied elsewhere into Instagram.
Stay Focused on the Subject
With a huge variety of interesting photos available, it can be all too easy to get distracted and start posting content that is strictly not relevant either to your brand or to your followers. For example, if you are a restaurant, your sole focus must be to post content on food and drink, and not on fashion apparel regardless of how appealing they might be. Posting pictures that are not relevant to your brand can end up confusing your target audience. Even if you are posting behind-the-scenes photos of your staff members relaxing with family and pets, you need to tie it all together with a relevant photo caption.
Create a Branded Hashtag
Even though it is a non-visual element of your brand, a branded hashtag can play a very important role in elevating your brand visibility among your target audience. You need to know that despite the nomenclature, a branded hashtag does not necessarily have to contain your brand name; rather it can contain a term that embodies your brand and encourages your followers to interact and share content using it. To improve the aesthetics of your post, Search Engine Journal suggests including the hashtags in the first comment following the picture.
Focus on Your Audience
While you can always find out more details of the marketing strategies of your competitor brands, you should never aim to duplicate it even if it is a very successful brand. Every brand is unique, and what works for someone else may not necessarily work for you, even if you are in the same industry. The key is to focus on understanding the needs and wants of your target audience and ensure that your products can satisfy them more than adequately. However, you can always learn what competing brands are doing to attract customers, engaging and converting them so that you can adapt the strategy to your own circumstances and make it work.
Conclusion
There is no end to customizing your content strategy to make your content resonate with your target audience. In addition to implementing the earlier suggestions, you must focus on posting creative visuals that can arouse the interest of your followers. Using video or live streaming is an advantage, as is interactive content. Add value by providing crisp but detailed captions that serve to make your visuals even more impactful.
