Goodwin Martin. - Instagram Marketing For Business: How To Get More Targeted Followers And Build A Brand On Instagram

Table of Contents

Copyright Philipp Klinkner
All rights reserved

This guide was translated from German to English

Disclaimer
The content of this book was created with the biggest amount of carefulness and clear conscience. Nevertheless, the curentness, completeness and accurary of the informations the author gives are supplied without liability. This book is a guide to potential success strategies but by no means a surety for success. Therefore, the author doesn't carry any responsibility for the possible failure of the mentioned strategies.

Introduction

Instagram has in recent years emerged as the most successful platform for photos. What initially began as a small platform for a few thousand people who shared interesting content about their lives, evolved over time into a platform with more than 300 million users. (April 2015)
Especially due to Facebook's acquisition of Instagram, more and more celebrities, bloggers, coaches and companies became aware of the platform. Instagram offers new opportunities for marketing. The viral platform is perfect for increasing ones presence on the world wide web, increasing reach and brandname awareness. Meanwhile an Instagram account belongs to any good online marketing strategy. Whether fashion bloggers, family business, YouTubers, local shops or websites: Instagram is used in many ways and offers the ideal opportunity to interact with the community and win them over.

Especially areas such as nutrition, health and fashion are popular on the platform, but any company can gain more coverage regardless of the field of activity. Instagram is fundamentally different from social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The app is mainly used for producing a proximity to users and thus is much more private than other social media channels. This is also reflected in the interactions. A recently published study shows that one can achieve over 50 times more interaction with followers on Instagram than on Facebook.

Gradually one builds his own loyal community. The popularity of Instagram continues to grow, so you should take advantage of the platform itself. You have decided to buy this eBook because you have recognized the great possibilities of Instagram and now want to get involved on the platform in order to acquire new customers, strengthen your brand image or to strengthen your community and expand. To succeed in Instagram, it's simply not enough to just post images from time to time and to "somehow" bring users to follow your Instagram page. Instead, a clever and thoughtful strategy should stand behind the marketing in order to achieve the desired results. The aim is to share high-quality content with long term value and to communicate in the right way with the users.

For this reason, this eBook has been written. It will give you the knowledge needed to be successful on Instagram. In the following pages I'll give you, in a compressed form, the knowledge to ensure that you have success on Instagram. The goal is clear: more followers, more coverage, more awareness. This eBook is for you, whether you are working for a company, are blogging or want to build a viral fanpage.

Differences to other social media platforms

Instagram is based on visual content. Basic functions are limited to the posting of pictures and videos, to find just such content and interacting with other users in the form of likes, comments and links. There is no Facebook "Share" function. Instead, in interesting post other accounts are linked with an "@". Then the linked user goes to the corresponding content. At first this form of sharing doesn't seem effective. However, it can prove to be a more promising strategy than the Facebook Share-function because there is a direct connection between the users which means that the recommendations are worth more.

Instagram also differs from other platforms because the profile of the account hardly offers settings. Only a short description of the profile with one link is allowed. For this reason, you should not regard Instagram as a hard selling platform. The aim is to strengthen your presence and to establish personal relationships with your fans and followers. Hence, there is rarely direct sales via Instagram, but relationships with potential clients can over time lead to results such as the building a newsletter list or the attracting of customers.

Have a strategy

Before we begin to start up at Instagram it is important to think about the goal we are pursuing with our Instagram account. Are you after reach and awareness or about strengthening your presence? You can only post appropriate content when you know what you exactly want. What image do you want to present about your company or about yourself? What is your philosophy?

The strategy for effective Instagram marketing is easily summarized in 3 points:

1. Orientation: What kind of posts are you thinking about? What impression should your account give to the users? Should the posts motivate, give a positive impression, tell a story? Become sure about your orientation. And in advance: No matter what direction you are choosing, make sure your content does one thing: Entertain!

2. Regularity: Only those who are constantly present, can leave a lasting impression in the minds of their followers. It does not help to come online once a month and upload 10 images consecutively. Many accounts fall by the wayside because they do not pursue a long-term strategy.

3. Interaction: In order to build your own Instagram community, the focus should be on interaction with the followers. Here it is not just about responding to their comments, but to involve them directly in the content. How you perform these interactions, you will learn later in the book.

Marketing

There are several ways to draw the attention of users to yourself. Again, you should first focus on your target audience and think about what characterizes them. Only then will you be able to act specifically to corresponding users.

Preliminary said: You should not think to buy or invest in likes or Instagram bots. Purchased likes are worthless likes and only something for the eye. The users that will follow you are usually fake profiles or not related to your topic. They like and don't comment.

Instagram bots take care of the activities of liking, following of and commenting. However, I advise you not to take this option into consideration. Instagram does not like it when forced likes are generated and recognizes corresponding activity. In addition only authenticity can make the right users to followers.

Your Instagram profile

When it comes to your Instagram page, you can adjust little compared to your Facebook page. It is nevertheless important to have a profile that makes a good first impression and conveys your message clearly at first glance. Once a person clicks on your profile, they decide on the basis of the description and posts whether the content is relevant to them and whether they will follow you or not.

The name

At best, use your name or the name of your company, if it is available. If this is occupied, you should easily convert the name so that it is still immediately brought in connection with your business.

The profile picture

Profile pictures are displayed as a circle at Instagram. Make sure that in spite of the circle everything necessary is recognizable. Use your logo or an image of your face, which is clearly visible. Look directly into the camera. Take a 150x150 pixel image.

At best, the profile picture arouses curiosity as in the profile picture of Tai Lopez (@ tailopez1) who has a sports car in the background of his profile picture. If you manage to arouse curiosity with your profile picture, then people who only see your profile icon will click on your channel to make it easier to see. They see your content and might follow you.