With over 2 billion monthly active users worldwide and counting, this makes it the most popular social networks worldwide according to available metrics.
Instagram is the world’s largest photography social media platform with over 200 million monthly users. It is also one of the most popular photo-based online communities in the world.
Instagram has more than doubled in size in the past two years, and it continues to grow at a fast pace. While there are more than 20 billion photos uploaded to Instagram each month, only about 3% of them gain any sort of recognition or traction beyond their user base.
This leaves 99% of images on Instagram looking very unappealing and generic formula for developing an Instagram strategy in 2022.
We all know that content is king on Instagram; however, not enough people know how to effectively promote their photos for maximum effect. We all know that images are a true reflection of us as people – but which ones?
How do you leverage your personality and interests to stand out from the crowd? Follow these five steps to develop a successful Instagram strategy:
Step 1: Define your core audience and objectives
It is important to first define your audience and the types of photos they care about. In order to best serve your audience, it is crucial to know what types of photos they like.
For example, if you focus exclusively on Los Angeles life, you would not only be serving the audience who loves travel, but you may also attract a more niche audience that only wants to see travel-related photos.
Step 2: Temper your expectations
It is easy to get too ambitious with your Instagram strategy and hope for the best, but it is also important to temper your expectations.
You can’t expect to be at the top of the charts with a single post, and you can’t expect to get millions of views and likes on your posts.
While each post should have a strong message, it is also important to remember that the overall Instagram strategy should be secondary to the individual post strategies.
Step 3: Set actionable Instagram strategies
After having defined your audience and objectives, it is time to put your plan into action. In order to gain the best possible results, it is critical that you use data-driven decision-making.
This is why it is so important to use quantitative methods when developing your Instagram strategy.
Step 4: Use data to inform your decisions
After having developed a strong Instagram strategy, it is time to execute it. It is important to keep in mind that your Instagram strategy is just a starting point.
The key to success on Instagram is actually in your post strategies. The real success comes from unlocking your potential as a creative and creating engaging content.
Think about your site’s visitors first
The first thing you need to do is to think about how your site’s visitors find and access your content. Why are they there? What are they trying to accomplish?
Your visitors may have come to your site to find out more about your products or services, or they may have come to your site to find out more about you as a person.
By thinking about your site’s visitors from this perspective, you’ll be able to design your content to be as useful to as wide an audience as possible.
Step 5: Choose your core customer-centric engagement strategies
Finding the right core engagement strategy for your business is essential to its success. Even if you have a large team of engagement strategists working behind the scenes, if your company’s brand is not well-known and its execution is confusing, you may struggle to win new business and retain existing customers.
The right core engagement strategy will help your company take ownership of its marketing and data analysis, enabling it to focus on developing strong messaging that resonates with current customers while also attracting new ones.
It will also help it reduce waste in strategy and processes so that every communication has value, rather than feeling like a bonus extra.
What is a core engagement strategy?
Engagement strategies are the core elements that make up your marketing plan. They are the building blocks that make up your marketing funnel and determine the success of your efforts. They are the building blocks that make up your brand.
An engagement strategy is a concept that represents the end goal of your marketing and strategy and contains drivers, triggers, and actions that bring customers into your funnel. Engagement strategies are not only about marketing but also sales, customer service, and operations, and they are often referred to as customer journey maps or journey maps.
A customer journey map will help you understand who your customers are, where they are in their buying journey, and what actions they’re taking during their buying journey.
Step 6: Encourage customers to ask and reply to questions
When customers give you a hard time about your product or services, it’s great to know there are other people who have had the same experience as you.
When you give your customers the benefit of the doubt and ask them to explain what’s going on, you not only get excellent support but also a great chance to improve your customer service. It’s also a good way to break bad customer service habits and establish new ones.
Here are some ways that you can help your customers get the best customer service: Ask politely. If they don’t want to help, don’t ask them over and over again.
Instead, find another way of reaching out to them that doesn’t involve repeating yourself or escalating a conversation—such as giving them a personal call or setting up an in-person meeting instead of asking via social media.
This might mean changing your company’s support channel or creating an alternative channel for questions (such as FAQs). Make it easy for them to answer questions when they respond. For example, if there is one simple question that is consistently asked by every customer, display it prominently at both ends of the support process so that people who come back often won’t have to search for it more than once.
Switching from one support channel to another may take some time and research into potential drawbacks beforehand, but it will save time down the road.
Step 7: Use storytelling to humanize your model
We all know what we don’t know. It’s something every business leader knows, and it’s one of the most essential things they do.
By humanizing your brand, you make it easier for people to choose your company over other businesses. You make it less scary to be associated with you, and more likeable. You humanize your brand without even realizing you’re doing it.
That might seem obvious, but how many times have you heard a customer complaint only to hear that the brand was “horribly unorganized” or “just plain wrong?” It might be because the parties involved were dealing with a specific sales rep rather than a team member from a different department—or vice versa. Or perhaps the customer simply forgot to mention their preferred way of contacting support when making their purchase decision (or didn’t understand exactly what number would work best).
If you own a business and want to improve your chances of getting new customers—and retention of existing customers—here are 7 ways that storytelling can help you do so:
Talk to Your Customer and Ask for Their Feedback
Most of us have that conversation with our customers at some point in our selling journey. But what if you knew your customer would never tell you what they thought? What if you didn’t even want to know? That’s where feedback is essential—and what storytelling can do for your brand.
What do customers want? “We’re always looking for ways to improve our brand,” one company told me. “So when we get feedback, we want to know what it is and why it’s important to our brand.”
This helps the brand proactively grow, while also inspiring confidence and loyalty in the future of the brand.
Step 8: Implement User-Generated Content in Your Business
Content is king when it comes to online marketing. Users are more likely than ever to discover and interact with content offered by businesses they trust, increase their social media following, and share their favorite products or services with friends and family members.
This makes user-generated content (UGC) important for any business looking to grow its online presence. But how can small businesses leverage UGC in order to attract new customers and drive search engine traffic to their site? For many start-ups, this sounds like a concept that’s been dreamt about but not really realized.
However, by implementing user-generated content strategies into your business model, you can not only attract a new audience of potential customers but also drive more targeted search engine results for your website visitors. Let’s explore 5 strategies that will help you implement UGC in your business.
Wrap Up
Like any industry, the photography industry is experiencing a shift towards more creative and artistic content. With Instagram’s continued growth, it is crucial that businesses adapt their strategies to stay ahead of the game.
To succeed on Instagram, businesses must be nimble and learn how to use data-driven decision-making to optimize their strategy for long-term success on this massive social media platform.
