Instagram Marketing and It’s Benefits

Instagram marketing is the way that brands use to connect with their target audiences and market their offerings. Recently, it’s gained popularity as an exciting method for brands to show off their cultures, recruit new employees, engage with customers, and show off products in a new light.There are dozens of social media platforms for marketers to choose from, with each and everyone offering different features, opportunities, and variations. For marketers, it’s all about understanding where your audience lives and what platform will enable you to best reach it.

The importance of using images in social media updates is something that is well talked about for driving up interest and engagement in the content posted. With Instagram, that importance has never been higher as the social media platform focuses it’s attention on the pictures not the words.

Combining photo sharing, video and social networking in one mobile app gives users the opportunity to portray scenarios, market products and even try to capture an emotion in the pictures they upload onto the site. With the focus being so much more on the images, it forces the user, business or person, to be more inventive and creative with the pictures they use to create a feel relevant to themselves, their brand or their company.

Benefits of Instagram Marketing to your Business :

Imagery, whether pictures or videos, always travel further online especially through social networks than the written word as images offer visual stimulation(become more active) and capture the imagination of people more than text. Joining that with hashtags going along with caption categorizes the post and allows it to travel further, past just followers to be found by other users searching for particular images. Through Instagram, you can take a quick look, what your audience are interested in through a quick scan of their profiles instead of having to read through wordy status updates on Facebook and Twitter.

2. There is a big audience on Instagram, giving you a greater chance to be seen.

There is a huge audience of people of all ages out there to connect your business with. At the moment, business adoption of the platform is very high in all types of industry, and still emerging and changes as more and more businesses are seeing the benefits of the platform for marketing and engagement with their customers. The benefits of the platform are huge with engagement 58 times higher than Facebook and 120 times higher than Twitter.

3. New audiences are easier to reach

Hashtags categorize your posts so people searching for a certain topic will find your posts among them. An example would be a Puma hashtagging their pictures with #Puma and #fashion so people searching either topic will find their pictures/content there.

Also, location tagging is a good way to reach more people, tagging your store within all your pictures gives people the opportunity to find you but it also gives you the opportunity to see pictures others have taken and tagged at your store. You can then engage with these users through commenting, liking or sharing their images and pushing up your engagement levels and audience reach even further.

4. It’s easy to share Instagram content across other channels

Once you have taken and edited your picture and added a caption, hashtags and your location, you then have the option to share your picture with your followers on other platforms when you click post on your Instagram picture. There is the opportunity to share your picture on Facebook, Twitter and the other photo sharing website. This is easy and simplest way to share content your content all across your social media at once saves time, increases your potential audience and keeps all your profiles regularly updated.

5. Good photography generates sales and increases website traffic

Pictures are meant to speak a thousand words and in the world of business and marketing, one very good shot can do so much more for your sales and for your reputation than any press release or catchy slogan would do. Instagram has forced people to be more creative with their photography coming up with new ideas and having a focus on subtle advertising. Getting your photography right will increase engagement, the sharing of your content and visitors to your Instagram profile, which in return will see more people inclined to visit your website and possibly buy something while they are there, driving sales forward.

6. Instagram’s casual tone gives personality to your business

Like Twitter, Instagram focuses on the more casual side of networking with others. This casual tone can be a huge benefit for any business as it gives them the opportunity to show a side of themselves that people rarely see, the human side of the business. Behind the scenes pictures of offices, stores, buildings etc, the day to day running and staff pictures all show the side of a business that people don’t see often but are very interested in. These snapshots can not only drive up engagement through complete interest but create a more trustworthy and easy to connect with business. This kind of content really can improve people’s opinions of a business in a way that seems completely natural and less business oriented.

7. Instagram is free advertising

With most marketing and advertising campaigns, there is a huge cost to the business and if it does not succeed then the business can stand to lose a lot of money. With social media, including Instagram there are no costs involved unless you decide to pour money into it. There are no set up costs, posting and creating the content is completely free and the advertising you naturally get for your products, services or business cost you nothing. You can pay for certain things, like someone to manage your account for you or to take professional images you can use as content for the next few months like photos for the next month you will be releasing, but to just use Instagram itself and share content has no cost to yourself or your business.

I hope this article was helpful for you to understand how Instagram Marketing works and what are the benefits one can receive through Instagram in their businesses.