How to Get Inbound Marketing Right on Instagram

A typical social media marketing campaign works like this—you spend weeks, or even months creating valuable content on your account. At the same time, you start following users in your niche, engaging with them and capturing enough attention for them to follow you back. Sometimes, if you have the budget, you may also consider bypassing several of these steps and advertising your account at targeted users.

This can be a long and painful process. However, by increasing your visibility and being seen, you maximize the chances of users following your account and thus accelerating your social media marketing process. Here are a few tips on how you can go about this.

Visibility starts with sign up

Instagram makes use of a number of parameters to decide what to rank on top of their search function. Among these, the most fundamental parameters are the account user’s name and Instagram handle. If you are an interior designer who wants to show up when users search for “interior design,” it is probably a good idea to pick a username that contains these terms. This is also true for your Instagram name.

It is worth reiterating that these are fundamental parameters. The actual search results make use of several other parameters including user engagement, popularity of your account, and so on.

Build a content strategy

A large part of your Instagram marketing success comes from knowing what content to post and when to do this. A good place to start is by looking into your competition and understanding what works.

Once you do this, you can invest in producing the right kind of content. But content production is only the first step. The next step is in experimenting with other factors like time of posting, deployed hashtags and frequency. Studies show that Instagram posts find the highest level of engagement between 12 PM and 1 PM, and between 3 PM and 4 PM between Monday and Thursday.

Social media automation helps you scale your campaign up and thus derive meaningful insights. For enterprise businesses, there are several popular marketing automation tools like HubSpot, Marketo and ActiveCampaign. For Instagram specifically, you could make use of a tool like Bulkly that lets you schedule your curated content over apps like Buffer.

Outreach beyond Instagram

Instagram is just one of the many channels you reach your customers. While a lot of your prospects are possibly on the platform, they may not necessarily follow you on Instagram. Email is often a better marketing channel since it gives the marketer greater control over how you nurture your prospects into customers. One way to expand your reach on Instagram is by cross-promoting your posts over your email newsletter. You may also consider automating this process by setting up a trigger so that every time you post with a specific hashtag, the message also gets cross-posted to your email subscribers.

The objective of these strategies is to make sure that you reach an inbound audience of Instagram users at a steady pace. Combine these strategies with relevant hashtags and content formats and you should be able to maximize your ROI with Instagram marketing.