Instagram is rapidly growing to become one of the best marketing tools for promotion; as you can see, brands have hopped onto this train to increase their engagement rates. On Insta, it’s not only about pretty images; your content also plays a big role.
In this blog, we will explore the best ways to build an effective content strategy that will help you boost your engagement and reach your audience while growing your presence.
Table of Contents
Let’s start:
- Do an audit
- Create a content strategy
- Use Instagram features
- Boost your content
- Monitor your performance
Before we get there, your brand needs to have a business account on Instagram. If you don’t have one yet, know how to set one up with this easy guide.
Do an audit of your Instagram profile
Here are a few aspects that you need to cover in your audit to get a clear picture of your platform’s presence.
Profile – Your profile is the face of your brand. Check if all the information mentioned on your profile is correct or needs updating. Your bio should be attractive, giving people a reason to follow your profile.
Content – When someone comes across your feed, you need to have a proper mix between promotional and informative posts. It must also reflect your bio and be relevant to your audience.
Goals – What is your brand’s goal? Why are you on this platform? Understanding this will help you grow and build your brand further to achieve your ultimate goal. A few goals that brands usually focus on are increasing their web traffic, growing their followers, increasing brand awareness, and building a community to root for their brand.
Create a content strategy
After doing a thorough audit and knowing where you stand, you can further build a content strategy to take your brand further.
These 3 pointers will help you with that.
- Content theme
- Content pillars
- Posting plans
Content Theme
Why are themes important for brands? Because when a user visits your profile, instead of a random mess, if they see an organized feed with a constant theme, there’s a higher chance for them to get hooked.
By theme, I mean the colors, fonts, and filters you use while creating posts need to be consistent, and the format of your posts needs to be structured.
Content Pillars
There are 4 pillars of content marketing – Entertain, Educate, Inspire, and Convince.
While creating content, keep in mind to entertain your audience through competitions, quizzes, polls, etc.
Your content in the form of reviews and ratings must inspire them. You can also create a community forum for the same purpose.
Educating your audience is a vital part of content creation. Many brands pass on information through blogs and infographics.
And lastly, convince them why they can trust you through case studies and webinars.
Posting plans
Once you’ve decided on your theme and embedded the pillars in your content creation process, the next step is creating a posting calendar.
The importance of creating a social media calendar is rightly overstated. A posting calendar helps you schedule posts during peak hours when you can receive the most engagement.
The few things you must consider when creating a posting calendar are:
- How many times are you going to post in a week? Create a benchmark.
- Remember to schedule posts in advance after knowing when your audiences are the most active.
- Use scheduling tools such as Tailwind, Hootsuite to make your posting job easier.
Make proper use of Instagram features
Instagram has a variety of features that you can try and play with while creating your content.
Besides posting on your feed, you can use stories, reels, and guides to spread your content out in an organized fashion but not all at the same time.
What are Instagram Guides?
In May 2020, Instagram launched Instagram Guides, initially for travel. People can recommend places in their city, their favorite products, and their posts for their followers to know the best that the user has to offer according to them.
With the travel ban in place due to the global pandemic, Instagram later used it for wellness purposes.
So yes, using these features will definitely help you engage better with your audience.
Boost your content
Imagine creating amazing content with no engagement or reach, which is why you need to also focus on your growth. To do this, you need to understand how the Instagram Algorithm works, which we have simplified in our blog.
Other ways to amplify your content on Instagram are:
- Cross-promote
- Collaborating with influencers
- Creating unique hashtags for your brand
- Organizing giveaways and contents
Monitor your performance
After doing all the above steps to leave your mark on Instagram, you must do one last thing, which is crucial for your content strategy to succeed – Monitoring your performance to see if your strategy is actually working.
The key performance indicators that you need to keep tabs on are:
- Stories insights
- Feed post insights
- Engagement rates
- Clickthrough rates
- Followers growth
Conclusion
By now, you might have a better idea to create your own content strategy for your brand and how you can use it for its growth.
Content strategy is a small part of Instagram Marketing. Social media platforms have now transformed into powerful marketing tools. To know how you can use Instagram as a marketing tool, keep an eye on our detailed guide on Instagram Marketing in 2021.
