The recent times have been revolutionary, transformative, and developmental for the digital marketing space. With more than a billion active users on Instagram, an average user spent over 30 minutes on Instagram in 2020. What began as a photo-sharing app, Instagram has evolved into a hub of business collaboration, marketing, and customer acquisition. As the user base increased, Instagram has launched numerous features to assist business endeavours.
It is next to impossible to devise a digital marketing strategy without Instagram. That is how crucial Instagram is for your social growth. From gathering social insights to increasing your customer base, Instagram is central to everything. Each day more and more businesses embark on their Instagram adventure but, only a few succeed in their efforts. Although there are various reasons behind this nonlinear graph of success stories, there is a common notion that Instagram is difficult to deal with.
Any digital marketing platform is indeed difficult, for that matter. But with the right strategy and goal-oriented approach, it becomes an easier task. However, it is essential to realize that every business and its respective marketing strategies are different. Hence, it is a matter of time you succeed on Instagram.
What Makes Instagram A Special Case For Digital Strategy?
If you are on Instagram, there is no need to explain how Instagram is a powerhouse of marketing for businesses. There are various reasons behind this special place it gained. The appealing features, eye-pleasing visual designs, and ease of usage are a few of them. All of these make it easier for the users to seek information and interact with peers while it bridges the gap between users and businesses.
Although content marketing works just as fine, it is evident that visuals appeal to the audience more instantly than mere text. The human attention span is merely 8 seconds. This increases the conversion probability of visuals as compared to hooking headlines. Evidence also suggests that over 40% of consumers respond more to visual content as compared to mere text content.
Instagram is a blend of content, visuals, audio, video, and images. It, thus, makes a comprehensive platform to pursue any kind of marketing endeavour. Keeping aside the visual aspect, Instagram can be extremely beneficial for various other reasons.
According to statistics, over 130 million Instagram users tap on the shopping posts each month. While 81% of Instagrammers use Instagram to research products or services, 50% of shoppers navigate to the business website after seeing a product on Instagram.
Instagram is relatively younger and has a younger user base. But, its potential has grown leaps and bounds over these ten years. Instagram has an engagement rate ten times of Facebook, 84 times of Twitter, and 54 times of Pinterest. By providing you access to a pool of potential customers, Instagram acts as a representative platform to drive your brand story across the screen.
With all these statistics, it is evident that Instagram is one potential place for both users and businesses to look out for. There are numerous ways to grow on Instagram. Experimenting with one or a mix of many strategies can help you attain an advantageous position. Once you reach a certain milestone, your brand gains the required validation, social proof, digital presence, and credibility online.
Instagram acts as virtual word of mouth as users leave feedback comments, review products or services, and tag your business, which increases the reach. Although it all starts with humble beginnings, the ultimate conversion rate increases gradually.
Why Is Instagram Difficult To Deal With?
Having a profitable presence on social media platforms like Instagram is central to marketing your products or services online. Have you ever wondered why there are only a few successful brand profiles on Instagram among hundreds of digital presences? It is because only a few know and follow the right strategy and implement it.
"Why is it difficult to grow on Instagram?" is the most often asked question. While some claim that Instagram is easier than it looks, few others argue that it is difficult than one could ever imagine.
Algorithm
Algorithms are the backbones of social media platforms. They are in charge of content prioritization. The content type doesn't matter because all that counts is the relevance of the content to the users. However, the relevancy ranking factor depends on the number of other constituents like your number of followers, likes, engagement rate, organic searches, SEO, and frequency of your posts on Instagram.
Without considering all these things, AI may not assist you in climbing the social ladder. However, these are not the only factors. Algorithms are subject to continuous alterations for various reasons. To improve the consumer experience, enhance engagement features, and make sure businesses do not manipulate by creating fake followers, likes, and engagement, algorithms are updated frequently.
Once you adapt to and strategize according to the prevailing algorithms, they tend to change as the tech giants roll out new updates. This makes it difficult for businesses and marketers to devise a new strategy repeatedly. It also delays the process because it is difficult to assess the algorithms and their functioning within a short span of time.
Increasing crowd
It is no secret that the crowd on Instagram is increasing day by day. As Instagram has become an important part of the digital space, new brands and small businesses are also hopping onto the platform. After all, digital marketing has become an inevitable step to thrive in the overcrowded business market.
Fake competition
Although organic and genuine efforts are the path to success, it is difficult to cut through the fake competition as well. Most of the time, businesses and individual creators opt for fake followers, bots, and fake engagement. It becomes difficult for genuine creators to cut through this noise on the platform. Users get easily manipulated in cases like these. Also, with increasing untrustworthy feedback and engagement, it is difficult to prove one's credibility.
Why Is Instagram Easier Than You Have Imagined?
Instagram is both difficult and simple at the same time. There are equally important and popular social media platforms out there. However, Instagram continues to hold the top spot in the current scenario. With 1 billion users, and 95 million posts each day, it might seem difficult to cut through the crowd. But, a perfect strategy and proper implementation are all it needs to master Instagram.
Demarcate Business And Marketing Goals
All social media platforms are nothing but marketing tools. But, unless you don't use these tools effectively, you cannot build a successful digital presence and earn profit from them. To start with, goals are the pillars of laying your digital foundation.
Define both your business and marketing goals and make sure your marketing goals are in line with business goals. Marketing efforts vary for different businesses according to their objectives and desired outcomes. For example, questions like
· What are the brand values and principles of my business?
· What does my business want to achieve through marketing?
· How do I want my target audience to identify my brand?
· Who is the target audience of our products or services?
· In what way does my product or service fulfil the target audience's needs?
· Are my marketing campaigns reflecting my brand values and objectives?
Are a few questions to introspect and arrive at logical conclusions to build marketing ideation based on. You may or may not have one single goal and it is completely okay to have multiple goals. But, it is essential to be clear and precise to represent your business in a simple yet effective way.
Know Your Audience
Gone are the days of generalized marketing. The sheen of TV marketing has started to fade away and the audience are no longer appreciating 'outright selling.' That makes personalized marketing an essential to get results out of your marketing campaign. Easier said than done, devising personalized marketing strategies require a deeper, comprehensive, and segregated target audience demographics to capture their interests and tastes and reflect them in your advertisements.
While there are numerous tools to analyze and study the mindset of your audience, a manual inspection of all social media platforms also helps you understand your target audience. Studying target audience has become extremely essential to get started in digital marketing. Hence, make sure you get your numbers right.
Master The Instagram Engagement With Consistent Efforts
Of course, it is not easy in the beginning. Castles are not built overnight. But, consistent and quality efforts, in the long run, will definitely bear fruit. All it takes is unique, creative, and high-quality content in all forms, exploiting all Instagram features and being consistent with your efforts to master the engagement on Instagram.
However, these are not the only things that determine your success. Before starting on your marketing endeavours, it is important to build an optimized profile. It starts with optimizing your Instagram profile to optimizing your posts on various fronts. For example, profile optimization includes placing all right and high ranking keywords in your bio and usernames. Optimizing your posts include employing a perfect hashtag strategy and altering it frequently according to the changing dynamics on the platform.
Captions are the most ignored factor on Instagram. It is equally important to optimize or place relevant keywords in the captions to improve your visibility. After TikTok has lost its fame, Instagram reels have given rise to influencer marketing and short-video marketing in an unprecedented way. Tapping into these existing models and ideating new trends can push your growth on Instagram.
An intellectual marketing mind can help you get all these factors in balance with one another to help you thrive. It seems to be a lot and overwhelming but, once you jump into action the clouds start to fade away. With experience comes expertise. Continuous efforts and experimentation help you stand out by inventing and creating new tactics that are unique to only you, which eventually makes you different from the crowd.
Also, it is important to be clear-minded in the Instagram marketing space to avoid finding yourself in tricky situations. While clarity of thought reflects your clear-headed business goals, experimenting helps you grab the attention of your audience.
Conclusion
Instagram, in the current scenario, is a powerhouse for digital marketing endeavours. For marketing, beginning from the massive user base to unexplored features, there is tremendous untapped potential. Right from exploring the right audience to stimulating engagement and generating leads, Instagram is the right place for all marketing objectives.
While it may seem as vast as an ocean, there is absolutely nothing to worry about as long as you employ genuine efforts with the right strategies. All you need to be is creative, prompt, informational, educational, and active to get them interested in you. It also seems easy and complex at the same time. If you start your marketing journey with an ambitious mindset, you will get what you want. Instagram is the most lucrative platform of all the other social media platforms. Once you understand the marketing game on Instagram, it gets pretty fun to experiment and grow.
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