Content is king on Instagram, a social media platform with around 1 billion active users. It’s the only arsenal for brands that want to grow and attract their ideal customers.
However, Instagram has evolved with the rate at which brands leverage the platform to win the hearts of their target audience. The competition is now fierce, and you need a winning strategy like Notion’s content strategy that can move the needle. Otherwise, you will continue to upload random pictures and videos, hoping that users will engage.
In this guide, you’ll learn 11 content marketing strategies your brand should use.
What is Content Marketing on Instagram?
This is the practice of creating and distributing valuable content on a social media platform like Instagram to attract and retain a target audience. With social media marketing, instead of plastering your products and services on their feed, you provide valuable content that will help solve their problems. This builds trust and credibility, which in turn prompts them to check out the products and services you offer.
Why Content Marketing on Instagram?
Customers want to make an informed decision. Nobody wants to spend their hard-earned money buying a product without prior knowledge of the brand and how it will solve their problem. On Instagram, users perform searches to consume content they need and in that process discover a solution. Content marketing saves costs since you don’t have to spend money on Instagram ads. Your traffic is organic, and that can boost sales. You build a community of loyal customers who will always return to buy more and also spread a good word about your brand.
Let’s dive into the 11 content marketing strategies you should adopt on Instagram.
1. Let Your Bio Reflect Your Brand
An ideal customer that wants to do business with you on Instagram will first check your bio before engaging with your content. It’s a waste of time interacting with faceless brands. That’s where building your bio comes in. No need of reminding you that a business, not a personal account, is suitable.
Upload a profile picture; that can be your brand logo. Have a username that relates to what you offer, and write a description that entails your mission and vision.
Take a look at Nike’s IG bio:
2. Understand Your Ideal Audience
Ask yourself who your ideal audience on Instagram is. This is key, otherwise, you will end up targeting the wrong audience that won’t add any value to your brand.
Spy on your competitors on Instagram to see who their audience are and take clues from them. Enter keywords related to your brand on the search bar to see the accounts of your competitors.
Another method is to conduct Instagram polls. You can activate this feature on Instagram Stories and ask relevant questions to help you know them better.
Below is an example of an IG poll created by Justinphumedia:
3. Make Your Content Irresistible
Every content piece you create should meet the yearnings of your audience. Begin by structuring it to capture their attention because that’s the only way they can read, or watch it. If you plan to microblog, you can do so within the 2,200 character limit Instagram allows. AI writing software can help you generate more ideas and produce more content for Instagram.
Ensure you aren’t writing for fun, but rather to help your audience.
Videos, photos, infographics, and GIFs are powerful content forms on IG. For videos, make them valuable, and edit them to enhance their quality. The same goes for photos and infographics. Then write keyword optimized captions that will entice users to view and also pop up on search results. Don’t forget to use the most relevant and trending hashtags with your content.
4. Go Live
Going live on Instagram is a form of real-time content. It offers your audience the opportunity to interact with you and see the human behind all those photos, videos, and articles that flood their feed. Technology is advancing and live streaming has become an effective way to deliver content.
Your audience in different locations can use their smart devices connected to the internet to join you live, and benefit from the content you have for them.
5. Build A Landing Page And Link It To Your Content
One of the aims of content marketing on Instagram is to generate leads and sales. It will be defeated if you don’t find a way of using your content to draw attention to your landing page. Building landing pages for social media platforms like Instagram is easy nowadays with services like SendPulse.
Create product-led content that highlights the benefits of your products and services, and use a call to action to drive your audience to it. You can add a link to your landing page in your Instagram bio, or even use link-in bio tools to make it catchy and enticing.
6. Tell Stories
Storytelling is a powerful form of marketing content. We all love to hear stories that inspire and prompt us to take action. Pictures and videos are content you can use to create stories that connect with the problems of your target audience.
It can also be a story of a customer testifying how your brand helps them solve their problems. That is a cool way of using content to build your brand in the minds of your target audience. It encourages those who are skeptical about what you offer to give it a try.
7. Leverage User-Generated-Content
Don’t make content marketing on Instagram your campaign alone. Let your customers, brand loyalists, and employees be part of it. This helps to increase engagement and conversion. Buyers are now selective with the brands they patronize, and you need UGC to build trust and credibility.
How do you feel seeing a positive review from a verified customer about a product you like but are scared of making the wrong decision?
I guess you’re encouraged to take action.
User-generated content can be a testimonial from a customer who purchased your product or an opinion from a brand loyalist on why they prefer your brand to others. It can also be from an employee explaining the processes you take to ensure your products meet the yearnings of your customers.
While some customers create and share this content voluntarily, you can ask for, gather and put them in a video, photo, or text content. Then upload them on your Instagram while giving credits as a sort of appreciation.
8. Schedule Your Content
Posting content randomly puts you off track with your goals. Scheduling your content will keep you organized. You keep track of the content you have posted on Instagram and those you need to create.
If you have a content team, it allows everyone to brainstorm new content ideas, identify content gaps and close them. Most importantly, schedule content to save the time you spend posting manually on Instagram. That allows you to focus on other aspects of your content marketing.
Instagram has a scheduling feature. You can use it when you want to publish your content. However, it isn’t advanced and that’s why you should consider social media scheduling tools like SocialPilot, Bulk.ly, and Hootsuite.
9. Let Your Content Demonstrate How Your Product & Services Work
Keep in mind that the aim of content marketing on Instagram is to attract users who have interest in what you do. Not everyone will have time to click on the link in your bio to visit your landing page. And you will be missing the shot if you don’t create video content that shows how your products and services work, and the value your customers will derive.
Seeing is believing and a picture they say is worth more than a thousand words. An ideal customer who is convinced with the demo video you shared will want to give your product a try.
Prepare your content, use free recording tools like OBS to record, then edit your video to fine-tune and enhance its quality.
10. Work With Influencers In Your Industry
There are certain personalities on Instagram that influence the behavior and choices of others towards brands. Identify and work with such people in your industry. They help build influencer marketing strategies and create more awareness about your brand, which is what your content tends to achieve.
Can you imagine the exposure your brand will get if an influencer with over 2 million active followers posts content about your brand?
Some of their followers will engage and make findings about your brand. Others may instantly follow you on Instagram to keep up with fresh content.
11. Track Performance
Your content marketing strategy on Instagram won’t be complete without tracking performance. That’s the only way to know what is working and what isn’t. Not all content will resonate with your audience. So, you need to focus on content that drives engagement and generates leads.
Instagram has an analytics feature, but unfortunately doesn’t offer the advanced features you need to make important marketing decisions. For example, most of the data will disappear after 30 days. It limits demographics to fewer countries, and you do the analytics manually.
To this end, you may require a complete social media management tool to get a detailed analysis of your content performance on Instagram, recommendations to improve it, and options to automate certain tasks.
Over to You
Your content marketing strategy must be on top gear if you plan to win loyal customers on Instagram. The goal is to create and distribute content that connects with the pain of your ideal audience and offers solutions to them. I’ve shown you 11 strategies you should adopt. It’s up to you to overhaul your process, do away with those that don’t work, and replace them with ones you’ve learned today.
About the Author
Chuks Chukwuemeka is a freelance SEO content writer & strategist who helps SaaS brands boost their rankings on search results. He’s the founder of depreneurdigest.com, a marketing blog, and loves learning new things about SEO. Connect with him on LinkedIn.