Instagram is a unique social network whose popularity is constantly growing. Today, it is used by more than a billion users, and 500 million of them connect to the network every day. The growth of the platform’s popularity does not end there. New accounts appear on the site every day, and, as some analyzers predict, the number of new users will continue to increase.
Surely everyone has thought about starting their own business on Instagram, because there are a lot of opportunities for this! We are ready to tell you how to start your own business on Instagram and promote it. Interesting? So let’s start!
Why is it worth starting an Instagram business?
If earlier Instagram was a place where users could simply exchange photos, showing part of their lives to the public, today it has become a huge trading platform where you can succeed . It seems that they sell everything from lipstick to refrigerators. And most importantly, everything is for sale! Well, almost everything.
Now this social network is mainly inhabited by a young audience. But as we said above, the number of users is growing every day, and therefore the audience is diversifying. So do not be surprised if your grandmother soon subscribes to you.
This is what attracts most business owners. After all, on Instagram you can find almost any target audience. Moreover, even if today you successfully manage your business offline and do well without an account in this social network, sooner or later you will come to the conclusion that a profile on IG will become necessary for you.
How to start an Instagram business?
The beauty of Instagram is that you can use it as the main business platform or as an additional platform. In any case, you will benefit from it and you will not lose anything.
Surely you know a lot of resources that have already talked about where to start your business on Instagram ? You may have already read hundreds of articles on this topic, but we think we wrote the best about it on the blog instaplus.me. In this article, you will find a complete guide to successfully promote business profiles on Instagram. Do not miss this opportunity to learn more about this topic.
Niche selection
The first thing to decide is what you are going to sell. If you already have a business, you can ignore this point. BUT! It is important to understand that today not all representatives of companies can access the Instagram platform. For example, if you are engaged in ferrous metallurgy, you are unlikely to find your target audience on Instagram. But who knows, maybe in a few years you will be able to find your place in the IS.
If you are just starting your own business, you need to choose the right niche. We advise you to choose a specialization not too wide, but not too narrow. In the first case, your target audience will be too wide and it will be difficult to set up advertising. In the second, you may not have enough ideas for continuous content generation.
Creating strategy
When you have chosen a niche, it’s time to create a promotion strategy on social networks. Today, you can develop your business page in three scenarios:
Blog development. To be successful in blogging for monetization purposes, you need to create quality content all the time. Everything is important here: visual, textual content, idea, person. But most importantly, your blog should be unique and interesting, attract new users and successfully retain “old”ones.
Showcase creation. If you want to get quick results, this strategy is for you. Storefronts are created by companies that can not show and tell a lot about themselves. Think for yourself, would you read a blog about trucking even if you needed their services? Not. Therefore, such accounts can only hope for good advertising.
Combined strategy. You can actively blog and edit ads to amplify the impact.
Define your target audience
This article is a must-have in any business. You need to understand to whom and why you are selling your product. Today, it is impossible to create a business or blog that is equally interesting for each target audience.
To define your target audience, draw a typical portrait of your customer based on your business theme. Determine his age, sex, place of residence, profession, income level, hobbies and hobbies. This article will not only help you set up your ads correctly, but also create appropriate content.
Competition analysis
Competitor analysis is another critical step in creating any business, whether online or offline. If you want to be the best in your niche, this step cannot be ignored.
How to find competitors on Instagram? Unfortunately, we have not yet offered universal services that could find your competitors on a social network on their own, so this work needs to be done manually. First of all, think, maybe you know your competitors “by sight”, follow their profiles? Ask your friends and acquaintances. Also use hashtags (keywords) to search.
After finding your competitors, analyze their pages. Pay attention to the design of the profile header, visual content, the number of posts, likes and comments, the number and quality of subscribers (is there a boost?), View recorded stories.
Take into account ALL the details of your competitors, spot their mistakes and note the advantages. Your goal is to make your page even better, so any errors you find must be corrected and all benefits implemented.
Good? It’s time to move on to the fun part – create and register an Instagram account. To begin with, register on the social network, choose a short but informative name for your profile (brand name, name, etc.). Fill in your profile header. We advised you to pay attention to the ceiling of your competitors and make it even better. So, add a description of your page, explain what you are doing and what subscribers will find in your account.
By the way, an important point! Remember that you need to create a business account. It differs from the usual profiles in that a company profile has the ability to view the statistics of its page and each individual post, see coverage, engagement, and you can also run targeted ads.
To create an Instagram business account, you need to associate your profile with your Facebook business page. Do not forget to fill in additional information: address, opening hours, etc.
Make sure that when people visit your profile, they immediately understand what you are doing.
Create unique visual content that looks stylish. It is very important that all photographs fit together. Create a profile you want to subscribe to!
Content also plays a key role. If you blog, you can say that your articles are even more important than the visual. People are interested in reading. The era of short quotes and emoticons in descriptions ended a long time ago!
Optimize your Instagram account
When the page is created, there are at least 9 articles on it, you can start optimizing your account. How to do?
Hashtags. Hashtags are keywords by which you can be found on a social network. If you want your target to find you easily, create a semantic core for your page.
Geolocation. Also an important element in optimization. Only we advise you to put a geolocation under the photos not of a country or even a city. Better to put closely targeted geolocations. For example, if you sell baby clothes, indicate the location of the maternity hospital. Why not?
Story. At first, the stories were not liked by the users of the platform, but then they took a key place in the promotion of accounts. Almost all the attention of advertising and the public went here! Therefore, a beautiful design and regular publication of Instagram stories is no less important than the design of your profile.
Commercial promotion on Instagram
In order to successfully promote your business on Instagram, you need to choose an effective way to promote your page. The most optimal and reliable way is paid advertising on social networks. So here are the main methods of paid promotion:
- Targeted advertising.
- Advertising bloggers.
- Advertising advertising.
- Mailing to direct.
- Advertising outside of Instagram.
There are also free ways of promotion. This includes, by the way, the optimization we talked about above. In addition, you can resort to subscriptions (mass following), likes (massliking), comments, but this method is no longer so effective.
It is also possible to promote your page and gain subscribers through gifts. You can sponsor a free gift. The conditions for such a donation are as follows: subscription to sponsor accounts, it is possible to put likes on the latest posts. But in reality, this method will do more harm than good. Think for yourself-who primarily participates in gifts? Insolvent persons who are unlikely to purchase your services and products. Most subscribers will leave immediately after the distribution of prices, and it turns out that you are just wasting money.
Useful tips for running an Instagram business
When the basic information is there, it remains to give useful tips that will help you successfully create and promote a business account on a social network.
Be pro-active. Do not let your subscribers forget about you, shoot stories and regularly publish interesting articles. But don’t overdo it. Five publications a day would be too much.
Connect with your audience. In order for your subscribers to stay with you, pay attention to them, respond to their comments and messages in Yandex.Direct. Do surveys in stories and ask for their opinion in posts. Give them freedom of speech.
Develop your own style. This applies to both visual and textual content. There are professional accounts that can be recognized from the first lines of their publications. Strive to do the same.
On this we will finish today. We hope that this information has been useful to you and will help you promote your business. But remember that the world does not stop, just like Instagram. Stay tuned for updates and your business will always be at its best. We wish you success!