Instagram Marketing – These 16 Tips Give You More Reach Straight Away

Your Instagram account is actually doing well, but somehow you’re no longer seeing results from Instagram marketing? Here are 16 tips that can increase your reach straight away.

Instagram marketing matters and can achieve enormous success. Even so, reach sometimes leaves something to be desired, or campaigns don’t get the attention you hoped for. To help you breathe new life into your Instagram account, here are 16 Instagram marketing tips that can give you more reach straight away.

Checklist: does social media make sense for me?
The following questions can help you decide:

* Is my product used by consumers/private users? Or does it at least belong to a topic that interests private users?
* Is my target group media-savvy?
* Do I have a clearly defined target group that I can’t reach well through other channels?
* Do I want to learn more about my target group?
* Do I want to build a brand and give it positive associations?
* Do I have a blog?

Instagram is one of the most successful social media platforms. The fact is, for your company Instagram marketing is in some cases better than marketing on other platforms.

Tip 1: Tell your story.

Use the caption. It can be anything from a few words to several paragraphs long and contain whatever you like – except links! At the time of writing, links on Instagram were only possible in the profile and in paid posts and stories. Try to tell a story with your posts. This engages your target group more and actively builds customer loyalty.

Our tip:

Try to make your images recognisable. Using the same font, hashtags or filters are ways to achieve this.

Tip 2: Like other companies.

If you like and follow other companies on Instagram, your own follower numbers will grow too, especially at the beginning. If there are other companies’ products in your photo, don’t hesitate to tag them. This can help you get discovered more easily.

Tip 3: Get other users to “help”

Repost pictures from users and followers too. But first ask the user whether you may post these pictures on your own profile. At the time of writing, Instagram had no repost function like Twitter’s, so reposting was done via external apps such as “Repost for Instagram”. The advantage is that you get content yourself and can bind users to your brand.

Your reach and interaction with the community also increase, which is essential for Instagram marketing.

Tip 4: Use hashtags

Create your own hashtag to link photos together, much like a photo album. This makes it easier for your followers to find your posts and put them into context.

You should also use local hashtags in particular to reach a target group closer to home.

Successful topics on Instagram are:

• #Fitness & #Food (including healthcare, sport, body)

• #Beauty & #People (including fashion, make-up, hairstyling, models, photography)
• #Leisure (e.g. #games, #books, #travel, #world, #party, #lifestyle)
• #Decoration & #Home (including furniture, decoration, architecture)

Through hashtags, users find new content they might like. They should of course fit your post, and you can use some of them repeatedly – for example the name of your company or brand. At the time of writing, up to 30 hashtags were possible in one post. It’s best to brainstorm new, suitable hashtags at regular intervals. You can use Instagram’s own autocomplete for this, but there are also specialised websites and web services.

Our tip:

Stay on topic when choosing hashtags and images. If you sell trainers, your pictures shouldn’t revolve around cars and your hashtags shouldn’t talk about tyres.

Tip 5: Organise contests and giveaways.

Competitions and giveaways encourage your followers to interact with your account and your brand. You can run a prize draw that, by cleverly combining conditions, brings more likes and followers. Examples: to take part, users have to tag 3 friends’ profiles in a comment. Or share your post, or create a post of their own, or mention you in their own story. And so on. You can also link giveaways to a hashtag. This increases brand awareness and lets you monitor the activity at the same time.

Our tip:

Consider working with a Social media marketing agency. The agency draws up editorial plans and schedules posts strategically for you. Social media support is available at various levels of intensity, even on a small budget.

Tip 6: Run community calls and work with influencers.

You can ask your followers and other users to post photos with your products. You can team up with influencers for this. A brand ambassador who already uses the products is a perfect starting point. The combination of influencers and community campaigns always helps you. This way you become known in the influencer’s community and strengthen your brand. By the way: it doesn’t always have to be the big fish. Micro-influencers with fewer than 10,000 fans are often easier to reach/win over and have a stronger bond with their followers.

Our tip:

If you want to learn more about influencer marketing and its benefits, read about it here.

Tip 7: Post something in your story.

The fastest way to get back into your target group’s mind (sometimes after a long period of inactivity) is Instagram Stories. Many stories are played without sound. So if you publish stories that don’t necessarily need sound, your advertising works all the better. In addition, a third of the most-viewed stories come from companies and brands doing Instagram marketing. Join them and keep raising your profile this way.

Tip 8: Promote yourself offline too

You can draw attention to your account on business cards and in adverts. Your Instagram marketing will benefit, because you get not only greater reach but also more traffic to your Instagram account and your website.

Tip 9: Don’t spam.

Don’t post too much. Instagram users like seeing your content, but you mustn’t completely fill their feed. For your Instagram marketing, a maximum number of posts matters and should be around two posts a day. After a few posts you will find out when your users are most active and when it’s best for you to post. Users who are more interested will also look at your profile and your website of their own accord. So give your followers some breathing space.

Our tip:

Social media may be friendly waters, but they are treacherous. When getting started, consider bringing a professional Social media agency or consultant on board, at least at the beginning. They can help you reach the right users from the start and, above all, produce high-quality content.

Many companies have several social media channels for their marketing and post the same content on all of them. That never really goes down well. As we explain in more detail in this article, different people (and types of people) with different interests spend time on different platforms. So think about which user group on which channel might have which expectations of your account.

Tip 10: Stay away from bot apps.

It may sound tempting to let a bot do the work to benefit from a boost in followers, but it isn’t as advantageous as it seems. Automatically liking and commenting on posts doesn’t do your reputation much good. The generated comments are easy to spot and usually unwelcome. Take the time to really interact with your community instead, otherwise your Instagram marketing will suffer.

In addition, Instagram declared war on bots in July 2018 and specifically tracks down such activity. Profiles that use bots can be deleted completely by Instagram without warning.

Tip 11: Don’t play the “follow-unfollow game”.

If you follow a random user just so they notice you, and then withdraw the follow the very next day, it doesn’t go down well. It usually gets on users’ nerves and makes you look unprofessional. In the end, this follow-unfollow game can even cause your total number of followers to fall. And losing followers is not what you do Instagram marketing for.

Tip 12: Keep irrelevant content to yourself.

The rule here is quality over quantity. If you don’t have decent content, you shouldn’t just post “anything” for the sake of posting. Stay in users’ minds with high-quality, relevant content. Good content is also rated well; anything else looks more like spam.

Tip 13: Don’t just post adverts.

Your Instagram marketing shouldn’t consist solely of advertising, because users quickly lose interest. Take your time and, between your product, service or brand, also present content that is less about advertising and more visually appealing. People would much rather like a sunset over the company grounds than an overview of the latest product range.

Our tip:

Also post pictures or short videos of something completely everyday. Snack content can be used for this too. You can find out more about snack content here.

Tip 14: Don’t aim at too many target groups.

More target groups may widen your circle of awareness, but with too many different ones it becomes hard to keep the content interesting for everyone. What interests one group may be of no interest to another. Then there is something for everyone, but nothing really for anyone.

Make sure the content is mainly suited to the target group you are aiming at. If other groups also feel addressed, that’s a positive side effect, but you shouldn’t lose sight of the main target group. The product should of course be presented in a suitable light.

Design your content so that it mainly suits the target group you are aiming at.

Tip 15: Don’t censor users’ opinions.

For your Instagram marketing, it is important that your company responds to positive as well as negative comments. Don’t delete negative comments – respond to them with class.

If you never respond to comments, you look as if you aren’t interested in your followers. Responding to comments encourages your followers to interact with you. That’s good, because they are supposed to support you and bring traffic to your page.

Tip 16: Don’t treat all social networks the same.

Different networks also have different kinds of content. Things that go down well on Facebook may be completely wrong on Instagram. So create a separate strategy and separate content for each channel. Sometimes it helps just to package the content differently. Our articles, for example, have different titles on Facebook and Twitter, but link to the same content.

Our tip:

This may sound overwhelming at first, but don’t worry: you don’t have to go from 0 to 100. A presence on social media is better than no presence. And if you really have no resources for it at all: you can also have others win customers on social media for you. There are specialised service providers to whom you can conveniently and efficiently hand over all these tasks – even for very manageable budgets, because the support can usually be put together very flexibly.