Instagram Growth Hacks: How to Organically Build Your Brand? – Social media can be a highly resource-intensive exercise for any company. Although it has a high ROI, if you do not have a dedicated social media manager, you are most likely not using social media to its fullest potential. Instagram, in particular, is a highly profitable and useful platform when it comes to reaching new audiences and engaging with your customer.
The thing with Instagram is that you need to have the time and dedication to create content, post it, engage with your customers and measure successes on the platform. You will need to have a well-thought-out strategy in place and be able to ensure that your budget is being spent in the right area. So, with all of this in mind, we thought we would take a look at how to grow your Instagram following. And how to grow it organically. Let’s get stuck in.
Table of Contents
Know Your Customers
Before you start targeting your customers, you actually need to know who they are. You will need to have a full customer profile in place in order to create a marketing plan that directly appeals to them. So, know their demographics, but also, know their interests and behaviors. By knowing what sparks your customers’ interest, you will be able to create content that directly appeals to them.
Remember, it is more important to have real, organic followers than to have thousands of fake profiles and bots. So, if you are wondering how to get more followers on Instagram, and real ones, the answer is by knowing them!
A fashion brand, for example, will have a totally different customer profile from a pet food and accessory retailer. So, you will need to understand who they are following and engaging with to replicate it.
Invest in your Social Media
This is where a lot of brands and startups fall short. They simply don’t know or don’t have the budget to invest in social media. And this is a rookie mistake. The fact of the matter is that you can choose your budget and you don’t need a lot of it. By sponsoring some ads and some of the content, you can reach audiences beyond just your followers.
This is where your customer profile comes in handy. By knowing what your customers like, where their interests lie and their overall profile, you are able to target them directly with your sponsored posts. You are able to filter these into your ads and reach these particular customers with a budget that suits you. The next thing you need though is content.
Curate Your Content
Content is critical in digital marketing. From copy to videos and images, this is what your customers are soaking in when it comes to your brand. So, create a content strategy from the outset and make sure you follow it throughout the year.
You will want your content to be relevant and focused at all times, so consider aligning it with what is going on throughout the year. Center your content on holidays, key calendar dates, and relevant trends that your customers are following.
Your content will also need to be SEO-optimized and contain the right keywords to be found by your audience. So, do regular keyword research to understand what is being searched for at all times. It is also worth your while to keep an eye on what your competitors are publishing.
Your audience will most likely be following them, as well as top global brands, so stay in the know to know what is working for them. Make sure your content is educational, informative, and entertaining at all times.
Partner With Affiliates
In order to reach an even larger audience, it could be worth your while to reach out to other brands and influencers. Now, we are not talking about macro-influencers that charge millions. We are talking about the Instagram profiles that have a couple thousand, highly engaged followers. They create their own, highly engaging content and respond to and engage with their audience.
These kinds of partnerships are great for brands as you can look for someone who fits into your industry and brand and partner with them. You will know, based on their content and profile that their audience is proportional to your audience. So, when they are posting content on behalf of you, or tagging you in, you know that you will be reaching a few thousand highly qualified potential followers.
The Bottom Line
What numerous brands forget to do when doing all of this, is to measure and monitor how well their efforts are going. So, if you are investing time and money into Instagram, watch the metrics that the platform provides you and tweak your strategy accordingly.