Social media platforms change constantly, and failure to adapt means missing out on both advertising and marketing opportunities. If you’ve been using the same online marketing technique for years, it may be time to take advantage of social media’s growing frontier.
However, this does not mean that your company needs to completely rewire the way that you approach advertising. It just means you need to look for more modern applications. Applying tested business techniques on the social media frontier will show the best results. For example, Instagram is a fairly new marketing channel, but you can achieve great success by applying tried-and-true marketing tactics to the new channel.
Hashtags Are the New Taglines
Before Instagram, establishing a brand meant creating a catchy logo and tailoring events to bring your fans together. These are still important for a growing company, but through social media hashtags have risen as a new way to give a name for your brand. Just like the logo ties a recognizable image to your brand, hashtags tie a recognizable phrase to your brand that users can share with their friends and increase your visibility.
Hashtags originally started as a way to search for related items without scanning aimlessly through pages; this makes them ideal for brand promotion. By assigning all your posts a hashtag, users can easily click on it and see the related posts without sifting through everything else.
When running a campaign, create a specific hashtag that you use for every picture within that campaign. That way, followers won’t have to scroll through all the company posts to keep informed about the campaign. Followers can also spread the word by using this hashtag in their own posts and thus creating free publicity. Recently, Lipton tea launched their campaign “#Briskpic” where users sent in their pictures using this hashtag. This not only created press for their business, but united their fans under a common hashtag.
Original hashtags also help establish a name for the business. If you link a hashtag to the brand name, people will associate the hashtag with it and therefore recall it easily. Make it catchy and unmistakably simple so that it will stick in a follower’s head. You’ll want them to be able to remember it and associate that with you whenever they search hashtags.
Originality Is Just as Important as Ever
Creating a successful business has always been about providing the market what they haven’t seen and marketing it. This meant creating witty slogans and commercials as well as giving services that other companies don’t offer. Anything that separates you from other companies puts you ahead. On Instagram, provide content that your followers cannot find anywhere else.
Every stock photo used on the Instagram business page is a wasted opportunity to connect with your followers. Instagram’s formatted for casual posts; using a picture with blank backgrounds and a watermark stamped in the middle will brand the company’s Instagram as phony. Not only will the company’s Instagram be viewed as phony, but you will not be able to do any branding with the picture. Instead of using others photos, take your own pictures that are relevant to the company but still show interest on a personal level.
Reap the benefits of Instagram marketing by targeting the network’s audience. The majority of them come to Instagram not just for business but for interesting pictures; take pictures related to your business that do not bore nor suggest fishing from the creative commons. Make sure each picture feels natural, while still putting a lot of thought into every picture that you post. Common themes for businesses are artistic representations of their products, graphic designs, and intriguing pictures of the workplace coupled with information relevant to the customer.
Starbucks uses their Instagram right. They not only posts pictures about their coffee, but they do so in a way that caters to their market. They put artistic representations of their products, fan pictures, and trademark Instagram “food” pictures. Not once do they use a stock photo, but, instead, constantly advertise themselves. In your business, do not settle for stock photos. Instead, create innovative, original photos and always find a way to link them back to your company.
People Will Always Respond to Practicality
People love receiving good advice; the best advertisements are the ones that help your customer out whether or not they buy your product. That way, they’ll at least consider you for the future. Marketing your skills through quick advice snippets is one of Instagram’s specialties.
The best way to market on Instagram is making it look like you’re not marketing but conversing. Appeal to the followers as a friend and offer them advice relating to your company’s product. If they find the advice interesting, they’ll check out your official webpage.
Take internet sensation Rachel Brathen, Instagram-famous for yoga pose tutorials under the name Yoga Girl. She uses her Instagram to promote her personal business by offering how to’s on different yoga poses. She also shares different poses she makes at exotic places. She does this for the followers to get a sense of what she does, thus giving her audience an idea of what to expect in her paid classes.
Give your Instagram followers tips related to the business that they’d find useful in life. Inform about the company in a proactive way by giving the information in a friendly way — think sharing ideas with friends, but to a broad spectrum. Always keep in mind, too, the market the business appeals to and what would best convince it to check your official website.
Forming Connections with Customers Is Critical
One of the beautiful things about social media is that connecting with customers is easier than ever. Before digital media, someone had to call or attend an event to connect with the brand. But now, it’s as easy as emailing or commenting. Instagram is no different.
In 2013, AT&T launched their season-long “Be the Fan” campaign. Through Modern Family star Eric Sonestreet, they set up weekly game day challenges that their followers could respond to through Instagram using the #BetheFan hashtag. Their “Be the Fan” website hosted many of these fan-sent pictures. During their campaign, social talk increased by over 200 percent on the various social medias.
AT&T exhibited several positive techniques mentioned above here and all of them have to do with connecting successfully with customers. They target a group of people — sports fans — who they knew were interested in their project. They also personalized it by using fan photos instead of stock ones. Finally, they used a hashtag to allow buzz a quick rise in the trends.
Connecting with the customers requires both a mixture of everything talked about above and more: AT&T did not use vague parameters in solidifying their campaign’s audience. They marketed it for sports fans who also liked their product. When making a campaign, attach it to a specific set of people for that feeling of personality, but while bringing it back to the company and its product.
This goes together with the benefits of communication. You may not be able to reply to every post your fans make, but you must make an effort to respond to some of them. Doing so gives you the image of the personable business that you want to be rather than a cold corporate center. Being kind to your customers is not a revolutionary idea. On Instagram, respond to their ideas and treat them as important.
Instagram breaks ground in social media by being such an informal base. People take and send photos of their lunches to each other and comment on photos regardless of the number in followers. Instagram thrives on strong relationships, and as a business, the best way to gain followers is to form friendships with some and ask them to spread the word.
This may or may not be achievable depending on the scale of the business, but even in a large company, liking the occasional fan’s photo every so often or following some back creates comfort. It makes the Instagram page feel less robotic and more like a friendship. Shouting out to or occasionally replying to followers also builds positive relationships without making impossible goals like replying to all of them.
Short and simple: treat your customers like humans who deserve input, offline and online, and acknowledge their existence. They will notice and respond to it positively.
Don’t Be Afraid to Branch Out; Your Marketing Techniques Are Still Relevant!
If you have been shying away from using Instagram as a business or if you have been posting pictures on Instagram without any clear goals, don’t be afraid of focusing some of your marketing efforts on Instagram. By applying marketing techniques that are tried and tested, you can build brand awareness for your brand and develop relationships with potential customers. What are you waiting for? Get out there and start taking strategic pictures for your company’s Instagram!
Rachel Crandall is a Social Media Community Manager for Business Bee. She loves spending time in the great outdoors, and loves coming home to Instagram her adventures. She prides herself in staying current with all things social media.