5 Marketing Strategies to Raise Your Brand Awareness on Instagram. Building your brand nowadays is far more easily compared with how it was a decade ago. With the power of social media and implementing a few smart marketing strategies, anyone can be successful and build a strong brand.
Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, and it has become a powerful tool for businesses to build brand awareness. But how can you make sure your brand stands out on Instagram? Below we will discuss five proven strategies that you can use to skyrocket your brand awareness on Instagram.
These strategies include creating engaging content, using influencers to promote your product, leveraging user-generated content, optimizing your profile for searchability, and using sponsored posts. By using these tactics, you can ensure that more people become aware of your brand and engage with it on Instagram.
Instagram is the world’s second-most popular social media platform, with more than 1 billion active users monthly. As one of the most visual social media channels out there, Instagram is a favorite of influencers and shoppers alike. Over 70% of online shoppers get inspiration from Instagram for their next purchase. And why not? With users visiting more than 200 million business accounts on Instagram, it seems like the perfect online shopping mall you can access from anywhere.
For businesses, the opportunities on Instagram are huge. It can get your brand name known to millions of users and expand your brand reach to all corners of the world.
But building brand awareness on Instagram is not easy. With more and more new features to contend with each day, it becomes easier to get trapped in the lure of shiny things and forget the solid, simple foundations on which an enduring brand can be built.
5 Marketing Strategies to Raise Your Brand Awareness on Instagram
In this article, we share five strategies that give solid footing to your brand awareness on social media. Once you do these things and do them right, you can only utilize the bells and whistles (shiny new features of Instagram) to their fullest potential. So, what basics do you need to get right? Let’s unwrap these smart marketing strategies to utilize Instagram to create a successful brand that people will remember forever.
1. Create a consistent and recognizable brand identity on Instagram
The first step to creating brand awareness on Instagram starts with creating a consistent and recognizable brand identity. Your logo design, brand colors and fonts, and a branded template for your Instagram feed (and other posts) allow people to slowly start recognizing you when they see you.
For that to happen, you need to design a logo that reflects your brand characteristics and character. Use that design as the profile image on all your social media, including Instagram. Choose colors and fonts that augment the visual identity you want for your brand. Create and use templates that allow you to post your content on Instagram with a consistent look and feel every time people come across that content. They can immediately recognize it as yours.
By building a consistent brand identity, you gain customer trust, emerge as a serious business, and remain on top of the mind of all your existing and potential customers.
2. Optimize your Instagram business profile
If you are a business on Instagram but haven’t switched your profile to Professional yet, do it at once. Instagram Professional is the new name for Instagram business accounts. It comes equipped with a ton of unique features and SEO boosters that a regular personal profile doesn’t have.
Some of these features and functionalities include:
- Access to business analytics to see who, when, where, and how have interacted with your brand
- Adding CTAs and other buttons to your Instagram profile
- Third-party integrations
- Creating social ads from within the app
- And many more.
Switching to a Professional account is easy.
If you are registered with a business name, go to Settings, scroll down to Accounts, click on it, and choose Switch to Professional from the new menu that’ll appear.
If you are registered as a personal profile, you’ll have to go to Settings, scroll down to Preferences, and then choose Switch to Professional from near the end of the list.
Before you make this switch, ensure your username on Instagram is the same as your brand name. Under your Account name, again, use your brand name to reiterate that you are a business. In your bio, briefly describe your business so people know what you sell or offer as services. In that one-line bio, do use your main keyword to boost your SEO.
Optimizing your profile is a small step with a ripple effect of benefits you cannot enjoy from a personal profile.
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3. Create a content strategy that provides value beyond your product
If the ultimate goal of your brand awareness exercise is to make more sales, it’s a pretty narrow and limiting vision. By using content in your brand awareness practices, you can create value for your customers that goes beyond your products and services.
Most online brands, for example, often do product tutorials which are always of great help to audiences. But going deeper, these brands can talk about other areas of shopping that may not relate directly to their products but help their customers nonetheless. For example, talking about cyber security measures while shopping online.
It has nothing to do directly with the brand’s products, but it’s still high-value content with great potential for shareability.
When you educate, entertain, or inform your audiences about stuff, regardless of whether it relates to your product catalog, you make your brand more valuable to your community. They begin to see you as a thought leader, someone who’s interested in making their customers’ lives better in different ways and who’s eager to solve challenges that their customers face.
To ensure your content performs to its best, become intentional with it. Create topics that relate to a theme. Themes could include:
- Tutorials
- User stories
- Tips and advice
- Fun and entertainment
- News about the industry and your take on them
Power up a good content creation strategy with a good posting schedule too. Post regularly. Preferably 2-3 times a week. Publish your posts when your users are most active on Instagram. Your Instagram analytics can help you track when your users actively engage with your brand or the app. Posting at the most strategic times is as important as figuring out what to post.
Remember, brand awareness is not sustainable without building meaningful relationships with your community. You create and keep that community by providing them with something more valuable than mere products and services.
4. Use hashtags correctly
The Instagram algorithm looks at alt-texts, metadata, post keywords, and hashtags to understand a post and distribute it to people likely to enjoy it/benefit from it the most. Using proper hashtags in your post is more complicated than just captioning every food picture you post with #foodlover or #yummy. As with content, you have to be intentional with your hashtags. Intentional and more creative.
Conduct hashtag research with tools like RiteTag and Sprout Social to expand your post reach on Instagram. The platform now allows a maximum of 30 hashtags to be added to a single post. You can also add them to feed posts, videos, Stories, and Reels.
By using the most efficient hashtags for your content, you make it more searchable, engaging, and likely to be featured on the Explore page and be discovered by high-value users, people with an increased potential to actually buy from you.
5. Create and run awareness ads
We have shared above organic ways to increase your brand awareness. These methods cost more time and effort than money. Yet, it’s a fact that to make money, you have to spend money. We visit this fact when we realize all the help awareness ads can provide to our brand.
To run awareness ads on Instagram, all you need to do is choose the correct campaign objective when you launch a new ad campaign from your Instagram page. The page will ask you what your campaign objective is. You will be given option such as Awareness, Engagement, Traffic, and more.
Choose Awareness so Instagram shows your ads to people who don’t yet really know your brand and who are likely to find them helpful. It ensures that your brand reaches high-value potential clients who are more similar to your existing client base and share similar interests, demographics, and probably purchase habits.
Awareness ads make the most use of your advertising dollars by ensuring your ads are seen by people who are most likely to remember and recall them.
Final Words
Once you start establishing practices to increase your brand awareness, it becomes necessary to begin tracking the progress too. Discover things that are helping you bring you closer to your goals and strategies that are not working half as well as you had hoped. By only tracking and measuring your progress, you can ensure your brand awareness campaign has the result you are looking for.
