Why Your Digital Marketing Strategy Needs Instagram

Do you use Insta­gram for busi­ness? To me, answer­ing that ques­tion should be the same as if some­one were to ask: Do you have a Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy? Both should receive an unequiv­o­cal yes. But you’d be sur­prised how many peo­ple bypass Insta­gram for their brand and miss out on what could be one of the best Visu­al Mar­ket­ing tools out there. What makes it so great? Glad you asked.

Here are five reasons Instagram Marketing should be part of your brand’s Digital Marketing strategy:

1. Direct Access to Your Target Audience

Think hard on this one…do you know any­one who doesn’t have a per­son­al Insta­gram account? Your grand­ma and the librar­i­an don’t count.

Let’s face it, with mul­ti­ple sources con­clud­ing that over 1 bil­lion peo­ple use Insta­gram every month, you can rest assured that at least some part of that pop­u­la­tion fits the descrip­tion of your tar­get audi­ence. This access, com­bined with the per­son­al nature of Social Media Mar­ket­ing, results in a sure-fire way to get your mar­ket­ing mes­sage seen and, ide­al­ly, act­ed upon.

2. No Training Required

Insta­gram, like most social media accounts, is ulti­mate­ly intu­itive to use. Con­sid­er­ing the fact that such a huge, diverse pop­u­la­tion uses it every day, there isn’t a huge learn­ing curve to under­stand­ing how to cre­ate, post, share, like, etc. content.

This means you won’t have to invest in expen­sive train­ing pro­grams that take months to com­plete and delay any actu­al use of the plat­form. Chances are, you and your team already have a strong grasp of how Insta­gram works. Just apply your Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy and it’s all sys­tems go!

3. Free, Free and Free

When was the last time you added a new dig­i­tal tool or soft­ware to your Mar­ket­ing arse­nal and didn’t spend a dime for it? How about never!

At the end of the day, Insta­gram is anoth­er social media plat­form, not a spe­cial­ty pro­gram or cut­ting-edge Google plug-in. It’s open to any­one to use at no cost what­so­ev­er. There­fore, your deci­sion to take on Insta­gram as part of your Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy won’t need to include your bud­get – or brain­pow­er (get it, a “no-brain­er” decision?).

4. Your Smartphone Makes It Happen

Because Insta­gram is an image-based social media plat­form, some peo­ples’ minds auto­mat­i­cal­ly grav­i­tate to pro­fes­sion­al photography/photographers get­ting involved some­where along the way. But this is noth­ing more than a myth – or an expen­sive unnec­es­sary investment.

Today’s smart­phones are bet­ter than yesteryear’s top-of-the-line dig­i­tal cam­era lens and can pro­duce pro­fes­sion­al-look­ing images with just a lit­tle patience and smart lighting.

Employ­ees with pho­tog­ra­phy back­grounds may be help­ful when it comes to plan­ning pho­to­shoots and choos­ing prod­uct lay­outs, but that’s noth­ing that you or oth­er asso­ciates can’t learn quick­ly by review­ing oth­er pop­u­lar Insta­gram accounts for inspiration.

Insta­gram thrives off of orig­i­nal ideas and clever approach­es to oth­er­wise ordi­nary con­tent. Which means, armed with only your cre­ativ­i­ty and your smart­phone, you’re well on your way to mar­ket­ing success.

5. Set It and Forget It with Automation

I know what you’re prob­a­bly think­ing right now. This is all great information…but now you have yet anoth­er social media plat­form to wor­ry about post­ing, engag­ing, respond­ing, etc. every day, and you can bare­ly keep track of every­thing you’re man­ag­ing now. But, thanks to updates made to Instagram’s API last year, you can now use var­i­ous sched­ul­ing tools to plan and sched­ule Insta­gram posts in advance.

This means you can choose when to sit down and build out next week/month/month(s) worth of Insta­gram con­tent, upload the posts, set the sched­ule, and then go back to focus­ing on engage­ment and oth­er core busi­ness activities.

It sounds com­pli­cat­ed, but it’s real­ly not. Under­stand­ing the basics is some­thing you can eas­i­ly learn from help­ful arti­cles online that cov­er the com­plete process of link­ing accounts and sched­ul­ing posts on Insta­gram, for every­one from begin­ners to pro­fes­sion­als to busi­ness own­ers to per­son­al users.

With just a few min­utes of read­ing and a few more hands-on learn­ing, you can boost your Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy with­out cost­ing your­self more of the time you def­i­nite­ly don’t have to spare.

Make Instagram Work for Your Brand…Today!

Design­ing a social media strat­e­gy is unique to every brand, every Mar­ket­ing team, every product/service. In much the same way, every company’s Insta­gram account is unique in the way it fea­tures con­tent and tar­gets customers.

Essen­tial­ly, the only wrong way to use the plat­form is to not use it at all. So, what are you wait­ing for? Don’t miss out on adding a tool to your Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy with an unmatched ROI and a poten­tial only lim­it­ed by the bound­aries of your own creativity.

SOURCE: MarTech Series