Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

You have set up your business account on Instagram, and you are ready to give your Business page a boost. However, you are on a tight budget. Can you promote your Business successfully enough to turn the social media platform’s algorithms in your favor?

The key to any promotional attempt on social media is to ensure an organic turnover in terms of audience engagement with your posts. Instagram is no different. Getting this turnover takes time, and if you are a brand-new business venture, it could take you a while before you manage to get a substantial number of followers on your account or likes on your posts. You could give your page a head-start in this game by acquiring Instagrowing likes. However, you will have to keep the ball rolling by managing your account creatively to generate and sustain organic growth in your target audience ultimately.

What will your Promotional Strategy Be?

Planning your promotional strategy is essential to getting your business page the attention you want it to get. As you are aware, billions of people use Instagram today to socially interact and create a market-base for their products. When you put your business page out there on Instagram, you are competing with several others who are eyeing the same follower base as you. With so many competitors vying for attention from the same target audience, how do you get an edge and highlight your uniqueness?

Ask Yourself the Right Questions

You need to figure out some crucial questions before you can actually move into the execution of your plan. Some of the things you may want to figure out include:

  • What is your posting routine going to be like? Will you be putting up new content daily? Twice daily? Or will you be doing it every alternate day? Consistent posting builds audience expectations, so it is crucial to choose your posting schedule wisely.
  • Do you have a visual template to post your content in? Sticking to a style /font/ color scheme that can easily be associated with your brand is always a good idea.
  • How much is your budget, and how would you like to use it? Even if your budget is minimal, breaking it down will give you a clearer picture of how best to utilize the social platform to your advantage.
  • How familiar are you with the features offered by Instagram? It is good to study the platform as Instagram is continually upgrading its features to give you an optimum user experience.

Get Creative with Your Promotional Strategy

If you are blanking out on how best to do this, here are 10 creative ideas on how best to promote your Instagram Business Page on a budget:

1. Update Your IG Story Routinely

Not only are Instagram Stories fun, but they also have exciting creative potential. If used right, they are one of the best means to increase IG engagement. You have several features available in the 24-hour story to build up brand awareness and connect with your market.

Image by Wokandapix from Pixabay

  • Get creative with the Stickers. You have a good variety to choose from. The built-in add-ons include slide-on stickers, smileys and much more. Give your story a caption or an emoji to evoke reactions.
  • Quiz your viewers. Organize fun trivia games or create a conversation starter around your products. Ask your viewers to select answers from a list of options or to type in their responses.
  • Get audience feedback. Be it a choice for things already out in the market or for forthcoming stories and products, give your target market a chance to have a say in it. Create interactive opinion polls that let the view select from an either-or option. This brings in big numbers on Instagram algorithms for your brand, and who knows, these could even drive-up sales of your featured products!
  • Go live! This is known to generate instant engagement boosts. Going live on Instagram Stories is a great way to grab attention. As you can answer your viewers directly and instantly, this often encourages the audience to leave questions and comments hoping for a quick response. Moreover, when you go live, your followers receive a notification about it. Time going live wisely to get a good audience response.

2. Engage your Audience by Organizing Sweepstakes and Contests

Who doesn’t like freebies? Consider setting aside a budget for hosting Instagram giveaways and contests. Simply put, an Instagram giveaway is when you offer to give something for free in exchange for an action on the viewers part of your posts. You could giveaway discounts, an offer to feature your customer in your posts, or mail-in items to the winner. Commonly, giveaways are given for leaving Instagram likes or comments. You could ask the participants to tag someone else in the comment. You could also get contestants to post something under a given theme on their accounts with a tag to your account. Such requirements bring in more viewers to your account. Hence this is a great way to expand your market organically.

For maximum benefit, put time limits on your giveaways and contests and promote the contest in your story. You could run up posts in the days leading to the competition and feature links that take your followers to a landing page. Add in bonus prizes and announce winners. This last point is vital to establish your authenticity as a business. If done correctly, contests and giveaways will bring your page a big audience and a vast follower group.

3. Make Your Products the Centre of Your Posts

Posting creatively and regularly about your products is the best way to get your audience to turn into customers. Create posts that will endear the product to your audience even if your posts are about the same product. You could:

    • Post videos of the product in use.
    • Post about the making of the product. This could include insights into materials used, the manufacturing process, the workers who are behind the scene, and so on.
    • Humanize the product by showing who benefits from the sales you make.
    • If your product has several models or variations, treat each of them individually and highlight them. Use your space on Instagram like a display window.
    • Create tutorials on how to use the products.
    • Create highlights that focus on the product.
    • Curate customer experience.
    • Most importantly, respond to customer queries and comments on the posts as promptly as you can.

4. Recognize Your Customers

The best spokespersons for your Business are genuine and satisfied users of your products. Recognize and appreciate your customers by highlighting their feedback and showcasing their reviews for your venture. You cannot collect customer reviews, and ratings on Instagram feeds directly as you can say on a Facebook business page. Still, you can create new posts with photos, videos, and stories of the same. If you are using excerpts from longer reviews or features in other media like blogs, or websites, you can always direct your viewers to the full review in the body of your caption or post. This will encourage more customers to share the feedback and leave their own as well. You could create only posts thanking customers for taking the time to share their feedback. Tag the customer(s) on such posts to spread their outreach.

5. Go Along with What is Trending

Trending topics appear on top of feeds. Hence engaging in a couple of trending topics can be beneficial to your marketing strategy. The right hashtags can make all the difference and bring your business page many visitors in a short while. When interacting with trending topics, it is important to remember they may not always fit your niche. You will have to think out of the box to make your Business seem in sync. For instance, you could support local law enforcement in spreading messages against drunk driving regardless of what you sell. Such content will bring your business page to the feed of users who may not necessarily be your intended target audience. Even if the viewer did not become an immediate customer, the post would have done its job building your Business a stronger brand awareness.

6. Make Wise Use of Hashtags and Hashtag Campaigns

Hashtags are essential power tools in Instagram. Observe what tags are relevant to your Business and which tags trend more. Create a few hashtags with your brand or your brand’s slogan. Specific hashtags will get your content to a broader audience and create brand awareness. They do for your Insta Post what SEO optimization does for webpages in general. Creating hashtag campaigns is a great way to market yourself and be the trend on Instagram.

7. Invest in Influencers

Influencers are a trusted source for your customers. Hence when your product is tested out and reviewed by an influencer, your Business gains trust. Influencers do what endorsers do in traditional marketing. Except that Instagram is a much more casual space, and customers, influencers, and the Business can talk to each other more freely and easily.

Unless you are trying to goad a star into being your influencer, most influencers can be reasonable with their pricing. Often micro-influencers are happy to review products in exchange for a free product. For influencers, Instagram is a source of income, so research your potential influencers before investing.

Photo by Kate Torline on Unsplash

8. Organize and Partner up With Other Businesses for Mutually Beneficial Promotions

A great cost-effective way of advertising your business is to partner up with other businesses to organize competitions, host contests, or giveaway promotional gifts. It is a good way to build a market presence. You can get as whacky or stay as traditional as you wish in creating such promotional offers. Remember to tie up with businesses or influencers who have similar goals and business ethos to create a mutual win-win event.

9. Make Your Poste Shoppable

Shoppable Instagram Feeds – one of the latest features on Instagram. Make use of this feature to your advantage. You can now tag products in your Instagram photos, and a click on a tag will lead the viewer directly to your seller’s website. Of course, once they are there, the viewer is free to browse and shop around your parent site! Shoppable Instagram feeds excellent to lead the potential customers directly on the path to shop and checkout. A small shopping bag symbolizes Shoppable Instagram images in the corner of the picture. Tapping any one product on the photo reveals all the products up for sale in the photo. However, this feature is only available in some countries. Also, your Business needs to have an operational Facebook page linked to your Instagram account to use this feature.

10. Create CTA posts

If bettering your ROI and generating sales is your ultimate goal, you need to incorporate CTA posts in your marketing strategy. These could appear periodically or be a part of your regular posts. The trick is to ensure that they do not sound overly pushy. You can prompt followers to turn on post notifications for your Business to keep up with the latest updates. This will enable followers who don’t regularly engage with your posts to be in the know of activity on your page, even if your posts may not have immediately appeared on their feed. Likewise, you can add notes like “follow our link” or direct the viewer to check out the content on the company’s official website. A call to action can be a simple “buy now” or “join now,” but it is more likely to goad the viewer into action when accompanying a compelling video or photo. Visualize what is most likely to drive your target audience and create CTA posts around these ideas.

Conclusion

Rest assured, if you get your planning right, you will find Instagram one of the best virtual spaces to promote your products and grow an organic customer base. It is a user-friendly platform that enables you to humanize your brand, interact directly with your customers, and reach out to new pockets of potential customers within your target market and demographics. Given the platform’s versatility, how you choose to put yourself out there is entirely dependent upon how creative you want to get with your advertising skills. So, go ahead and unleash your creative potential to grow your business page. We guarantee you do not need a huge budget to do this effectively, just some smart planning!