Avoid These Mistakes When Marketing on Instagram
Who would have believed, Instagram could report more than a billion users. Isn’t that a great platform to set up credibility and grow your brand?
When Social media influencers, smart entrepreneurs, celebrities and top brands are taking advantage of Instagram since it came into existence, why not you?
You can create a free business profile on Instagram and promote your brand name. It takes a few easy steps to create your account and make it easily accessible to the users interested.
Set-up your account, post photos, build a relationship with your followers and turn them into customers.
It seems easy, right? It can be, if the last thing you do is making any of the very common Instagram mistakes mentioned in the blog ahead. Avoid these Instagram marketing mistakes and make your business achieve a great deal of your target market.
1. Keeping your account private
You put limits on the opportunities by setting up your account to private. The personal account could be private but it makes no sense for the business account, that has to be publicly accessible.
Keeping a business account public creates a higher chance of pulling out potentials and reaching out to an extensive number of audience in order to make an effort to increase the number of followers.If the users who are interested in your product or the business you are in, see the account set to private, would understand that you don’t want them or they will have to wait for you to find the time, login to your profile and accept their request.After looking into a private profile, the users will likely steer clear. And, why wouldn’t they be? The private icon indicates that you don’t want them.Double-check your business account status in the profile settings to avoid such a mistake.
2. Posting irrelevant content & low-quality photos
Posting an image or a random photo doesn’t really work for a business account, even if you want to be social, remember, it is not a personal account in which you can share anything you want.
Serve the best look possible, use some simple tweaks, share pictures that are relevant to your brand, anything else might appear unprofessional. Although, there is no harm in being personal for once in a while but being it a business account, try to keep the balance between random and the relevant posts.
Again, to look professional, you need to post good quality pictures and videos that talk about the quality of the business products and services you are providing. Images and videos should be of high resolution and perfectly sized, as the prospects judge the brand name and its quality in several ways.
3. Incorrect hashtag usage
Make the correct usage of hashtags, in order to make them effective. The significant idea of using them is to make them searchable. An incorrect or over usage of hashtags could harm the brand name on Instagram.
Hashtags are very essential element of marketing on Instagram. They can be used to organize and promote the brand name. Customers who are interested in your products and services can find you easily if you have made the correct use of hashtags.
There is no single strategy for the use of hashtags. It needs a plan, keeps a check on how your hashtags perform, tracks the ones that are leading to get more audience and increased engagement.
Be specific and keep it simple, that is all it takes.
4. No engagement with an audience
Engaging with the users leads to retention and eventually, growth.
Engagement with the audience helps them understand and know you and your business much better. In addition, you get the opportunity to know what they expect and need from you. Be creative to connect with your audience, it is more effective than the posts that look like a straight-up advertisement.
Users like the post or post the comments when they are interested in your product or content. They should always get a response as it makes them think that their contribution is being recognized. An Instagram business account needs followers to grow its business and promote the brand name. If users will not get a response, they will not post anything again.
Users commenting or posting feedback on your post states that they want to get connected, respond to them.
A user who is willing to tell other people what experience they have been through while reading your posts, working with you or going through your account, you should respond to that person instead of keeping staring blankly until they go away. If the comment is positive, appreciate it! If it is negative, take it as an opportunity to improve. Reply to user comments so that they should know that you are open to discussion.
If you will not respond, the followers will not bother interacting with you.
5. Buying followers & Influencers
Buying followers or likes on Instagram is equivalent to cheating on yourself. It does not only damages your brand name but it also degrades the credibility. Rather get engaged with the right people, build a community, it takes time but works out. A contest or campaign could be a better and effective idea to increase followers. Promote your brand by running advertisements.
6. Not paying attention to analytics
Always pay attention to your business Instagram account analysis. In order to check what content is working out for you and which one is wasting resources, you need to be alert to analytics. You could miss some important information that could help you promote your brand, increase the business or plan campaigns.
Analysis data also helps understand the audience, If you know what kind of posts they like, what are they most interested in looking into, their online shopping behavior, you can create better content to keep them engaged. Consider the facts, understand your objective and the path that leads to it.
Keep a check on the web traffic, audience growth, advertisement success, use the analytics tools for your business.
7. Not having a Goal-driven approach
The goal is an important factor that forms the foundation of any plan or strategy. Talking about Instagram marketing, without objective designed, is all, the waste of efforts, opportunities, and resources. You should know what you are working towards.
A business should always try to grow and become profitable. To get a clear way to measure success and beyond the tactical side, look at your company from five or seven years perspective, other than taking a macro view, that makes you see it from a business vertical, competitive or economic perspective. You should have a better understanding of what you need and how you have to go about it.
8. Not adding relevant links to your bio
Your website link needs to be added to the Instagram account, to generate traffic to the website. Instagram provides an option to add one link in your bio, take advantage of it. If users like your brand they will follow you, and if they don’t find the link to click on, you lose your opportunity of increasing your followers. You can run a large portion of Instagram sales through this link in bio.
Most of the Instagram users don’t even think about adding links to their business account, where Instagram also tells to add the link in the marketing tips. On Instagram, go to the option ‘Edit Profile’ and add the link in the ‘website’ box. You will get this option to add a link, only if you run ads on Instagram.
9. Not being consistently active
The more frequent you will post, the more followers you will get. Increasing the number of followers, creating and scheduling more content for consistency is a time-consuming task. Create more content that connects with the previous one, in order to maintain the count of the followers.
Prepare a content posting schedule, create a content calendar, make a plan on what and when will you post.
Try using different formats to get more attention. Go for GIFs or Boomerangs.
10. Not proofreading
U can’t miss out on proofreading, like I just did. It takes plenty of time to decide what kind of content you will post this time. How long does it take for you to double-check if there are any mistakes and edit the text?
Proofreading should be a regular part of the social media strategy. Making grammar mistakes, missing punctuation, spelling mistakes are easy ways to look unprofessional. They ruin impressions in front of a large audience very quickly.
A content failure on social media can harm the business in many ways especially in areas like marketing, healthcare, finance and many more, where the business you own, needs the customers to have faith in you.
Correcting them creates a good opportunity to make an effective first impression on new users and long-lasting ones on your current followers. It maintains the credibility of the brand name in all the online interactions. There are various proofreading tools available online. Start using them and avoid simple writing mistakes.
Next Steps:
You might be making some of these Instagram marketing mistakes mentioned above, but it is never too late to be done with your mistakes and get back on track. Follow the tips stated in this blog to work on Instagram mistakes to avoid. There could be one simple mistake and you lose one precious prospect. Make a note of the things not to do while marketing on Instagram and you will be good to go.
Instagram is an awesome platform to promote your brand and achieve your business objectives, just do it right.
