Instagram thrives as an avenue for brands to develop a loyal community and culture through creative content. The evolved technology and the striking features mingled with content such as reel, story, feed post, and carousels offer the brand to build a platform that entertains and excites the audience.
90% of Instagrammers follow at least one brand on Instagram. ⅔ users said that Instagram enables interaction with the brand and 50% of users are interested in a brand after visualizing an ad on Instagram.
Impactful Instagram content guides the target audience to immerse in the brands' journey. Effective Instagram content adheres to limitless possibilities in the audience's immersive experience, which brands can utilize to bring new customer experience into realIty.
In the article, we have encased unique Instagram content ideas and best practices to level up your Instagram marketing strategy. Extract the content ideas, align them to your business goal and turn the Instagram community into customers by aiding them to discover your brand. Let's get started!!
- Instagram Content Ideas For Business
- Ask Questions To Your Audience
- Give Your Followers A Puzzle Break
- Post Tutorial IGTV Videos
- Behind The Scenes
- Product Teasers
- Display Brand Expertise
- Get On With The Trend
- Share Before And After Posts
- Use User-Generated Content
- Collaborate With Influencers
- Create Carousel Posts
- Go Live
- Create Educational Reels
- Branded Memes
- Stickers for Businesses
- Build Your Audience Through Instagram Content: Best Practices
Instagram Content Ideas For Businesses
To create brand awareness and simultaneously develop opportunities to nurture leads, you need to provide valuable content geared towards the target market.
Content relevance is also a vital parameter to consider. Besides, with each emerging trend, you need in-depth analytics and precision to drill down your best-performing content and incorporate popular Instagram trends to enhance content visibility. Still in a dilemma? We have got you covered.
Set Up Instagram Business Account
Before we drill down to Instagram content ideas for Business for Instagram marketing, you need an Instagram Business account or an Instagram Creator account.
An Instagram business account allows users to access features that you can't leverage using a personal account. With a business account, you can check the Instagram insights, start an Instagram ad campaign, set up an Instagram shop. Besides, with an Instagram business account, you can add CTA to your profile to navigate your audience to a landing page.
Instagram insights are an integral part of a brands' Instagram marketing strategy to understand your content's performance and re-adjust your approach. Social media management tools like Statusbrew also allow you to add your Instagram business account to integrate to a user interface and streamline your workflow.
The Instagram creator account has its unique benefits for content creators and marketers, but a business account has the most help for brands.
If you are new to Instagram or creating a brand new account following are the steps you should consider to follow:
Step 1: Sign Up
- Open the Instagram app, tap on Sign Up with Email or Phone Number, or on iOS tap on Create New Account.
- Now enter your email or phone number and tap Next. Note that it is a good practice to use your business email address.
- Create your brand’s username and password. For the user name, choose your brand name to enrich your Instagram profile discoverability.
- Add your profile photo. Use the brand logo, add an Instagram bio, fill out all your profile info, and tap Next.
Step 2: Switch To A Business Account
- Open your Instagram profile. Tap the three-bar menu at the top right corner.
- Go to Settings and tap on Account.
- Tap on Switch account type
- Tap Business account and follow the screen instructions
Following are the 15 unique content ideas for each Instagram feature to guide your content-creating strategy in the right direction. You can thank us later. Let' roll out:
1. Ask Questions To Your Audience
Posting questions on your Instagram provides opportunities to let your audience share their views and ideas related to any topic. The insights that you can gather from there will help you to come up with better content.
If you ask the right question, you might even get new product ideas which your audience is looking for. Besides, the answers that you will get from your audience will help you structure a lot of new content.
2. Give Your Followers A Puzzle Break
More often than not, we are so busy with our work, life that we forget to pause and refresh or think about ourselves. You can help people to take a break from their busy schedules. Instead of posting your regular content, create and post a puzzle that makes your followers pause and work their minds.
Create puzzles that reflect the value of your brand by using related graphics and animations. Doing so, along with giving your audience a break from their busy life you will create ongoing engagement.
3. Post A Tutorial
As a brand, you want to post content that is engaging and creates value for you and your user. To achieve this, tutorials should be your go-to content. Instagram IGTV gives you an opportunity to post short and quick tutorials on any topic or topics that are related to your business.
For example, if you are business-related to food, you can share some of the recipes. This way, you will keep your audience engaged, and you will be able to post content that creates value.
4. Behind The Scenes
Posting behind the scene content is one of the most effective ways to humanize your brand. Show your followers what usually goes on in your workplace. By posting behind the scene content, you make your followers emotionally invest themselves in your brand. This creates a strong relationship between you and your followers. Show them the fun or exciting side of your office. Look around your workstation and think about what you can show off to your followers.
5. Product Teasers
Launching a service or a product? Want to post about it on Instagram? Rather than posting directly about the launch of the new product, post stories and pictures to drive interest. Try to build up anticipation by posting teaser videos, photos with question stickers.
You don’t have to create enigmatic content to build up the hype. Post polls and questions on Instagram stories to create engagement. Make your followers guess and award the first correct answers. You can collaborate with an influencer to talk about the new services or the product to build up the hype.
6. Display Brand Expertise
To display your brand as an expert in your niche you can share lessons on a topic, valuable tips, best practices, and many more. Sharing thought leadership content makes your followers look at your brand as a source of ideas and information. Making your followers look up to you in this way is excellent for building brand authenticity and creating engagement.
7. Get On With The Trend
Posting trending content, memes, and challenges is a great way to add the fun factor and relevance to your brand. However, you should not post posts related to every trend and meme.
You have to be careful about that. Avoid any such content that could harm your brand on the social platform. Look for a trending meme that you can blend with your brand and post. If you are creating memes yourself, make sure they are good ones. Otherwise, instead of posting memes on a funny subject, you might become a subject of fun.
8. Before And After Posts
To showcase the impact that your brand can create, sharing before and after posts are the best ways. You can show how your work benefits the clients and makes a change; this greatly helps in audience building and engagement.
If you have a product or you are a service provider, you can create a photo showing how your service or product has valued your customer. This will help you to build trust among your followers.
Also, you can create a post of your company’s logo, showing how it changed over time, or a photo of the old office and new office, or the number of employees over a period of time.
9. Use User-Generated Content
User-generated content is one of the most effective content that you can use for your brand. Surveys show that followers want to see user-generated content on the brand’s feed. Posting user-generated content shows that you are actively engaged with your community; this can earn your trust and give you opportunities for more UGC.
Before posting user-generated content, make sure it is well constructed and goes with your branding. You can get more user-generated content by letting your followers know what you want to see and providing them with a hashtag they can use while posting. You can later search for the hashtag and ask permission to share those posts on your profile.
10. Collaborate With Influencers
Through influencer marketing, your brand can gain some extra reliability and attention in a short period. It isn’t necessary to collaborate with influencers with millions of followers.
It might be better to collaborate with influencers with smaller followers. These influencers may have only a few thousand followers, but their audience trusts them in most cases. Also, they are more likely to work with small businesses or new brands, and that too at affordable charges.
11. Make Them Swipe With Carousel Posts
Carousel posts let you post or upload multiple images or videos into a single post. Users can swipe through the posts to see each post on the carousel.
Carousel gives several options for creating posts, such as showing the number of ways a product can be used or showing related products. Making sure each product is posted with its own product tag. You can create a photo essay by offering a number of pictures taken during an event, or showing a step-by-step tutorial on any topic.
12. Don’t Forget To Go Live
Going live on Instagram every now and then is one of the many ways that can help you to boost your Instagram engagement. It aids in your authenticity, and your followers and customers can engage with you in real-time.
During your live session, you can answer your customer’s questions, share behind-the-scenes content or even launch a new product. Moreover, you can even post the live video to your stories, thus providing you with additional content.
Make a prior announcement regarding the live session. If possible, add a countdown timer to your story post so that your followers don’t miss the session. For a great live session, make sure you have done your practice, give your audience some time to join in and place yourself in an area where lighting is good, and there’s no background noise.
13. Create Educational Reels
Instagram reels are 60 seconds long short videos. Like TikTok, Instagram reels comes with many editing tools that let you create intriguing and fun videos easily.
A Reel can have a number of video clips, stickers, captions, backgrounds, and more. Though reels are primarily used to create fun videos, you can also use reels to create short videos for your brand.
You can easily create educational reels to start with. For example, if you can develop reels showing how to use your product or the results of your service.
14. Branded Memes
We all know how engaging memes are. Memes are one content that gets shared and liked the most. So, letting go of the opportunity to use memes for your business won't be a good idea. You can create your own branded memes related to your industry, product, service, or business. Taking popular and trending memes and editing them to make them relatable to your brand is an effective way to create branded memes.
Here are a few tips for you to create memes that will help your business:
- Create memes that align with your brand's reputation, try to learn about your audience's preferences.
- Try to use relevant memes and incorporate a sense of humor.
15. Stickers For Businesses
Lately, Instagram has included several stickers that are intended to support small businesses. Stickers like Food Orders, Support Small businesses, DM Me, Challenge, etc., can be used effectively for your business.
The "Challenge" and "DM Me" can be used for any business; "Support Small Business" stickers can create a flash mob. "Food Orders" stickers make it very simple for food businesses to get direct customers from their customers. Moreover, these stickers also show that you care about your customers or followers.
Best Practices To Build Your Audience Through Instagram Content
To build your audience on Instagram, you need to adhere to certain best practices. Following are the best practices on business on Instagram. Consider these practices as a definitive guide to your amalgamating them with Instagram content ideas to boost your brand visibility and nurture leads. Let's roll down to it:
1. Define Your Goals
To leverage Instagram to its best, you have to understand what you are willing to build. Social media platforms act as tools in your marketing efforts, and for effective use of these tools, you require to align the usage of the device based on the goals you want to achieve.
Marketers use Instagram marketing for different purposes; you can think of what you are looking for, such as building an online presence for your business? Enriching brand visibility and awareness? Is your goal to get new leads or enable yourself as an industry leader, or are you planning to sell your products directly from the app?
You may also have several different outcomes. But you should know what outcome you are looking for from your Instagram strategy. The best way to clear your goals is to research your brand's current status, assess your marketing efforts, discuss with your team, assess the competitors, and plan a playbook.
Statusbrew can help you get the insights of all your social media profiles, reach, engagement on your content, along with your team performance. All you can leverage from a user-friendly unified dashboard. You can share the live reports with your non-Statusbrew user team members, which simplifies the process of targeting your Instagram marketing plan.
2. Assess Your Audience
When you plan your Instagram content, doing preliminary research is a good practice that helps figure out who you can be your ideal audience. Besides, when you strategize on how to market on Instagram, assess your target audience, their demography, age, gender, interest, locations, social behavior, etc.
As per data, the Insatgramamer are between 18 and 29 are most active. But it doesn't necessarily mean that you only should create content targeting this age group. Instead, drill down the audience data to define your target market to create Instagram content directly related to your audience.
Statusbrew's reposts lab offers more than 180+ metrics where you can gain audience insights at a minute level. Besides, you can create customizable reports with drag and drop widgets to make your audience research easier. Assessing the audience vital as it is This will also become critical when choosing targeting options for your Instagram ads.
3. Optimize Your Instagram Profile
Profile optimization is a crucial part of building your audience on Instagram. Your Indategam bio has to create the impression and have to be enticing enough to hook the visitors. In the 150 characters, you have to creatively make a brand personality and help people understand why they follow your brand's Instagram account.
To fit into that small space, you have to be creative enough. Besides, optimizing the profiles helps your audience to find you in the internet sphere. Add your website, contact info, and CTAs to your profile, along with your name and username. If you are searching for Instagram bio ideas, we have a massive list for you. Have a look:
Suggested Read: 300+ Instagram Bio Ideas: How To Write A Killer Instagram Bio
4. Establish Your Brand Style
Instagram is a visual storytelling platform. Hence, along with creating content, you should also focus on how the content will look in your profiles. Aesthetics content with color cohesiveness or influences buying decisions and brand recognition.
Hence, your Instagram content should be across your posts so that followers can recognize your content in their feeds. Focus on developing a consistent color scheme, look, and feel is a wise step.
An easy way to establish a brand style and consistency is through Statusbrew compose. It assists you in visualizing how your content will look on Instagram, and according to how you can work, it requires any modifications and changes.
Besides, the permission-based approval workflow on Statusbrew helps you review your content following a review here minutely. It ensures that no content goes out violating the brands' guidelines which can negatively impact the brand's
reputation.
5. Plan Your Captions
Like your content, captions are also essential to creating your brand voice. Instagram captions allow to use up to 2,200 characters long. You can use captions to share quick tips or for detailed storytelling.
Note that 125 characters appear in the first two lines in the news feed without tapping more. So share all crucial information of the post in the first two lines. While preparing content, follow a content repository and align with the post plan you captions before chance.
Suggested Read: 350 Best Instagram Captions For 2021
However, if you seek examples of long Instagram caption ideas, National Geographic is a great example to take inspiration from. Your Instagram captions should be relevant, informative, compelling, entertaining, and on-brand to draw the audience's attention.
6. Choose Hashtags Wisely
Instagram hashtags are a great way to boost content visibility and discoverability. Even though Instagram allows you to use 30 hashtags in a post, the recommended use is between five to nine hashtags per post.
Adding more hashtags in a post makes the content looks spammy and results in hashtag stuffing. Besides, avoid using irrelevant or repetitive hashtags. Select Instagram hashtags that are relevant to your content and which are specific to your niche.
Check out our complete guide on Instagram hashtags to an in-depth idea on this topic:
300+ Best Hashtags For Instagram In 2021
7. Post Content At Best Time
To get the most reach and impression, post your content at the best time. Based on your industry, the best posting time on Instagram varies.
You can extract the best time to post on Instagram for your business using Statusbrew. Statusbrew provides users a total breakdown of audience demographics, sentiments, and the best time to post depending on likes, followers activity, & comments.
It can help you strategize your Instagram marketing precisely, and you can post content based on your audience preferences. Also, apart from knowing the best time to post, you can schedule Instagram posts at those peak hours within a few clicks when your audience is most active. To learn more about the best time to post on Instagram, you can go through our detailed guide:
The Best Times To Post On Social Media In 2021
Pro Tip: Engage with your audience if you wish to boost engagement rate on Instagram. Posting good content is a great way to draw attention when you engage in a comment. It makes your content visible organically. Find out the content of your niche and spark conversation to boost engagement in your content as well.
Summing Up!!
The best way to propel your Instagram content strategy is to learn from experience. Besides, rather than getting locked into just one type of content format, be experimental!
You can check out Statusbrew Blogs to get more ideas. Also, leverage Statusbrew for impactful Instagram marketing. With Statusbrew, schedule posts and story and track performance. Explore Statusbrew today.
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