In this article, I give you five advanced Instagram marketing tips to grow your Instagram and to grow your business.
Instagram is a huge opportunity, both from an advertising perspective and an organic one. At Yatter, we specialise in Instagram ads (via Facebook) but in this article we’ll be discussing organic tips.
1. Change your name on Instagram
Most people typically use their actual name but what we want to do is change that name to something that people are going to be searching for, like marketing tips or bridal dress shop for example.
There are two reasons to do this.
First of all, that piece of real estate on your profile is in bold and it’s the first thing people see. So rather than looking at your profile and just seeing your name, they’ll see immediately what they’re going to get from following your account on Instagram.
Your Instagram profile is really a sales page… it’s there to either get somebody to follow you, message you or get someone to click the link in your bio. So we want to use every part of that profile and the name is the best and biggest bit because it’s bold.
The second reason we want to do it comes down to search. If our ‘name’ is digital marketing tips when someone goes onto Instagram and types in digital marketing tips, we’re more likely to come up number one.
On Instagram we’re always trying to find new ways to get reach, to get found. That’s why we use hashtags. If we have our keywords in that name, we’re more likely to be found when somebody types in those search terms.
2. Use the highlight section to get a business result
Use the highlight section to drive people to take that action or to follow you.
A lot of business owners include a specific conference they went to and there’ll be pictures from the conference. Or they might have something like ‘the weekend with my kids’ or ‘my holiday to Bali’.
Don’t get me wrong. These are highlights for you but they’re not there to get a business result, whether that’s somebody following us, clicking the link in our bio… whatever it may be for you.
So what could you put in those highlights that would actually be of value to your audience?
For example, in my highlights, I’ve shared some of the results people have had from my program and some testimonials and case studies. This way, when someone comes onto my profile, they read that I’m a Facebook ads guy, and then I show them the results, so they’re much more likely to take me seriously. It shows authority, and they’re much more likely to think, “Oh, maybe I can get those results.”
3. Use Instagram Reels
What I’ve found when I’m posting videos on Instagram is that you get a far better reach when you post Reels.
So, here’s a little tip for you. If you have a 55 second video, you’re not able to put that onto Instagram TV with a preview to your feed. It has to be 60 seconds or more.
So what to do is just edit five more seconds into that video, even if it’s just a blank screen. This allows you to post it to Instagram TV which then allows you to post it as a preview into your feed. This way you get much more reach and way more views because Instagram TV is a relatively new feature for Instagram and so they over-index it in the platform so you’re more likely to get people watching.
4. The $1.80 tactic
The fourth of our Instagram marketing tips came from Gary Vaynerchuk and it’s basically going and searching relevant hashtags relating to your niche or your industry. You then find all the top pictures and leave your ‘two cents’ by adding a comment or dropping a DM.
For example, you might want to go and look at the hashtag from a conference that you know your audience is at. For me, that might be something like Social Media Marketing World. So I go to the hashtag and I look at all the pictures that people have posted from the conference and I simply go onto the picture and leave a comment. That starts a conversation between you and that person who you know is in your audience because they’ve used that specific hashtag.
This is an outbound method which takes a lot of time and effort but because you’re taking that time and effort, people are always taken aback and are then very likely to go and look at your profile. From there they might well follow you.
5. Use line breaks and paragraphs in captions
If you’ve tried to write out a long caption on Instagram you’ll probably know that you’re not able to create different paragraphs just using the return key.
What happens is when you post it, it just puts it into one big paragraph.
But there’s this really cool tool which allows you to just copy and paste your text in and it then creates the line breaks for you. You copy and paste that back into Instagram and boom! You’ve got a really nice, well-written caption that will capture people’s attention. It’ll take up more real estate on the feed which means people will pay more attention to it. And it generally just looks and feels good.
It reads like a proper post on Facebook or LinkedIn or a blog post, making it easier to read… and if people are spending more time reading it and interacting with it then Instagram are going to share that with more people.
So there are my five advanced Instagram marketing tips. If you utilise you’re gonna get more reach, more followers, and hopefully more people into your funnel so your business will grow!
If you’re looking for expert help with your Instagram and Instagram advertising, get started here.
