With more than 1 billion monthly active users, Instagram is the priority of many brands in their social media marketing. Despite the simplicity of using it, many marketers are not successful in their marketing attempts on Instagram. In fact, there is a difference between posting like a common user and leveraging it for brand awareness, lead generation, and building sales funnel.
In this article, we are going to summarize several important mistakes you need to avoid in your marketing via Instagram.
Don’t embark on Instagram marketing without a strategy
You need to define clear goals in detail and categorize them if you want to be successful in your marketing. Without having certain goals you will not able to devise certain plans to achieve your objectives and subsequently, your attempts and investment will not benefit you.
Moreover, without objectives, you cannot measure your performance on social media. So, your strengths and weaknesses cannot be exactly determined. You need to list some certain, achievable goals which can be measured and analyzed regularly.
For example, a certain number of followers, engagement rate, shares, etc. which you have to reach within a specific period. Of course, a complete strategy is much more complex and you need more study in this regard.
Don’t start posting without defining your target audience
Many marketers do not pay attention to the fact that different kinds of audiences have different characteristics and therefore need different kinds of content.
Identifying the target audience is of paramount importance for every business regardless of the type or size. In fact, you have to prioritize your content strategy on Instagram according to your most probable customers.
For example, potential customers of a fast-food industry are considerably different from consumers of a vegetarian brand. So, the marketers of these two businesses must target their audience accordingly.
Don’t post boring content
Content generation is the most critical task of every marketing campaign. You cannot expect your target audience to keep following your account just for some mediocre pictures or videos.
If you want to build sales funnel via Instagram, you need to out-compete countless profiles that are constantly posting and engaging on Instagram. You have to generate and post compelling content along with creative hashtags to make your account go viral.
Remember to leverage the power of Stories on Instagram including Swipe-Up links to attract users and redirect them to your website.
Moreover, Live on Instagram has a mesmerizing effect on building customer loyalty and make them trust in your brand.
Don’t postpone the engagement
Even an informative, high-quality content cannot generate enough leads if you do not engage well with your audience at a good time.
It is highly recommended to engage under your posts immediately after posting. Actually, if you have a reasonable posting schedule, you can expect the highest amount of engagement within a few hours after you post. This is the best time you can build a strong relationship with your audience and make them feel they are part of your story.
Engaging at a personal level and responding to questions friendly can also work miracles.
Don’t ignore niche relevant influencers
More than 80 percent of marketers believe that influencer marketing is the most effective means of building brand awareness. It is anticipated that brands will spend more around 10 billion dollars on influencer campaigns in 2020.
Accordingly, you need to think of finding suitable influencers and collaborate with them as your brand advocate. Based on Social Tradia, many users on Instagram want to be an influencer to earn money, so you need to be careful in finding a trustworthy and niche relevant influencer.
Don’t continue your strategy without analytics
One of the most detrimental mistakes of many marketers is keeping up with a solid strategy without analyzing its performance.
If you want to remain in the market, you need to constantly analyze your performance and optimize your activities accordingly.
You need to consider all the KPIs and see how each of them is performing in your Instagram marketing.
To see analytics for a post on Instagram, you can go to the post and tap View Insights in the bottom-left corner.
Also, Google Analytics can provide you with useful analytics data to be able to perform better in the next campaign.