5 Brands With an Engaging Instagram Presence

With over 1 billion active users and counting, Instagram gives marketing teams the unique opportunity to reach a vast number of highly-engaged users for pennies-on-the-dollar. With the overall usage of Instagram doubling over the last two years, the importance of this unique social media platform will only increase.

Instagram makes it possible for brands to easily engage with customers.

Yet, for whatever reason, many brands fail to capitalize on Instagram’s nearly limitless marketing potential. Instead of working to curate meaningful content and engage their loyal fanbases, many brands simply opt to post bland marketing materials that are better suited for static mediums such as magazines. 

Ranging from Chipotle to BarkBox, companies have mastered the art of careful content curation. They strive to create content that is both engaging and meaningful to their core customers. It is our hope that a quick analysis of these star-players will help inspire your Instagram marketing campaigns. 

Brand #1: Lego

Believe it or not, this timeless toymaker has managed to develop one of the most effective marketing campaigns on Instagram. Their posts accurately capture the whimsical and imaginative nature of their products and have created a feed of quality content. Traditional products are featured in tandem with their STEM-based line of toys, which helps to further communicate Lego’s natural fit throughout all aspects of childhood. In short, their content is relatable yet modern, serving to increase the brand’s notoriety while simultaneously driving high levels of user engagement with their 3.2 million followers. 

Lego’s Instagram is a hit with its customers.

Brand #2: Chipotle

Simply saying that Chipotle has developed an engaging social media presence doesn’t do their Instagram justice. This iconic brand developed a feed that organically markets their delicious offerings while still paying homage to their indie roots. Quality photos are consistently combined with witty captions, making for an enjoyable and engaging social media experience for each and every one of Chipotle’s fans. 

Brand #3: GoPro

GoPro’s versatile cameras have transformed how content creators capture memorable moments ranging from the extreme to the mundane. GoPro is well aware of this fact and emphasizes the feedback loop between adventure, social media, and the content created by their cameras throughout their Instagram feed. This unique strategy not only drives an extremely high level of engagement between GoPro and their 14+ million followers, but it also manages to present the company as a lifestyle brand—which is an extremely dynamic marketing approach for a company once viewed as a Silicon Valley tech darling. 

GoPro showcases the capabilities of its products on Instagram.

Brand #4: BarkBox

A quick scroll through BarkBox’s Instagram feed will show you dozens of adorable dogs in almost every imaginable situation. This laugh-out-loud content has aided BarkBox in developing their social media brand, as reflected by their 1.4 million Instagram followers. The genius of this approach is the combination of enjoyable content and brand promotion. While there are dozens of accounts that post funny dog-based content, BarkBox is the only place you can go to find great content and enticing promotions. Better yet, this approach makes their content feel more like a meme and less like marketing—which in turn allows social networking to naturally run its course. 

Brand #5: Oreo

The Instagram feed of Oreo is full of truly enjoyable content, which naturally drives some level of engagement with fans. However, the secret of Oreo’s marketing lies in the fact that they take care to place their products at the heart of every single Instagram post, all while managing to do so in a genuinely fun and engaging manner. Entertaining copy and captions combine with vibrant images, videos, and animations to accurately reflect the fun-loving aura that surrounds their product offerings. 

Oreo’s fan following is dedicated thanks to its classic design and flavors.

As you see, there are numerous different ways to build an engaging presence on Instagram. Whether it be for your personal brand, or for that of your company, we strongly suggest using the brands above as a guide when working to develop your own unique Instagram marketing strategy. 

Improve Your Content Marketing to Get Better Results

No matter what level of content marketing you do, we’re here to help you up your results.

Achieve your revenue goals with content marketing.

Content marketing should always be done to create value for customers and potential customers. This value can be shared in the form of blog posts, instructional videos, infographics, webinars, and more. You’re probably already producing at least one of the different forms of content listed above. Here are a handful of ways to improve your content marketing to get better results:

Create a sustainable schedule. Have you had really productive stretches when you produced a lot of blog posts for three months then stopped for six months? This is because you’re not focused on sustainable marketing. If you only have time and resources to write a blog post once a week then write a blog post once a week. Don’t try to write three articles a week. The same goes for infographics, videos, and other forms of content. You’ll be burnt out and won’t be able to be consistent when it comes to sustainability.

Focus on sustainable marketing.

Use social media schedulers. You can save yourself time and be more efficient thanks to the availability of social media schedulers. After your content has been published on your website, schedule times for your content to be shared across the various social platforms. You can schedule your posts ahead of time so you don’t have to manually share the articles.

Review your content before you share. It never hurts to have a second pair of eyes look over what you’re going to share with your followers. Hiring an editor in-house or outsourcing to a freelance editor is better than never checking your work. By reviewing your content, you can make sure that you’re providing value in an accurate manner that you can be proud of.

Track the data. Are you paying attention to what types of content is actually getting traffic to your website? It’s important to know which posts perform the best. Pay attention to how well your how-to articles do compared to more factual content that you produce. Look at the data to determine when you should publish your posts.

Know which posts are your best performing by looking at the data.

Cut out what ever isn’t working. Remember to always give different types of content an actual chance before saying it doesn’t work. There are business owners who have given up on sharing photos on Instagram after only posting two times. There are people who say that videos are ineffective form of marketing after having a video that bombed on YouTube. With that being said, don’t be afraid to cut out what isn’t working. If your ideal customer does not engage on Instagram then focus on the platforms where your they are engaged. If your ideal customer consumes significantly more video content than written content, shift your focus to video content and don’t put so much weight on blog posts.

4 SEO tricks you need to know for your business

Having a good search engine optimization plan is an important aspect of any online marketing strategy. As a business owner, it is important that you make your website visible enough for search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. These search engines have billions of daily visits. Having a good SEO will ensure that you easily attract and retain visitors. 

Google is the go-to search engine for people around the world.

However, these search engines are constantly updating their algorithms. This makes it difficult for businesses without a strong SEO strategy to retain the top position on Google and other search engines. This article is written to show you 4 SEO tricks that you can apply right now.

1. Make your website faster: According to Neil Patel, four out of every ten visitors will leave your website if it takes more than four seconds to load and 80% will not return. The whole point of doing SEO is to attract and retain clients. If you are scaring them away before they check your content, you are not doing your business much good. To further impress the importance of site speed, Google included site speed as one of the most important site ranking criteria. 

There are a few factors that contribute to site speed. One of the biggest factors is the size of your images. If your images are compressed, it will reduce the size of your pages by up to 40%. As a result, your website will load faster. Apart from optimizing your images, here are a few other things to consider:

a.    Reduce plugins. Identify plugins that are not useful for your website and deactivate them. The beauty of running your website on WordPress is that you can install several plugins. However, too many plugins may slow down your website. If you are not running an e-commerce store, you do not need a timer or any of the other urgency plugins. 

b.     Review page elements. Review all the elements on all your site to ensure that only the necessary elements are on each page. Trim your website pages to the essentials widgets by decluttering your sidebar. When it comes to site speed, minimalism is the way to go.

c.     Enable browsing cache. Browsing cache stores data in a temporary storage. This helps returning visitors access site pages that they have visited before faster. 

What are you doing to increase the speed of your website?

2. Link to relevant websites: The future is shared. If you want to boost your sites SEO, you have to link your content to relevant authority websites. Linking to outside content will take people off our website. However according to top SEO expert, Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz, when you link to other websites, especially authority websites, it makes your website more valuable and trustworthy. Trust is critical to your website growth. 

3.    Improve traffic and engagement metrics. When it comes to SEO, engagement is measured by the amount of time that visitors spend on your website. It is one of the strongest metrics that Google uses in ranking a website. The more visitors spend time on your website, the more they will enjoy and engage with your content. Typically, the amount of time spent by visitors on your website will determine your organic ranking placement. When visitors spend a long-time on your website and there is a low bounce rate, it suggests to Google that people are enjoying your content. And since Google wants to supply users with valuable content, they are more likely to rank your website higher. To improve your site traffic and engagement metrics, here are a few things to bear in mind:

Always track metrics to know what’s working and what isn’t.

a.    Use relevant images. When you use relevant, compelling, and quality images on your website, you keep the audience engaged. The cliché, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” should actually say, “a good and relevant picture is worth a thousand dollars in SEO.”

b.     Create easy to read content. Your content cannot just be informative—it has to be entertaining. It does not mean you have to crack jokes or use pictures of Seinfeld in your posts. You have to create content that is easy to read. Mix short sentences with long sentences. You should break your content into paragraphs and do not forget to use a lot of white spaces in between your posts. Make your content easy to scan. 

c.      Provide value in your content. A good SEO strategy is to provide value throughout your content. Most importantly, provide value at the beginning of your content. This will keep viewers glued to the blog. You can create value by writing content that answers your followers’ questions.

4. Focus on user experience. Write for humans, not Google. This is called SEO copywriting. Instead of stuffing your content with keywords, you should focus on providing useful and engaging content. When you focus more on how you can help people engage with your brand and services, you will be automating your SEO. The goal of SEO is to reach more people who have wallets and are interested in the solutions you offer. Instead of writing short-tail keywords for search engines, write long-tail keywords for humans. 

Always write for humans. Not for Google or Bing.

Real-life examples of companies applying SEO in their marketing

1. If you search for the keyword, “fitness company,” the first website on the Google search results belong to Fitco. Fitco integrates the keyword, “fitness company” in its website description. Fitco is actually an abbreviation of a “fitness company.” What really sets Fitco apart is the site speed which is less than four seconds. With a blog that actively focuses on providing comprehensive content and compelling images on fitness, Fitco rises to the top of Google ranking for “fitness company.”

2. Famous Footwear does a great job including keywords for their industry. As an e-commerce store for shoes, Famous Footwear consistently uses high quality and highly compelling images of Nike, Adidas, Roxy, and Converse footwear. The website is designed to ease the user’s navigation. 

3.  Time Doctor does a great job including quality backlinks to other authority websites. As a top website in time management, Time Doctor consistently publishes tips on productivity, outsourcing, and other articles that include long-tail keywords.

4. Nonstop Signs & Printing focuses on using long-tail keywords on their popular pages. By proving content that offers value to the users, they improve their search engine ranking. In addition to using long-tail keywords, the site is fast and visually appealing. 

Utilizing SEO in your online business marketing strategy does not have to be frustrating. If you begin to apply these SEO strategies, you will begin to experience massive growth in your site engagement traffic, search engine ranking, and ultimately, a bigger email list.