4 Ways to Step Up Your Instagram Story Game as a Small Business

Instagram is surpassing other social media platforms regarding popularity. Recently there has been a shift in social media preferences. Photo-sharing applications made it possible for both new and established brands to market their products and services across the world. The trend is particularly common to a group that belongs to younger demographics. 85% of young people access social media to post something or view a pic or video almost every day.

You can achieve your revenue goals with the help of Instagram marketing

Previously, Omnicore gathered interesting and incredible statistics as to why brands should opt to engage themselves with Instagram followers. As of last September, the Instagram platform has had more than 800 million followers. According to Instagram, there are currently 25 million businesses on the site compared to July 2017, when they were 15 million businesses. Also, over 80% of Instagram users follow a business whereas 200 million Instagrammers visit a business profile on a daily basis.

How to pull from top brands on Instagram

1. Develop brand partnerships To get attention on Instagram like Nike, Chipotle, or Lego you need to partner with other brands that share your audience. For example, you can create a joint campaign that targets a social cause. Through the campaign, the audience will be attracted to know what you are selling. Most companies are establishing affiliate marketing partnerships, sponsoring partnerships, or value-added partnerships. Such approaches can involve celebrity influencers, but this can only be successful if it fits targeted demographics, strategies, and budgets. When working on collaborations, look for opportunities that might yield a win-win situation for all entities. 

Partnerships give you more opportunities to grow.

The primary purpose of the partnership should be geared to attract more customers who can benefit from all brands involved. Partnering creates an opportunity to pull resources together and achieve higher results compared to when a brand goes solo. Also, it gives a substantial financial muscle for partnering companies to compete with established brands like Nike, Chipotle, or Lego.

2. Demand affiliates and influencers to be transparent and authentic  If you are authentic and transparent with your followers, you will get off to a great start by attracting more attention. The affiliates and influencers must be transparent as they market your product/brand online. Primarily online business is grown and maintained by staying transparent and authentic. JVZooCEO Laura Casselman says that the importance of consumer education via Instagram can only be successful if the followers completely trust the influencer. 

Transparency equals authenticity.

3. Stand out with humor for the target audience Don’t be afraid to capture the hilarious moments that happen behind-the-scenes of your business! Your fans will love that you’re willing to share different raw moments on your Instagram Story from pictures to videos. It’ll show your followers another side of your business that will give them more to talk about.

4. Stand out with lifestyle shots to showcase products The pics or videos posted must stand out. Professionally taken photos or fun pics will lure more followers to know what your product is all about. For example, Nike on Instagram always provokes conversation about the brand thus helping the company achieve its core objective. Creativity while taking the pics or video is an important aspect because it makes the pic or video to stand out.

Lifestyle shoots are one of the best ways to showcase what you have to offer.

With many established brands out there, it is hard to stand out on Instagram. New brands must be more aggressive to reach more potential customers. The intention of posting a picture or a video on social media is not to gain views but to increase sales and your customer base. Even if it is hard, the more a product keeps on rotating or appearing on social media, the more it lures potential customers to buy it or try the service. In addition, with careful planning and targeted action, it is easy to connect with your audience on Instagram. Numerous new brands have found their niche on Instagram and they have seen great success.

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.