How to Do A Promotion on Instagram – Adapt to Current Realities

Daria Kosych

3 years ago

Instagram is no longer just a social network for sharing photo and video content. It influences one billion people monthly, making Instagram one of the best platforms for building your business. But if it were that simple! A huge competition is waiting for inexperienced business owners who don’t know what to start from and how to make their accounts bring profits. Hence, we offer you to learn how to do a promotion on Instagram and consider the best free and paid methods to succeed.

What to Wait From the Article

Free product/service development methods: business account creation, bio description, using quality content, adding hashtags, virtual face masks creation, lead magnet, live streams, stories, IGTV, reels, geotags, Tik Tok, interactive games, etc.
Paid services: targeted/bloggers’ advertising, participation in marathons, and giveaways.

Step #1 Create Business Account

To start a promotion on Instagram, you need to create a business account. However, do not be intimidated by this mode; it slightly differs from a regular Instagram account by useful additional functions and tools.

Thus, a business account is an advanced version of a profile that opens up new opportunities to brands, organizations, retailers, and service providers for the presentation of business, monitoring the performance of chosen strategies, customers flow, and managing budgets:

a detailed description of your services;
contact buttons(phone number, email, etc.);
specifying the field of your activity;
statistics on views, savings, subscriptions;
opportunity to advertise your offers.

F.e. for the local business, the opportunity to add an address and link to Google Maps will be helpful. In contrast, the chance to interact with advertising that becomes available to users of business accounts will be indispensable.

To switch from personal to a business account, please click on settings, then Switch to Professional Account, select category(personal blog/product/service/art/musician/shopping/health/beauty, etc.), add contact info, and enjoy new opportunities.

Step #2 Think of Effective Bio

A unique and creative bio isn’t enough. To catch users’ attention and make them read your posts/follow the link to the website, it’s essential to find the words able to impress, present your business and give a push to subscribe and become your client. Thus, it should include a laconic nickname, the fundamental concepts of your offer(avoid sentences or even short phrases), contact information, emojis, and your site URL. Please note the maximum length of a successful bio is 150 characters.

Besides, don’t forget about a quality profile image associated with your logo/service/product(its standard size is 110×110 px). You should give your audience a clear and memorable look, as they often search by the profile avatar.

Step #3 Plan Quality Content

Remember one essential rule – before promotion, consider what to promote as nothing will help you if the content is of poor quality. Just look at these eye-catching examples of presenting sales on social networks! Content on social media must present your brand, aims, and strengths. The less time you spend on its development, the fewer subscribers and sales you get. For a good content plan, please pay attention to the following tips:

define the type of your account, whether it’s a personal blog, presentation of the company, page for brand development, or an online store;
think about the structure of future content;
create main rubrics(on selling, educational, informational, and entertainment themes) and indicative topics for each rubric; thus, you’ll have a plan for every week, posts will be different and engage users more;
ask your audience what they prefer or analyze which posts attract them more and focus on them accordingly.

By practising and using different Instagram promotion guidelines, you’ll finally find the optimal strategy for maintaining an account and pleasing almost every subscriber.

Some Ideas for Posts

For sales: describe features/benefits of products/services, strengths, share announcements, clients’ reviews, compare your offers with competitors’ ones, answer users’ questions.
To entertain/provide valuable information: figure out and discuss main trends in your sphere, share the company’s news, mission, funny stories, motivate your subscribers.
For touching clients’ souls: consider the pain of the target audience, add some philosophical discussions, tell how you personally treat the product, share some tricks/tips that may help clients in life, be open to them, show how you spend time with your staff(parties, travelling for instance), and so on.
To familiarize with products/services: specify how to use it, create video guides or ask customers/bloggers to share their experience, f.e. if you sell handmade goods, provide brief information or video material of the process itself.

Step #4 Add Awesome and Original Visuals

Since Instagram is primarily about publishing and displaying visual content, you need to follow the style of your account. Think about brand colors, fonts, quality images, and videos. Engage visitors by aesthetics/bright visuals/pastel tones considering the preferences of your target audience. Here is an example of Ikea’s idea to attract users:

How to Do A Promotion on Instagram – Free Tools

Let’s find out how to keep users engaged and stimulate audience growth without spending money.

Stories

It’s one of the most productive Instagram promotion guidelines, so it’s essential to know how to use Instagram stories. Not to clog and disturb the design/aesthetics of your profile, you can use it for the following tasks:

simply add images/short videos(about 15 seconds)/even text;
communicate with followers/promote products/services;
get more traffic and engage potential clients;

Please note that the stories are valid only for 24 hours, so if a fragment contains helpful information or a call to action, it is worth adding them to Highlights. These are life stories under the bio in the profile header. They are usually used to save stories that contain essential information or quality visual content(f.e. images of products, details on the brand, prices, terms of delivery and payment, reviews from customers, etc.

Reels

It offers to post short videos. As it’s a new option on Instagram, those who use it know how to do a promotion on Instagram and boost their audience engagement. You should try it 100%!

IGTV

To provide a broader range of video content, in 2018, Instagram launched IGTV for videos from 15 seconds to 60 minutes. The record can be saved and added to your profile. The statistics section on IGTV is more exciting and informative. In addition to views, likes, and comments, it shows a graph of audience retention (you can see the percentage of users who completed watching a video or the point where they stopped watching) depending on a particular timeline.

Streams

An online broadcast is an effective way to communicate with your audience, boost trust, and customer flow. Before its organization, you need to think over the topic, structure, and presentation to avoid inconvenient questions from the audience.

Also, it’s beneficial to provide joint live broadcasts. Thus, you can get new subscribers(from the blogger you talk with). To succeed, it’s essential to:

choose the blog with a similar topic;
inform subscribers about the future stream and engage by presenting its key points.

Hashtags

A small but tangible addition to any post is hashtags. On Twitter, this method of searching and identifying information is used more actively than on Instagram. Still, our goal is to use all possible tools for promoting our account, especially since it is free. You can go to a free hashtag generator that can also bring some good results.

Why use hashtags?

users will find your post with its help;
create collections according to various topics; thus, clients will find what they are looking for and avoid wasting time on the information they aren’t interested in.

Please, remember that hashtags can be:

high(that millions of people use, like “love”, “happiness” for instance);
middle(related to a specific topic, like “travellingusa”);
low frequency(up to 10 thousand searches, these hashtags are rarely used but perfect for businesses, f.e. “homeservicesutah”, brand(f.e. “starbucks coffee”);
unique(you create them on your own to divide posts into particular rubrics, f.e. “fashiontips2021”).

How to Do a Promotion on Instagram with the Help of Hashtags?

Use various types of them to achieve better results – people will find your posts in the search or the feed. We recommend adding about ten hashtags(30 is maximum).

How to use them? Add to the text itself if it matches the post’s message/at the end of a post or in the comments section.

Please, follow some rules to succeed:

hashtags should reflect what is described on the picture or in the text;
it’ll be more difficult for users to notice your updates if you include lots of high-frequency hashtags, so try to add more middle and low-frequency ones;
don’t copy the same set of hashtags and add them to all your posts – its diversity will bring more followers;
it’s better to avoid hashtags for sharing likes (“follow4follow” or “likeforlike”, for instance) as it doesn’t attract potential clients.

Use Geotags

It can help you boost your reach significantly. After you add geotags, your post automatically appears in the collection of posts with the same tag. If it becomes widespread, it’ll get to the top of the feed and be viewed by thousands of people.

If you also have an online shop or any offline business, you can add your address to your bio or the post itself. Thus, you’ll get both online and offline customers.

Create Instagram Masks

It’s an excellent opportunity to attract new subscribers. It would be best if you created a unique and cool mask that most users want to use. It’s up to you whether to add filters, some funny phrases, or some effects. Just imagine what your target audience would like. If you want to know how to create a mask on Instagram, please follow the link.

Get Followers from Tik Tok

Tik Tok is a perfect platform for attracting new customers. Practice shows that one video can bring thousands of subscribers. If you stop the video in the most exciting moment, you can offer users to continue watching it on Instagram and get new traffic.

Think of a Lead Magnet

It works when you offer a precious product in exchange for an action – likes, subscription, reposts, etc. Also, you can share some tips, tutorials, or free guides/courses. Thus, everybody is pleased: you get subscribers, users get valuable information.

Engage Users with Interactive Games

To make your posts visible, it’s essential to increase users’ engagement rate. Nowadays, various games and interactives are popular: bloggers ask questions, set up polls, find differences in the images, send reactions/emojis, etc.

How to Do a Promotion on Instagram with Bots

Yes, bots, but not for fake subscribers, likes, and comments. These bots were created for the Telegram platform to simplify Instagram account management. Most of them are free but have advanced features with a paid subscription.

@Instaseve_bot – allows you to download photos and videos without losing quality;
@HashtagsGenBot – create hashtags for any topic;
@text4instabot – creating paragraphs and counting characters. Since Instagram has a limit of 2200 characters, the bot will help you stay within bounds;
@Getlikersbot – finding out the winner of giveaways by checking whether users put a “like” to a particular post.

Unlike bots for cheating, these bots do not violate the Instagram Terms of Use; therefore, they do not pose any threats to restrict or block your accounts.

Let’s Consider Paid Tools

Advertising

As we have already noticed, a business account provides opportunities to advertise and track your business promotion methods. To attract the most relevant and interested followers, you can select a post, story, or your profile in general, then click Create Promotions. The function is quite convenient and straightforward – you can choose the ad integration time and audience(gender, age, social status, or even a geographic location), depending on your goals and budget.

Also, you can create Instagram ads with the help of Facebook.

Advertising with Bloggers

This approach brings tangible reach and an increase in new subscribers, likes, and views. In this case, it is vital to choose the blogger with relevant content and good statistics. If you have a travel agency, an advertisement should be ordered from a travel blogger. Thus, it’ll look harmonious, and the reaction of subscribers will be positive.

Often brands who don’t know how to do a promotion on Instagram come across the same mistake – they think it’s enough to pay for the ad to any successful influencer. But it doesn’t work so. First, you should check the blogger’s average publication statistics and reviews of those who have already used their services. Also, it’s better to think whether you need an expensive ad from a blogger with thousands of subscribers or it’s enough to start from a usual blog with conscious followers. Second, it’s essential to create a straightforward task and point out what you want to get.

Tip: close your account during the ad period. Thus, users won’t have a chance and click on the Subscribe button if the ad works.

Giveaways and Marathons

For quick results, you can cooperate with other bloggers and launch giveaways or marathons. Even though you boost your traffic, you should note that such an approach may lead to subscribers who aren’t interested in your blog and leave your account after the prizes distribution. It’ll negatively impact your statistics and won’t satisfy Instagram algorithms.

How to do a promotion on Instagram and succeed?

avoid presenting winners with money or iPhones. Instead of that, offer your product;
introduce your business in the contest post;
during the competition, work on your content more to attract, engage and make users stay with you even after the end of a giveaway;
set up easy conditions for participation, like subscription, a few likes, or comments under a particular post so that it doesn’t require lots of time.

When the marathon ends, launch targeted ads to reach a balance between users who leave you and those who join your blog not to lower your reach and avoid penalties from algorithms.

Competitions on Bloggers’ Pages

This method is similar to the previous one. Still, it better suits business owners who don’t have lots of subscribers yet – you start a contest but on the page of a famous blogger who also subscribes to your account and tells his followers about your offer. So, it’s a win-win – you attract potential clients while a blogger improves reach and engagement rates.

How to Do A Promotion on Instagram – Afterwords

All in all, Instagram is a robust platform that provides everybody with incredible opportunities for business development. We’ve considered four steps to help you start a social media presence and pointed out free and paid Instagram promotion guidelines that work. Even though it’s challenging to stand out nowadays, you should try to make your project unique, support its strengths and define what tools suit your niche more.

Please, share your experience with us in the comments section, we’ll be pleased to know what strategies help you, maybe your tips will help others too!

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