If you’re reading this, congratulations: You just made it to the advanced tips post about how to use Instagram for business. In this article, we pulled some of our tips on using Instagram Marketing for our clients in various industries.
If you’re ready, let’s dive right in
Instagram Marketing for Restaurants / Catering
In the restaurant business, your guests are your number one. For you tracking brand sentiment (with a web-based tool) is essential. This will help you keep an eye out for any new reviews from major review sites and use social listening by regularly monitoring social media comments from visitors. Not everyone will @tag you, especially when they have less positive feedback. Whenever someone mentions your restaurant on either Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, reply to them with a personalized message letting them know they matter to you.
Are there any particular foodie influencers who are posting about your restaurant? If so, reach out to them and see if you can share something with them to thank them for their visit or, even better, set up a collaboration that you both can benefit from.
Create ” evergreen ” posts with fresh content that will be exciting months down the road; your future self will thank you later. Everyone enjoys looking at mouth-watering foodporn, but we’ve all seen that before. Mix up your content by creating an animated infographic on some of the histories behind your dishes, offering recipes for home cooks who want to recreate the flavors on their own, or sharing a recipe with a personal story that touches people.
Instagram Marketing for Retail Shops
Update your bio and feed for better engagement. Keep in mind that Instagram is a very visually oriented platform, so keep your captions short and don’t post too many text-heavy images; they are not readable most of the time. Your fans will be more likely to follow through with liking or commenting on your posts when they look clean and are easy to read. Your Instagram feed is like a (vegan) burger, having an excellent looking burger (or feed) isn’t that important; it’s about the content and the flavor, but a juicy looking burger with all the toppings is more attractive, simply because it’s aesthetically pleasing to the eye.
UGC is essential for retail shops. User-generated content will provide others interested in your product with an authentic review. You can use web apps like Repost for Instagram or InstaRepost to make this process easier. Or what we prefer is to download photos and videos with online tools like Inflact and re-upload.
To help sell your product or service even faster, look into tools like Canva so you can create content in the correct sizes for a whole season and plan them in your calendar directly.
instagram marketing for e-Commerce businesses
Take the time necessary to create aesthetically pleasing content that will tell a compelling story on its own. When making posts, keep in mind that they should be sharable if you want to grow. If you have a powerfully emotional story to share about why your cause or product is so important, post it. If it’s sharable, people will find you. Do you have knowledge and expertise about your industry? Share it with your customers; it adds value to your account. Make sure to add a catalog and a shop to your Instagram page so people can easily purchase your products.
You could consider hosting an Instagram giveaway with prizes for people who share posts of your products. Remember that giveaways are only fun when they’re easy to enter. Put some thought into how you want people to submit entries (comments? likes? follows? Shares?), make sure it’s clear what they need to do to win and what your terms and conditions are. Finally, Instagram giveaways work best when they have substantial prizes. It’s an effective way to boost sales, yet mind that you need to keep engaging after the giveaway; otherwise, all those new followers will leave just as fast as they came.
STRATEGY, CREATION, PLANNING, MANAGING
It’s a time-consuming process to create original content over and over. When you plan out your Instagram strategy at least two weeks in advance (if not more), you get a better grip on what’s ahead of you. It makes it easier to keep the balance between your feed, stories, reels, and IGTV’s. It would help if you took enough time to write compelling copy, take pictures and videos that are high quality (and easy enough to edit!), and draft up captions that tell engaging stories that end with a CTA (call to action). Planning the post in when it’s ready gives a feeling of satisfaction, but mind that some posts still work better if done organically. Like other marketing types, having a well-rounded strategy is the key to driving traffic to your website; it starts with strategy and creation and ends with posting and community management.
Instagram is one of the most valuable assets in your business’s multimedia mix. Whether you’re focusing on food, retail, marketing, or anything else, Instagram has the potential to help expand your customer base and increase sales week after week. There are so many different businesses out there, so feel free to get creative when developing your Instagram strategy!
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out!