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Especially a staple in the fashion and beauty industry, Instagram today, is the place of business and brand visibility. Instagram’s photo-based style and the numerous updates lately have made this platform a hotbed for brand promotion, collaborations, and even sales. Find out how to outperform your Instagram game this year!

Know Thyself

Your profile picture, as a business, should be your logo that communicates about your brand to the audience at all times. People must be able to identify your brand when visiting your Instagram profile, other social platform or a physical billboard in an instant, which increases their chance of remembering you.

Set your Instagram name as your business name, including a keyword in your business name such as “Sam’s Boutique” instead of simply “Sam’s will help people find your profile through Google and other search engines and also understand who you are at a glance.

Optimize your Instagram bio, which is the brief lines of text under your profile picture, name, and category, to quickly explain to visitors who you are and what you do. This is where you can show your brand’s personality, and also including some keywords can work great too.

Link any branded hashtag of yours in your bio. A unique branded hashtag help people view all the posts in this hashtag. Also push a call-to-action(asking visitors to do something/take action) to initiate a visitor response.

If your account is a personal one, make the switch to a business account, so that you can take advantage of many advanced features. Go to settings (on your profile), tap on “account,” and you can easily upgrade to a business account.

This will allow/prompt you to choose a category to best describe your business after which you can list your email, phone number, and address and then you can start running your paid campaigns with ease.

A brand image is what your customers and potential ones think of you. It’s important to have a lasting brand image that is consistent across all platforms to increase your brand awareness on the whole.

The first step is to choose an Instagram theme and a colour scheme. Make sure that your logo and profile picture match the colour scheme in the posts to adhere to the brand image. The easiest way to do this is to make use of filters and editing to achieve the perfect theme throughout your photos. Presets and tools like Lightroom can also help achieve this goal.

Highlights are genius

Stories are huge on Instagram right now but they only last a day. Highlights lets you capture Instagram stories into highlights where visitors will be able to see your stories even after the 24-hour periods that stories last. You can sort highlights into categories to better help user viewing.

Mix of Content

Product shots on Instagram business profile usually follow some common styles like images of the details of a product or of a model holding/adorning it and flatlays, where the products are aesthetically laid on a flat background). You can also use creative posts and non-product shows that talk about the product without showing it directly. Mix photos, videos, GIF content and also IGTV videos.

Push User-Generated Content

Rather than keeping to original content, curated user-generated content is a top trending tactic used by brands on Instagram. UGC is images taken by your customers that you can repost and share on your platform. Elevate it with a branded hashtag and promote it, so that potential customers see a relatable face, further vouching for the authenticity of the brand.

Informative Content Works

Help your Instagram following learn something new about your product, something relevant in the world or anything educational related to your brand. Interesting captions and images can make your page look more interesting than completely promoting your products.

Employee In Frame

People love to see who really puts the work in to make their products. Shooting behind-the-scenes pictures or interviews with staff members boosts trust and transparency of your brand. Photos of faces work great on Instagram if appended by a splendid caption. Talk about some things that make him/her unique and fun to further amp up the post.

Tweak those IG Stories

Instagram is loaded with features to make posts interesting and even more interactive. Brands have been keenly shifting from posts to stories to step up their presence on social media.

The “swipe-up” feature on Instagram stories is a fast and convenient way for your followers to purchase or learn more about products on your website. It has worked great in getting more web traffic and sales.

Live videos are especially popular with 80 percent of users watching live to reading blog post, and 82 percent preferred live videos to social media posts. Live videos work best to announce a new product or show the behind-the-scenes at the office.

Polls are also trending and help know the opinion and preferences of your customers before any launch. It also serves as an excellent way to get more engagement and helping your customers feel like friends. It, therefore, boosts the feel-good appeal of the brand.

Chat stickers and quizzes are also hugely popular with influencers resorting to them when they run out of content. By this sticker, you can also create a group DM chat which is a great tool for small local businesses.

Are you on the lookout for digital marketing solutions that go beyond to make your brand look impressive? Get in touch with us at OnPageOne today!