With Instagram being home to 1.47 billion monthly active users and its positioning as the fourth most used social media platform, it’s a no-brainer for marketers, advertisers, and businesses to focus on their Instagram marketing efforts.
One in every two people uses the platform to discover new brands. At the same time, about 44% of people use Instagram for shopping.
If you are an active Instagram user, chances are you’re already spending hours using the platform each month. In fact, the monthly average number stands at 11.2 hours.
With an average person spending 11.2 hours using Instagram, as a business owner or marketer, promoting your products or services on this platform could open up doors and opportunities untapped!
If you kickstart your efforts and spend months posting and interacting on Instagram, you may find out that your business profile isn’t gaining the level of engagement that other popular businesses are.
Data released from Hootsuite indicates that in 2021 the average business profile engagement rate on Instagram was 0.83%. If your engagement rate is lower than average, chances are not many of your Instagram followers navigate to your website from Instagram.
This means you could be potentially wasting thousands of dollars on Instagram marketing.
If that’s the case, you may find yourself wondering:
“Should I pause my Instagram marketing efforts?”
We’d suggest- NO!
If your business profile is subject to low engagement, maybe you’re not posting relevant content. Or perhaps you’re not following and adopting the latest trends – which can drive the biggest results.
To help you boost your engagement rate, we’ve put together four brilliant ideas we use to boost our client’s company’s engagement rates.
Let’s dive straight into them.
4 Brilliant Ideas You Can Use to Boost Your
Company’s Instagram Engagement
These are four ways we boost our client’s Instagram engagement.
- Understand your customers’ needs, pain points, and problems
- Post consistently
- Generate video content
- Host enticing giveaways from time-to-time
Understand Your Customer’s Needs, Pain Points, and Problems
“There’s only one winning strategy. It’s to carefully define your target market and put a superior offering in
front of your target audience.”
– Philip Kotler
Running a business without knowing your target audience is like driving a car with a blindfold on.
It’s dangerous.
Without knowing your target audience, you’ll never know their needs, pain points, and problems.
If you don’t discover what they need when they conduct a Google search, you’ll never be able to produce and post content that makes them take the desired action.
Suppose you run a leather bags store in Boise. In that case, you’d want to target people genuinely interested in leather products – people who are actively using hashtags like #leatherbags or #leathermessengerbag.
You can add your product(s) pictures or videos as Instagram posts, but these posts won’t get them moving.
Instead, you need to focus on their pain points, problems, and needs. Here are some they may have:
- I can’t find a durable bag
- The bags online aren’t stylish enough
- I’m looking for vegan leather
And if you are aware of these points, you can build Instagram content that promises to offer a solution to their problems.
But if you don’t know who your target audience is in the first place, then you’ll never be able to produce attention-catching posts that get your audience moving.
Post Consistently
We’re sure that you have heard that consistency is the key to success. And while most businesses are consistent across different areas, most companies have a hard time posting consistently on Instagram.
For example, let’s say you run a bakery in Boise offering delicious bread, cookies, cakes, and pastries.
You’ve asked one of your staff members to post daily on your bakery’s Instagram profile.
They do it for two days.
Maybe five or ten.
But then they had a hectic week with their kitchen manager out sick and unfulfilled orders piling up, so they never got around to posting.
Taking a break from posting may not seem like a big deal, but five days could turn into a month, and that month could turn into much longer. Before you know it, you’ve lost your motivation to post, and even worse- you’re losing engagement with your customers.
This is a problem most businesses encounter with social media and Instagram.
They kickstart their social media marketing efforts, enjoy it for a few days, but then stop posting completely – as naturally, they have other priorities.
Posting high-quality content that targets your audience’s needs, pain points, and problems is essential. And it’s equally important to be consistent with your efforts.
If you’re posting four days a week, you need to make sure you’re consistent week after week with this level of commitment.
The sweet spot is consistently five posts per week, but it depends on the industry you belong to and your budget. Since you’re just getting started, we’d advise you to start with at least three posts per week and then scale your efforts.
This will help you keep your feed fresh and help you catch your audience’s attention – which will result in higher engagement. When people see your posts consistently, they’ll think of your brand as credible and authoritative.
Focus on Video Content
Gone are the days when Instagram was just a photo-sharing platform. Now, you can add video posts, reels, stories, and much more.
In today’s digital world, Instagram is the hub for content creators – it’s the place where people enjoy consuming content. People want pictures and video forms of content.
- Instagram video posts receive twice the level of engagement that other posts do.
- 89% of video marketers have claimed that video marketing has helped them achieve a great ROI.
- 78% of people globally watch online videos every week. 55% do it every single day.
- Over 54% of consumers have reported that they would love nothing more than to see their favorite brands publishing more video content.
- Your viewers will retain over 95% of the information you share via video posts. But the number reduces to 10% for text.
Judging by the stats we’ve listed above, video is the most engaging form of content. You can share it in the form of reels, stories, or just directly post it on Instagram.
So, if you want to boost your company’s Instagram engagement, producing and posting video content is the way to go.
Host Enticing Giveaways from Time to Time
Instagram contests/giveaways are subject to 3.5 times the likes and 64 times the comments on average than regular posts.
As humans, we love free things.
One of the reasons why Netflix is a tech giant today and the most popular OTT platform is because it introduced the “One Month Free Trial” which was a game-changer.
If you host enticing giveaways with promising rewards, your audience would love nothing more than to participate in them.
You’ll be raising the stakes. And when you do this regularly, you’ll be subject to a higher level of engagement – with your audience tuning in to your posts on a regular basis.
Conclusion
And while these ideas are really basic, the first step is to get things in motion. Some other ways to increase user engagement are choosing the right hashtags, focusing on Instagram reels, partnering with micro-influencers, and more.
To achieve the best possible results, it’s crucial to build a fool-proof Instagram marketing strategy. We’re here to help.
Our strategic social media marketing experts have helped dozens of businesses achieve the pinnacle of success and build a solid social media marketing presence. If you think your efforts are lagging, allow the #1 social media marketing agency in Idaho to help you out.
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