Launching your brand on Instagram can be overwhelming. Attracting followers, achieving a strong presence, and surpassing competitors can be even more stressful. Read on to find proven tools and strategies that will help you in the task of becoming a success on Instagram.
A Quick Guide to Success on Instagram
You might be wondering where to even start. You have the idea, but how to begin influencing on Instagram? This article is divided up into five parts — five strategies that will surely help you in the process of launching your brand and making it stick. Attract followers, be recognized among competitors, and reach your goals with these five basic steps.
Setting Goals and Target Audiences
If you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter which road you take. Right? That’s why setting goals right off the bat and establishing a target audience is so important — you’ll know better which road to take.
One of the most important steps in achieving success for your brand is to set specific goals and establish a target audience. Your audience needs to be as narrow as possible in the beginning, as it will help you understand their behaviors and needs better and quicker. It’s also beneficial to establish a secondary audience — those who you also want to reach. Having a secondary audience will give more wiggle room when tracing your success. Also, remember that having realistic and attainable goals for your brand is key to cultivating & attracting an audience that enjoys your brand.
When making your goals, look at what you would like to obtain with your brand. Would you like more followers? More interaction and engagement with the followers you already have? You can choose goals such as engagement, brand sales, or even just brand awareness. If you have a specific goal, you will be more likely to create content that aligns with it, thus making your brand more consistent and appealing to your target audience.
To establish your target audience, you must first understand who you want to target with your brand. Ask yourself questions of who would benefit from your brand, be interested in it, or would gain value from it. You should decide the gender, age range, interests, hobbies, region of living, and income that you think your target audience would have.
Each piece of content you create should have your target audience and your goal in mind, this is how your brand will grow and provide value to your audience.
Creating a Style Guide
It’s important your brand’s goals, content, and visuals aren’t all over the place. A style guide will save you the embarrassment.
Following a specific and detailed style guide is crucial for a brand’s consistency, appeal, and success on IG. A style guide is a document that helps you plan how you would like your brand to be displayed visually.
Creating a stylebook for your brand is essential to cultivating a consistent and eye-appealing brand that is easily recognizable for your audience. However, this can be a daunting task, which is why we have created a free stylebook template for you to download here.
You must put extensive thought and research into your stylebook, though. It can make or break your brand’s presence and success on IG. Think carefully about each topic on your stylebook, keeping your brand’s message, purpose, and main goals in mind. Also, make sure it all revolves around your audience.
For example, when establishing a color pallet and a design feel, keep in mind that older
audiences prefer conservative colors and patterns, while younger audiences prefer
modern and creative designs.
Our template walks you through each step of creating a stylebook. A simple stylebook
includes your brand logo, branding colors, fonts, photography examples, and copy
styles.
Each one of these sections will allow you to see clearly how you would like to set up your
brand and attract your audience. It will also be a great reference as you create the
content for your brand’s Instagram. Relying on the information you have in your brand’s
stylebook will allow you to create content that is consistent with the look, style, voice,
and feel you have predetermined for your Instagram.
Using IG Features to Your Advantage
There are several tools to use on Instagram. Use them right, and they’ll do the heavy lifting for you.
Instagram can truly be a brand’s dream platform; there are so many features that can be utilized in ways that will push your branding and business above your competition. There are four main features on Instagram, and each should be branded similarly to stand out and create a sense of consistency and visual appeal. Other features are newsfeed posts, stories, highlights, and IGTV. Consistently branding each of them to your brand’s purpose, audience, and style guide will make a strong presence for yourself. You can find more in-depth information and details on the breakup of different Instagram features on Sprout Social.
News Feed Posts
One thing to be mindful of when posting visuals and captions to your newsfeed is the message you are conveying. Take time to think about your brand, then think of its main mission and purpose on Instagram. Do the photo and caption correlate with your message and help make your brand stronger? Are they enticing?
Curiosity provoking? Take time to brainstorm and get creative.
Next, you should be thinking about the visual aspect of the photo/graphic you are posting.
Does it coordinate well with previous photos’ color schemes and styles? Editing your photo can help you to maintain that consistency and establish an editing pattern that your audience can recognize.
Some sources that could be helpful for you in this aspect, include Adobe Lightroom CC (mobile app), Adobe Photoshop Express (mobile app), PicsArt (there’s an app version as well), VSCO, Canva, Snap Seed, or presets that can be purchased from other photographers. Whatever editing style you go for, make sure to make it your own!
Beforehand, establish guidelines you want to consistently use, regarding lighting, colors, style of shoot, etc.
Your audience will be able to recognize your brand if you stay consistent in your editing and your message.
Here’s a very helpful tutorial to give you some ideas on how to keep your newsfeed posts consistent.
Also, here’s a link to the Canva Designing page, where they’ll walk you through all the aspects of designing in a few simple tutorials. Take time to look over them, get inspiration and ideas, and learn more about how to design your posts with appeal, professionalism, and consistency.
Stories
Stories are a great tool to engage with your audience. One thing to remember when using Instagram Stories is to maintain your color scheme and font style. By sticking to your color scheme your viewers will, again, easily recognize who you are.
Something to be cognizant of is understanding what your audience likes to see. If you are consistently posting what your audience is interested in, you will obtain and maintain a loyal audience. Take some time to study your audience. Ask yourself: “what’s more appealing for the gender I’m targeting? And the age gap I’m aiming for?”
This is where you find the “Story” button on your IG page. The best way to learn all its functions is exploring. So, have fun!
Note how this sequence of stories is so consistent with each other. If you access Glow Recipe’s Instagram page, you’ll note the design and branding of their stories is actually very consistent with their overall style.
Highlights
Another option with Instagram Stories is to utilize the highlights. Highlight bubbles can be seen from your profile page and contain saved Instagram Stories. Each highlight bubble has a cover image that you should customize and portray even more brand consistency when your audience visits your profile.
Sticking to your color scheme, graphic/photo style, main brand message, and overall brand style can be a beneficial way to show potential followers the overall feel and message of your brand.
Some popular cover images could include icons about the story’s topic, a plain colored image that matches
your color story, or an image of you and an item that relates to the highlight’s topic.
IGTV
IGTV is a great new feature that Instagram allows you to use to bring more traffic to your brand. IGTV is a separate app, but you can link it straight to your IG account. As you upload your videos in the IGTV app, it will automatically link it into your Instagram account as well. IGTV is an essential feature that allows you to create long-form content in the form of videos. This is a great way to relay extensive content and create
engagement with your audience.
On the app, you will find videos usually ranging from 1 to 10 minutes. IGTV can be consistently branded by creating similar content in each video. You could create a regular series such as a vlog, a day in the life video, tutorials, or educating your audience on a new topic each week. IGTV allows you to upload a photo for each video, so a cohesive picture or graphic for each IGTV will allow your audience to instantly recognize when you have uploaded a new video.
Here’s a helpful tutorial on how to start using IGTV.
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Styling Your Content Consistently
Remember: consistency is key. Stay true to your style guide. Plan your posts ahead and accordingly, and make sure they all have a uniform feel while still calling viewers’ attention.
When planning the objective and message of your brand, it’s important to keep in mind the style you want your brand’s content to follow. Style consistency and creativity matter! More than just staying true to your brand’s style guide, stay true to your “content’s style guide.” It’s easy to deviate from the other.
For example: Do you want your posts to be more video-centered? Do you want your images to have the message on them (infographic), or do you prefer posting an image and writing a caption? Do you want your posts to focus on how-to’s, or reports about something, or promoting products/places? Do you want them to be thought-provoking? Or curiosity enticing? The sky is the limit, just make sure your content is not all over
the place.
Take time beforehand to plan your posts and the content on each. Plan which IG feature you’ll use when and why. It can also be quite effective to pick two or three different post-styles and use them on different days of the week. Keep in mind though, to use each style on the same day of the week each week. Take time also to thoroughly search through other brands to get an idea or two, and then expand and develop your own
style and its consistency.
For example: You can post a short video on Mondays and Thursdays. You can post a quote or an infographic on Tuesdays and Fridays. Then, you can create polls or thought-provoking content on your Stories on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Pick something completely different for Sunday and make it a “special Sunday post” thing.
The message, the purpose, and the objectives of your brand will actually determine the post-styles you’ll come up with and how you’ll use them.
Remember to be creative. Followers like what entices their curiosity and catches their eye. They like consistency; it brings a sense of familiarity and comfort to them. Most importantly, they like to always have new content available to entertain themselves, so remember to post often!
Also, make sure your post-style and content align with your style guide, brand purpose, and main objective. Then, let the creativity sink in.
It’s very helpful to look at what others are doing and how they are doing it to find some inspiration. You may start by researching a few famous brands and seeing how they create their content and the style they follow. Look for the creative ways those brands convey the messages and get their audience to engage.
Plan, Plan, Plan!
Posting on the Right Days, at the Right Times
You need your audience more than it needs you. Tailor your schedule around them and you’ll have much response and engagement. Be aware of your audience’s demographics and find out when they are most often online and ready to view your content.
Don’t Let it All Go to Waste
With all the work you’re putting into your brand’s Instagram presence to target your audience, you want to make sure you’re also tailoring your timing to them by posting when they are most active. Understanding your audience’s trends will get you the most bang for your buck with the posts you make.
Depending on the industry your brand or business is in, your audience will most likely have a different peak time than another. For example, optimal reach for a fashion brand will require a different post time than a technology brand.
Expert Voice has an entire webpage with more in-depth details on general high traffic times for Instagram. However, remember to narrow your research down and find the prime posting times for YOUR target audience.
The General Rule
With the help of Instagram Insights, you are able to better gauge your demographics and activity. However, there are many generally known “best” days and times to post on Instagram. Having this information on-hand can help you move more swiftly through the trial and error phase of finding those perfect posting times for your specific audience. Take time to thoroughly define your audience’s demographics and then search
their behavioral patterns on IG.
Insights: Instagram Insights is an analytics tool Instagram provides so you can track audience & follower traffic, demographics, and engagement. This is an extremely beneficial feature that helps you understand your audience flow, what content they enjoy seeing from your brand, what times they engage more, etc. To access Instagram Insights, you will first need to make sure that your account has been set to a business or
creator account. This can be done under the account section in your Instagram settings.
Find more detailed instructions on how to convert your account to business and how to find Instagram Insights here.
Once you are a business account, there will be an “Insights” option from your account home page. From this “Insights” tab, you will be able to see multiple options and information about your audience and the content you are creating. From the “Content” tab you can see how many people are viewing, liking, sharing, and commenting on your posted content. You can also see how many people you are reaching, as well as how
many people are finding you through your hashtag usage. You will also be able to see similar information on the stories that you post and any promotions you are running.
From the “Activity” tab, you will be able to see your reach and impressions each week, as well as how many actions have been taken on your account. You will also be able to see how many times your profile has been visited.
From the “Audience” tab you can see how many followers you currently have, how many people have unfollowed or followed you on any specific day, where your audience is located, your audience age range, and their gender. You are also able to see what day and time your followers are most active on Instagram.
By understanding how each of these topics impact your brand’s goals and objectives, as well as how the Insights work in general, you will be able to better understand our audience and in turn, create content tailored to their specific needs.
Good, Better, and Best
The overarching answer you might find across various online resources indicate that earlier days in the week and any time before 5 p.m. are better to post on Instagram. However, we now know we can get more specific for best posting times based on your brand’s niche. The media management platform, Sprout Social, gathered data from their data science team. The brand optimizing platform segmented various industries
and broke down the best post days and times specifically for Instagram. The focused industry areas were consumer goods and retail, media, education, nonprofit, and tech.
Now, You’ve Got it!
Now, reaching your objectives on Instagram should be simpler. These five strategies — establishing clear goals, creating a style guide, using IG features correctly, styling your content consistently, and posting at the right times— will allow you to climb the ladder to your Instagram success. Remember to put enough thought, time, and effort into applying each of these steps when launching your brand. Be faithful to your objectives, your audience, and your style guide.
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