If you think Instagram marketing is only about growing your following, you’re dead wrong.
Sure, gaining a significant IG following is crucial, but if you want a fighting chance at growing your business through IG marketing, you have to do more—you need to engage your audience.
Engagement means having people share, comment, and like your posts and other actions—helping you build trust with potential customers.
Higher engagement rates translate to more audiences interacting with your brand. It can increase your chances of generating leads, driving conversions, and ultimately, sales.
While there is no shortcut to engaging your audience effectively, these five reliable methods can kick off your efforts to level up your Instagram marketing efforts to boost your engagement rates.
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Interact with your audience via Instagram Stories
One of the simplest and most practical ways to engage your audiences is to interact with them, helping you connect with them better.
Foster meaningful interactions with your audience using Instagram Stories.
For instance, you can leverage the best IG tools to automate your campaigns, run polls quizzes, or use the popular or top questions to ask on an Instagram Story.
The question sticker lets you have direct conversations with your followers, encouraging audience interactions and engagement.
Using the stickers for your stories can help humanize your brand, helping your audience put a face to your company. It can help nurture trust and, in turn, drive conversions and sales.
Schedule some of your IG Stories, such as when promoting events, launching new products, etc., to step up your engagement efforts.
Use social media marketing platform Vista Social to schedule your Instagram posts and Stories on days and times when your audience is most likely to engage.
The platform’s sophisticated and all-in-one solution also offers a Smart Publisher feature that can create and auto-publish your IG posts for you.
Vista Social’s robust yet affordable features can simplify your critical IG marketing tasks—from post scheduling to analytics—to boost your engagement.
Host giveaways and contests
Who doesn’t love free stuff? Certainly not the majority of Instagram users.
Use this to your advantage by running contests and giveaways to encourage audience engagement with your content and brand.
However, it’s crucial to be strategic about hosting contests. Avoid running giveaways for the sake of drawing your audience’s attention.
Be more intentional to engage your target audience and ultimately turn them into paying customers (and even loyal patrons and ambassadors of your brand).
See More: Ways Brands Can Engage Daily On Instagram For High Engagement And Traffic
Follow these quick tips to create irresistible giveaways on Instagram.
- Set a goal for your contest. Determine a specific purpose (or goals) to help you tailor your strategy and assess your contest’s success. Your goal can be growing your following, increasing your website traffic, and boosting sales (among others).
- Choose a prize that can help you meet your goals for the contest. Choose a product, experience, or service to giveaway as your prize. It should help support your efforts to achieve your contest goals. For instance, if you want to spread awareness about your product launch, giveaway the specific product you’re launching as the prize. You can also leverage your dependable customer engagement platform to gain insights about the products or items your target audience are most likely interested in for your giveaways and other promotions.
- Use hashtags. Include relevant hashtags to make your giveaway easily discoverable and get it in front of more audiences.
Create a unique and compelling campaign hashtag to help spread awareness about your giveaway and, in turn, your brand.
Post relatable content
One of the best ways to drive engagement on Instagram is to speak the language of the internet: Memes.
Memes often provide funny, entertaining, and relatable content, making them excellent posts to help you connect and engage with your audience.
Weave memes into your IG marketing efforts. You can even go as far as creating a strategy when you shape your content development approach on Instagram and other marketing channels.
Share relevant information via carousel posts
Sharing single, compelling in-feed videos, images, and other content is great for engaging IG users.
However, you can take this to another level by creating carousel posts to attract more engagements.
Leverage carousel posts to share photo dumps, before and after transformation pics and videos, content based on tips, and more.
A carousel post on IG allows you to share more information, details, and content than posts containing a single image, text, or video.
The example below shows an IG user sharing a carousel post on ten creative ways to use carousel posts.
Follow these tips to help you create carousel posts that drive engagement.
- Use an attention-grabbing or compelling first image, text, or video. Use an eye-catching first image or video to entice your audience to scroll through your carousel instead of scrolling past it.
- Share recipes, step-by-step guides, and quick tutorials. Post-bite-sized tutorials via carousels to provide relevant, interesting content that is easy to digest. Think of it as a slideshow’s more fun, interactive, and engaging cousin.
If you use robust user story software, you can get snippets of your product development process, for instance, and create a carousel post out of those.
It’s a great way to share what goes on behind the scenes, increasing your engagement opportunities.
Also, You Can Read Instagram Story Maker: Create Stunning Visuals for your Instagram Stories
Be strategic with your videos
Post videos that spark interest and encourage your audience to stop and take a look while helping you achieve your engagement and other IG marketing goals.
Below are some tips to help you nail your Instagram video for higher engagement.
- Make your videos searchable by including relevant hashtags.
- Provide high-quality videos whether your goal is to entertain, educate, start a conversation around a specific topic, etc.
- Follow the recommended video sizes and ratios. For instance, it’s best to use a 4:5 aspect ratio and 1080 x 1350p for Instagram Feed videos.
Creating compelling, high-quality Instagram videos doesn’t mean using advanced and expensive video creation gear and tools.
You can use affordable (and free) platforms and what you already have. You can even edit and slow down or speed up videos using your iPhone.
Supercharge your Instagram marketing
Instagram marketing doesn’t have to be rocket science. Learn from tried and true tips to supercharge your Instagram marketing initiatives to increase engagement rates and gain expected returns.
While driving significant engagement doesn’t happen overnight, the tips in this guide can point you in the direction of success.
Here are a few more topics that you shouldn’t miss:
8 Social Media Marketing Strategies To Grow Your Business
Digital Marketing is Simple: A Step by Step Guide
Capitalizing on Mobile Marketing as a Small Business
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