I know what you’re thinking: “How could a social media platform filled of hilarious cat videos, posts from influencers, and photographs of food help you get more consumers and make more sales?” I’m going to answer that question for you: it couldn’t.
You won’t believe it, but Instagram is about a lot more than just posting photographs and videos that are entertaining to look at.
10 Tips For Promoting Your Local Business On Instagram
It is also gradually becoming a marketplace, with 70 percent of customers turning on Instagram for their next purchase. This number is expected to continue to rise in the coming years. And fifty percent of respondents said that seeing advertisements for a brand makes them more interested in that brand.
Take into consideration the fact that there are currently 1.13 billion individuals utilising the site, and that number is growing daily. That’s a significant number of prospective buyers, which is why there are over 200 million businesses using Instagram.
But if you want to become popular on Instagram, you need to do more than just create an account and post pictures of your products. Building a fan base for your neighbourhood enterprise can be likened to an art form. And you’ve come to the correct place to find out how to do it.
You are going to learn 11 methods that you can use on Instagram to increase the number of people you reach, boost engagement, market your local business, and make sales.
1. Participate, Participate, Participate
As is the case with every other social media network, Instagram’s primary function is to serve as a community.
And in the same way that your company is an important component of the community in which it is located, you also want to demonstrate that you are a respectable and useful member of the Instagram community.
This will assist you in gaining followers who are eager to participate in the stuff that you post.
However, simply publishing amazing photos or videos is not enough.
You need to build relationships with other brands and influencers on Instagram—even brands that are direct competitors—and participate in the conversations that they are initiating in order to acquire a good reputation within the Instagram community. Engage with the stuff that they’re making and talk to other people who use Instagram.
You must invest in engagement to make engagement.
And when your followers start a discussion in the comment section of one of your posts, you should participate actively in the dialogue and answer your followers’ questions, worries, compliments, and other feelings.
This is also a wonderful opportunity to address any potential unpleasant experiences, get out in advance of any unfavourable media, and demonstrate to your followers that you value their thoughts and take them into consideration.
2. Make your Instagram community stronger by reposting local content from your feed.
By routinely reposting content that is produced by your local followers, other businesses in your region, and local celebrities, you may improve the reputation of your company both on Instagram and in the community in which it operates.
Not only will the content creator feel fantastic about having their work featured by your company, but other followers will also take notice of the fact that their work has been published.
They may mention your “shout out” on their Instagram page, which would enable you to connect with the individuals who follow them as well as even more people in your immediate neighbourhood. Win, win!
Sharing content that was produced by real individuals makes your brand seem more approachable and human when compared to its competitors.
After enough sales have been made, your organisation will start to feel less like a corporation and more like a kind and welcoming neighbour.
This tactic will not only help you build a stronger reputation in the community, but it will also save you a significant amount of time in the process of developing original and distinctive material.
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Simply ensure that you ask the individual beforehand and tag their Instagram account in your post.
3. Preserve a Brand Identity That Is Consistent With Itself
The Instagram account you use for your company is only one additional facet of your brand.
Even though Instagram is a distinct platform that can (and should be used to) achieve different goals from other touchpoints, including your other social media accounts, you still need to maintain a sense of consistency across all platforms, particularly in terms of the tone and personality that your brand has established for itself.
Many of your clients are followers of your brand across a number of these various media if not all of them.
Customers are more likely to become perplexed if the persona you present on Instagram is inconsistent with the one they find on your company website, Facebook page, or the staff that work in your physical stores.
This indicates that your interactions with customers on Instagram and the tone you establish in the captions of your photos need to be congruent with the experience of actually going to your place of business in person.
On the other hand, you run the risk of having clients go in expecting the happy and upbeat business they encountered on Instagram, only to be underwhelmed when they arrive.
This causes an interruption in the consumer’s journey and has the potential to completely disenchant the customer.
4. Avoid Blanket Posting
Even if the tone and persona that are behind your postings need to remain constant across multiple platforms, having too much of the same tone and persona might be harmful.
You must carefully navigate the space between remaining consistent and posting unique content in order to avoid blanket posting, which refers to using the exact same message and content across a variety of social media platforms. This requires careful navigation of the space between remaining consistent and posting unique content.
When you post in bulk, you run the risk of clients who follow you across numerous social media channels seeing the exact same message more than once. This is known as the “risk of blanket posting.”
After the initial experience, it will no longer be engaging and will instead become disruptive. Keep in mind that each channel has its own personality and should be dealt with accordingly.
Having said that, there are situations in which it is appropriate to make a post that is applicable to everyone, such as when your company is organising a community event or introducing new items and you want as many people as possible to be aware of the news/event/product(s) you have to share.
Despite this, you should still make certain that you are engaging in responsible cross-promotion.
When you cross-promote responsibly, you are not simply duplicating your efforts from one platform to the next; rather, you are utilising each channel in the most effective way possible to promote the same cause.
5. Showcase the local way of life in your area
The simplest way to describe the local lifestyle of your company is to think of it in terms of the life that a consumer leads after they have purchased your items.
Due to the fact that Instagram is such a visually-oriented social media network, it is the ideal outlet to demonstrate what the local lifestyle of your company looks like.
Include photographs of your products being used so that clients can see themselves living the lifestyle portrayed in the photographs.
This enhances the value of your brand as a whole and provides those customers with more motivation to make a purchase.
When you are shooting photos or making movies to showcase how your wares complement the local way of life, you should make it a point to include well-known landmarks in your city or town wherever possible.
Not only are these locations easily recognised and well-known, but they also help the customer picture your items fitting in seamlessly with their lives, which is especially true if you pick landmarks that the customer frequently visits.
6. Adapt Yourself To Current Fashions
One can usually count on the holidays to become a topic of conversation that is trending, and businesses have taken advantage of these days for a long time in order to engage customers with holiday-themed messages.
On the other hand, there are a lot of other hot themes that you may harness to generate appealing content for Instagram.
This is an excellent method for gaining some local attention while simultaneously posting content that is pertinent to and entertaining for your local followers at the same time.
If you want to discover which hashtags are currently popular in your region, you should pay attention to the news, community activities, and holidays that are unique to your area.
Because of this, it is a good idea to follow other businesses, local celebrities, and other thought leaders in the community on Instagram. This is because you can look at their accounts to get ideas for keywords that are currently popular in the area.
Nevertheless, there is a negative aspect to capitalising on trendy issues. Some companies are pushing the boundaries and trying to take over conversations that are better left alone.
For instance, you want to steer clear of something terrible happening if it does. On the other hand, it could give the impression that you are trying to profit from the misery of other people.
Ignoring contentious issues is the best course of action because doing so will cause you less harm than engaging with them head-on. Things like politics, religion, and any other contentious issues are not allowed to be discussed.
7. Pay Attention to the Regional Hashtags
When we talk about hashtags, we should mention that there are many similarities between hashtags and SEO keywords.
You need to put your attention on localised hashtags if you want to maximise the local reach of your Instagram profile.
This makes it possible for individuals in your area to discover your postings and your business by using hashtags that are particular to your region.
Use a hashtag that includes your location, such as #NewportNature, on the caption of your outside shot rather than the more generic #nature. For example, #NewportNature.
It is also a good idea to include hashtags that include the location of your business as well as the kind of company that you own. Again, hashtags are very similar to keywords in many ways.
If individuals in Chicago are looking for a hairstylist on Instagram and you happen to be a hairstylist in Chicago, then you want the material that your business posts to Instagram to appear in the results of that search.
Therefore, it is recommended that you hashtag your work with relevant tags, such as #ChicagoHairStylist, #ChicagoHair, or #ChicagoBeauty.
When it comes to locally relevant hashtags, the difficulty is in determining how local to become.
Do you concentrate on your own town or on the state as a whole? Is it more effective to use a hashtag that only contains the name of your town, or is there more volume in using both the town and the state? Perhaps you could focus your efforts on the area immediately surrounding your home?
This question does not have a single, definitively right response to it. How people search in your location has a significant impact on the answer to this question. To identify which local hashtags are most appropriate for use in your region, you will need to perform some research first.
It’s possible that you’ll find third-party programmes helpful, such as Hashtagify or Focalmark, because they let you enter a keyword or hashtag and then display other words and phrases that are connected to it.
These tools are wonderful for monitoring the performance of a variety of hashtags, as well as for generating ideas for brand new ones.
Utilizing these tools will allow you to discover useful regional hashtags and have a deeper understanding of how people search in your region.
8. Make sure your bio has a link to your website.
Including a link to your website on your Instagram profile is not optional, despite the fact that it could appear to be self-evident.
Because the bio of your Instagram business page is the only place on Instagram where you can include a link, you should make the most of this opportunity.
Followers won’t be able to convert in any other way, such as visiting your website, purchasing your items, or engaging with your brand elsewhere, if you don’t provide them with this link.
If you want people to go somewhere specific after viewing the content you post to Instagram, you need to include a link to that location in your bio.
You should also include details about your other social media accounts, such as the Twitter handle of your company, in this section.
It is essential to mention your address, especially if you own a local business so that your customers will know where to locate you.
9. Produce Original and Creative Content in a Professional Manner
It may go without saying, but a significant number of company pages on Instagram often share photos and videos that are of poorer quality, are blurry, or have poor composition.
If you want to get a significant advantage on Instagram, rather than merely utilising the camera on your smartphone, you should think about making an investment in a camera of greater quality.
You might even make the decision to spend money on a professional photographer to assist you in creating photographs that are captivating.
After all, Instagram is a visual platform; therefore, if you want to really excel at promoting your business in this environment, then you need to create the best visual content that you possibly can. If you want to use Instagram to its full potential, then you need to create the best visual content.
When you share images of products, this is a very crucial consideration to make. You should really strive to have your followers see the product and be able to see themselves utilising it (remember, local lifestyle).
If the picture is of bad quality, not only will they be unable to do this task, but they may also be led to believe that the quality of your products is substandard as well.
10. Please geotag all of your posts.
Another tactic that, despite the fact that it may appear to be self-explanatory, a significant number of local companies fail to implement.
It is imperative that you provide your Instagram followers, as well as Instagram itself, with the location of your local business if you want them to become aware of it and potentially patronise it.
You have the ability to geotag specific posts with a location.
When consumers click that location link, they are taken to a screen within the application that displays a map and shows them the precise location of your place of business. Additionally, it displays additional content that was posted from this location.
On the other hand, geotagging your specific place of business shouldn’t always be done.
If you post material on Instagram about a landmark or a particular region in your location, geotagging that location can add some variation to your posts and increases the likelihood that your content will be discovered by users who conduct searches on Instagram for terms relating to those locations.
