Instagram Marketing on a Budget: Tips for SMEs
Who doesn’t know Instagram? This online social platform has only been around since 2010, but it is projected to reach up to 1.4 billion users before 2025. For small businesses, it offers a huge potential to reach new audiences and boost their revenues. It is particularly suited for new and up-and-coming brands, thanks to the eager and curious behaviors of its users.
Below, we’ll show you some of the tried-and-true strategies for marketing your small business on Instagram on a budget!
1. Connect with Your Niche
Niche refers to a specific group of people that you need to reach out with your marketing efforts. Typically, this group will have certain characteristics that tie these people and make them relate to your products and services. This can include a wide range of things from age levels, brand preferences, values, to many other other demographic factors.
You will develop your content and campaigns based on this niche. On top of that, you will need to adapt your messages, tone, and brand values according to it. You can take a look at Drunk Elephant’s Instagram page. They choose people who prioritize long-term skin health as their niche. As a result, their content mainly features healthy ingredients.
Finding the ideal niche will also help you narrow down your marketing campaigns. When you don’t have a specific group of people in your mind and simply try to reach out to everybody, your Instagram marketing will look like all over the place. On the other hand, when you have the right target audience in mind, you can shape your strategy according to their characteristics.
2. Develop Visual Identity
To differentiate yourself from other businesses, you’ll also need a powerful visual identity. It might seem apparent, but understanding the values your brand upholds is the first step towards creating it. What kind of company do you run? How do you want people to see you? These questions can help you get the essence of your brand’s vision and personality.
Once you’ve laid the foundations for developing your brand values, you’ll rely on them to establish your branding basics, which consists of your mission statement, logo, and brand bio. Although they may appear simple, excellent branding and logo design require a great deal of skill and expertise to execute. Working with a branding expert at this point could be worthwhile to achieve even better branding and marketing results.
3. Maintain Your Engagement Rate
How many likes and comments do you receive on your Instagram posts? These are things that you may never think about when managing your personal account. Nevertheless, your top goal should be to drive real, organic engagement when it comes to Instagram business marketing. These metrics help you focus your marketing efforts by indicating how well your content connects with your target audience.
As social media is a two-way street, you must give your followers recognition if you hope to develop an active following. Note that each comment you receive implies that someone read your post and took some time to leave a message. Why, after all that, wouldn’t you answer? Use the comment threading technique to find out which of the user comments you’ve skipped on your Instagram posts.
Ultimately, don’t overlook the use of Stories, which let you share anything from small business flyers to behind-the-scenes clips. You can use stickers to get questions from your followers or to run surveys and quizzes. Each interaction a person has with those stickers contributes to your engagement rate! Using the “Add Yours” sticker is one of the newest trends on Instagram. Make use of this feature to encourage interaction on your posts.
4. Hold Contests and Giveaways
Instagram users’ eagerness to enter contests, even those with small prizes, is another reason why it’s the ideal marketing platform for small businesses. Brands can use giveaways and contests to hand out an item or service to one or more fortunate participants based on a predefined set of requirements.
An effective Instagram giveaway should ideally increase your Instagram following and promote organic social sharing. An interesting competition will encourage social media shares on its own, increasing your profile visibility and impression share. Furthermore, the giveaway entry requirements should also help you achieve your secondary objective of expanding your Instagram following.
The Takeaway
While there are a lot of social media platforms out there, including Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter, your ideal target demographics are probably still on Instagram. On top of the enormous user base, this online social media website allows small business owners to connect with potential customers even without a big budget or a dedicated marketing team.