10 Simple Steps to Promote Your Small Business on Instagram

We’re living in a fast-paced, modern world and surrounded by gadgets that connect us to another world; the virtual world. Actually, it seems we spend more time in the virtual world than the real one.

This fact creates plenty of opportunities for businesses to promote their products and services on the internet and especially on social media, where the channels of promotions are incredibly cheaper. If you run a startup business, you should not miss promoting it on social media. 

With its remarkable popularity and useful tools, Instagram has many unexpected benefits to your business. 

In this article, I’m going to talk about how you can use Instagram to promote your startup business. So, let’s dive in. Here’s an infographic for you to cast a glance at:

10 Steps to Promote Your Startup Business on Instagram

As a startup, you might have a limited budget to promote your business on Instagram. But don’t worry, none of the following items is going to cost you that much. Here you go:

Step 1- Optimize Your Instagram Bio

The first step toward having an attractive Instagram page is writing a grabbing bio. This is the first thing visitors will see when they are peeking into your page. So, you want to make the best of those 150 characters that you have for writing the Instagram bio.

A useful hack for optimizing your bio and making your page more accessible for your customers is to include your brand’s name and niche in your display name, profile name, and bio text. For example, if you run a startup about selling books and e-books, it’s better to include the name “book” in the mentioned parts.    

Step 2- Stay Original

One of the fundamental principles that you should apply when promoting your startup on Instagram is originality. You can’t expect your visitors to follow the page when you only copy the content from other pages or have nothing special. That’s why authenticity works like a pillar for the popularity of your Instagram page.  

It would be best if you stayed original in all the aspects of your Instagram marketing, from writing captions, photos, and choosing a theme. Being authentic does not mean that you should stop finding and getting inspiration from other successful pages. But don’t just copy and paste other pages’ captions or upload their photos without mentioning their name. 

When writing a caption, try to use a hook to catch visitors’ attention and don’t forget to use a call to action phrase such as “like this post,” “visit our website,” “share this post,” and “link in bio.”

Having an eye-catching feed is another way to demonstrate authenticity. It’s a good idea to have a flexible pattern for your page. You can use websites and apps such as Canva and Preview to make your page look stunning.

Another great way to make visitors stay on your page and touch that follow button is by using lifestyle photos. Try to show people using your products or services most naturally. This will make the visitors trust you more quickly and maybe become your future customer.

Step 3- Use stories

Instagram Story is excellent because it maximizes your engagement and boosts your sales. It has numerous features such as emoji slider, question sticker, quiz sticker, poll sticker, and many AR filters. 

Stories only last 24 hours, you can upload types of content that you don’t usually share on your feed, such as behind the scenes or fun photos and videos. 

Step 4- Use Follower Apps

If you want a promising development and gain followers fast and easy, the best choice is to use follower apps. It’s good to mention that not all of these apps use bots to promote your page. In fact, you can find some Instagram manager apps which are entirely based on manual growth. 

If you have any doubt about using these apps, better to pick the ones that come with free trials and free Instagram followers, so you can grasp a better understanding of how they actually work.   

Step 5- Consider User-generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) is one of the best ways to attract followers and even potential customers to your Instagram. UGC can work for any niche, especially for online shops. If you run a business related to selling products, an effective way to boost your engagement is by running contests to gain user-generated content. Then use those UGCs on your feed and Story to show your followers you care about them.  

Step 6- Use Hashtags

Hashtags are great tools to get your startup business known in the Instagram world. Think about what your potential customers would type in the Instagram search bar to find the products or services that you offer. Then make a list of those words and find the related effective hashtags.

But you should not only focus on general hashtags. Out of 30 hashtags available for each post, you can use up to five specific, brand-related hashtags. You don’t want people to get “no result” when they search your brands in tags. 

Another great Instagram hack is using geotags. This is especially useful for startups looking for local followers because the Instagram search engine shows nearby results before others.    

Step 7- Work With Influencers

Influencers have their own unique voice and fanbase. If your startup has a specific type of customer, your best choice to market your products is to reach out to an influencer related to your niche. 

A popular Instagram influencer marketing strategy is using an indirect recommendation approach. For example, if your startup company offers beauty products, you can ask the influencer to wear them and mention your products in a video or caption in the most natural way. 

This type of marketing is more effective because the followers will trust the product so much more than traditional advertising as it is promoted indirectly by their favorite Instagrammer. 

That’s one of the reasons why you want to maintain a long-term relationship with influencers. If they continually promote your products, their fans accept your brand as an everyday part of the influencer’s life. And this is actually true as most influencers only take promoting brands that are aligned with their lifestyle.  

Step 8- Run Instagram Ads

Another fast and straightforward way to gain more followers and boost your startup business on Instagram is running ads. The good news is, you don’t have to allocate a lot of money on this. However, the more you spend, the more followers you get. 

A good point to remember when running an Instagram ads campaign is that you should pay attention to your followers’ demographic figures when adjusting the ad’s settings. For example, if the majority of your followers are teenage girls who live in New York, you may want to focus on showing your ad to the same group.  

Step 9- Run Contests

People love to compete! They also love to earn rewards. The beauty of the Instagram contest is that they are not difficult to participate in. Most Instagram contests and giveaway rules are simple: follow the page, like the post, or tag three of your followers. 

Moreover, as mentioned above, one effective type of contest is UGC contests, which provide you numerous photos and videos for your feed. 

Step 10- Post Consistently 

The last Instagram hack that I want to talk about is consistency. You should post on Instagram on a regular base, and it’s a delicate job to find out what is the magical number that works best for your page. However, most Instagram experts advise Instagram managers to post at least once a day. Thanks to Instagram schedulers such as AiSchedul, you can plan your posts and Stories and save time for other essential tasks. 

Conclusion

Promoting a startup in the virtual world can be challenging. That’s why you should pay special attention to all the tips and tricks of growing your Instagram. Follow all of the steps that I’ve mentioned carefully to have a robust Instagram marketing.

DepositPhotos – Instagram marketing

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