Don’t lose sight of Instagram’s potential because of the buzz surrounding up-and-coming sites like TikTok and Clubhouse. It continues to be one of the top five most downloaded applications in the globe, and its popularity as a channel continues to grow.
At the close of 2020, Instagram surpassed 1 billion monthly active users throughout the world. What’s more, Instagrammers are extremely engaged, spending at least seven hours each week on the network on average.
Instagram is more than simply a distribution channel, and it deserves a spot in every marketer’s toolset, whether they’re selling to consumers, direct to consumers, or business to business. Instagram is about more than just what you say; it also requires attentive listening. After all, there can be no such thing as a discussion without two-way communication.
You should utilise it to find out more about your demographic in addition to advertising your business, providing deals, and publishing photos you’ve taken. Instagram may provide a wealth of information about your customers and the market that can be used to improve your sales and marketing strategies.
Put ads to work vetting out potential marketing materials.
Instagram’s large user base makes it a good location to test out promotional copy and video content concepts and gauge audience reaction. Testing and tracking user reactions to postings is beneficial for all companies, even business-to-business ones.
Even while they might not immediately come to mind as the quintessential Insta-brand, IBM routinely shares both photos and videos on the platform. They were able to gauge the effectiveness of the image and copy by the hundreds of likes and comments this post on their newest CPU received.
Explore Alternative Platforms in Search of Untapped Markets
Find Instagram accounts that may be interested in your company by using hashtags associated with your vertical or niche, and compile lists of local niche micro-influencers and other relevant enthusiasts.
Instagram posts that include at least one hashtag receive more likes, comments, and shares than those that do not.
A restaurant chain considering constructing a location in Detroit may promote itself to the city’s foodies by monitoring hashtags relating to the city’s cuisine.
Popular accounts that employ these hashtags might be scraped for more leads by just looking at their followers. The Instagram accounts that follow you might also benefit from this strategy.
You may gather Instagram fans in one of two primary ways. You can create your own scraper with Python and Github if you’re technically savvy. If you’re not, and the odds are quite good that you aren’t, you can save yourself a lot of time and effort by making use of one of the various Instagram scraper apps available.
Even after scraping a follower list, you still have work to perform. You can’t just start plugging in the information you find to your Facebook Ad Audiences; doing so might get your account banned. It has to be spruced up by removing irrelevant or bogus profiles and accounts. In addition, it may be used to track down potential clients for social selling.
However, you should also examine the data to look for trends among the accounts, as you might discover new key traits that identify future customers that you might not have otherwise considered for interest-based ad targeting or co-marketing purposes. For instance, if many of the new followers are around the same age, or if they all enjoy long-distance running, or if they all live in the centre of busy metropolises, you might find that these are all characteristics that you can use to your advantage.
Recognise Emerging Tendencies and Shifting Consumer Needs
Instagram’s data can teach you about unmet needs, rising trends, and opportunities for product growth.
Winc, an online wine retailer, employed similar strategy during the pandemic to evaluate potential new digital wine club lines.
It marketed their wine delivery service with a video series and a quiz with six questions on the user’s preferred wines. The results of these quizzes were used by Winc to fine-tune the wines it gave to certain demographics, while the responses to videos and comments were used to determine the relative success of various wine distribution strategies.
More Instagram information increases the quality of the output. Think about how people have responded to your own posts, what you can learn from debates about posts by your rivals or the posts of your most active followers, and how your content has been shared and mentioned elsewhere on the platform.
Instagram listening tools allow you to monitor industry competitors and identify emerging trends within your target audience.
Discover Hidden Ad Audiences on IGTV
Instagram video views may be used to target users with Facebook ads based on their attention span. By doing so, you may target a certain audience that is more likely to be interested in your product with sales-focused ad content, such as promotional discounts.
Data from Instagram Can Be Used For Much More
Instagram may be used in a variety of non-transactional ways to generate sales in addition to transactions conducted on the platform itself. Profitability may be increased across all of your channels by using data insights to find and capitalise on emerging trends, create and test advertising audiences, evaluate creative concepts, and identify and refine target markets.