Being active on Instagram entails a combination of many things. It’s more than just marketing and promoting your products but also about building your brand’s image by creatively telling your story through captivating imagery (both photographs and videos) and engaging captions.
The visual element plays a critical role in drawing your target people into your feed and once drawn, you’re able to build a relationship with them by interacting with them through direct messages, public comments, and Instagram stories.
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The following steps are sure to help you build a presence on Instagram and sell more products using the platform.
While creating a profile for your brand sounds pretty straightforward, make sure that the username you come up with represents your brand. Commonly, companies would use their company names as username, but in cases when the company name is too lengthy, you have to come up with a shorthand version that doesn’t deviate too far from who you are as a brand.
Remember, your Instagram name can be any 1-30 characters long and you have the freedom to add additional characters and underscores. However, if your company name doesn’t have numbers in it, it would be good to skip that part.
In case your desired Instagram name is already taken, you have to come up with an alternative name that still accurately represents who you are. You can check if your desired name is still available or otherwise via this Instagram Availability tool.
Be succinct yet creative when writing a bio because you only have 150 characters to work with. Tell users and followers directly who you are and what your brand is about. You can change what appears in your bio as often as you want.
There are two important components of content. The first is text (captions including hashtags). The second is visual imagery like photos and videos.
Instagram photos are said to drive 36% more engagement than Instagram videos, so you’ve to build a balance between videos and photos. Your photos can be any (but not limited to) of the following:
When posting photos, it’s important to post professional-looking images that would attract your target customers. Remember to pay attention to the basics of jewelry photography to ensure that your target customers get something of value from your content. For instance, the entire product must be in focus, well-lit, and is free from any distracting background that doesn’t compliment what you want to achieve.
Your jewelry piece in action doesn’t only provide you with captivating visual aesthetics, but it also allows your target customers to visualize how it looks when work while giving them important visual product information such as the stone’s dimension.
Although photos generate more engagement than videos, this doesn’t mean you can abandon making videos at all. In fact, Instagram videos consumption has increased by 40%.
Overall, your Instagram content should be a combination of videos and photos – each serving different purposes such as enlightening, educating and entertaining your target customers and promoting your products.
The statistics show that product posts beat out other content like lifestyle photos and/or videos as 65% of top-performing content are product posts. However, be mindful of the 80/20 rule where 20% is dedicated to self-promotional posts and 80% is for educating, enlightening, and engaging customers.
Instagram allows you to work with up to 2,200 characters in the caption; however, the text will get truncated after the 125th character so the key is to place the most important information at the beginning of your caption and all the @mentions and hashtags at the end.
When writing captions, don’t forget who your target customers are and what your brand represents. The message must be genuine and engage your target customers by asking questions or adding a quick call-to-action.
Hashtags can help you grow your audience as it makes your posts visible not only to your followers but also to other Instagram users who are using your hashtags as their search terms. Instagram allows you to use up to 30 hashtags per post but maximizing it doesn’t always guarantee results. According to statistics, 5 to 10 hashtags are the ideal number to use in a post. 70% of the most used hashtags are branded hashtags, so don’t forget to include one as this is unique to your jewelry business.
Using a branded hashtag doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to limit it to your brand name.
The most important takeaway here is to always use hashtags in your posts. The statistics show that an Instagram post with at least one hashtag will do better – attracting 12.6% engagement – than those posts without. This will help you tremendously in increasing product awareness.
Instagram is one of the best platforms for connecting with your target audience. It’s said to have 800 million monthly active users with nearly 60% of them aged 18-29. And if merely existing on Instagram isn’t fast enough for you, you can try reaching audiences through Instagram ads.
There are several types of ads but the photo and video ads are two of the most popular. Like your regular posts, it will let you tell your story but the ads will allow you to build your brand even more by reaching well-targeted demographics. You’ll also get to choose from different supported call-to-action buttons like “Download”, “Learn more”, “Contact us”, and “Book now” among others.
If you’re still lost when it comes to building your presence on Instagram, feel free to contact GemFind Digital Solutions.
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