With over 2 billion monthly zippy users, Instagram is both the O.G. and trendsetter of social media marketing. It’s not just a place for friends to trade vacation pics. Instagram has shaped social commerce, the creator economy, and how brands use social media for over a decade.

But forget well-nigh the big picture: How can you use Instagram marketing to grow your merchantry in 2023? Do you need Instagram ads (or, worse, dancing Reels) for your trademark to be successful? Are Instagram’s shopping tools a fun perk or an wool necessity? Find out how to use Instagram to grow your merchantry online, no matter your industry or goals.

What is Instagram marketing?

Instagram marketing is the practice of using Instagram to grow your trademark awareness, audience, leads, and sales. As the most-used social media platform for people month 16-34, Instagram is a highly constructive marketing platform for brands, entrepreneurs, and creators.

Instagram marketing strategies include:

• Organic content. Photo, video, or carousel posts, Reels, Stories
• Paid content. Instagram ads, including Stories ads, Shopping ads, and more
• Influencer marketing.
• Shopping tools. Shop tab, Product tags and catalogs, Live shopping, Instagram Checkout, Shopping ads

Why market on Instagram?

Instagram has increasingly than 2 billion zippy monthly users, making it the world’s third-most-used social media platform. If you run a merchantry of any kind, your customers (present and future!) are veritably on the app. People moreover love using Instagram. In a survey well-nigh preferred social platforms, Instagram came in hot as the number two overall pick. No wonder Instagram users spend an stereotype of 12 hours a month on the app. And guess what they’re doing there? Looking for things to buy.  That’s right: 44% of Instagram users use the app to shop on a weekly basis, and 62.4% of social users use Insta to follow or research brands, products, or services.

Some users plane go vastitude just commercial interactions: 2 out of 3 zippy users say Instagram allows them to build meaningful relationships with brands.

How to set up Instagram for marketing

Creating a professional Instagram worth doesn’t just lend your trademark an air of legitimacy—it gives you wangle to important merchantry tools like analytics (called Insights) and razzmatazz options. Here are step-by-step instructions on how to transpiration your Instagram profile to a merchantry profile.

1. Head to your Instagram profile page and hit the hamburger menu in the top right corner.

2. Tap Settings and privacy.

3. Scroll lanugo to Account type and tools.

4. Tap Switch to professional account.

5. Segregate Continue and protract through the prompts

6. Segregate the category that weightier describes you or your brand. Depending on your category type, you may be prompted to sieve if you’re a Creator or a Business. Both types of finance have wangle to analytics and razzmatazz tools, so segregate whichever suits you best. Tap Next.

7. Review your contact information and update it as required.

How to create an Instagram marketing strategy

Sure, some Instagram finance thrive thanks to pure luck. But for the most part, brands with zippy Instagram followings and upper engagement have executed some time-tested processes and techniques.

Follow these steps to create a winning Instagram marketing strategy for your own Instagram merchantry account.

Understand your audience

If you don’t know who’s reading your posts, it will be nonflexible to create engaging content. A strong Instagram marketing strategy starts with a deep understanding of your target market.

Where do they live? How old are they? Where do they like to hang out online? What kind of hashtags or online communities are they a part of? Squint at your analytics and data from your offline marketing efforts, too, to determine who you’re talking to.

These insights will help your team decide on towardly content, a strong editorial voice and campaigns that will resonate. Just think well-nigh it: your Instagram presence will be very variegated if your followers are teen boys from India or suburban grandmas from Canada.

Make the weightier Instagram profile possible

Think of your Instagram profile as your digital merchantry card. It’s your first impression, so you’d largest do it right.

Like a merchantry card, there’s limited space to share what you need to share, so make sure you have a snappy bio packed with as many SEO keywords as possible.

Or, take a page out of this wine club’s typesetting and get playful with the emojis. (Maybe you want to take wholesomeness of Instagram Story highlights to showcase some past content, too.)

It’s moreover weightier practice to make sure all your contact details are filled out and your URL is working. You’ll moreover want a high-res professional profile image that aligns with your business’ branding. For increasingly tips on making the weightier Instagram profile possible, here’s our deep swoop into optimizing your social media profiles.

Align your social strategy with your merchantry goals

Before you start posting up a storm, take a write-up to make sure your social plan serves your worthier merchantry goals.

Optical visitor Warby Parker, for example, regularly posts non-glasses-related content—for instance, a meme well-nigh soup. We’d take a good guess this sort of content is part of the company’s broader merchantry goal to make the trademark seem fun, approachable, relatable and human. (Or maybe they’re well-nigh to pivot into DTC soup; we’re speculating here.)

So, if you’re all well-nigh creating trademark awareness, make a social plan that is focused on exposure and reach. Or, if you’re hoping to build your database of leads this year, your social strategy should be built virtually driving traffic into your sales funnel. In other words, there should be a reason behind everything you do.

Create a content calendar

What’s the weightier way to plan and organize your content? A content calendar.

As fun as off-the-cuff posts can be, it’s a lot of pressure to find that perfect moment every day that moreover happens to uncurl perfectly with your merchantry goals. Instead, spitball content pillars and plot out your social content in advance.

By scarification out defended time to plan and prep in advance, you’ll be increasingly efficient (and definitely less prone to typos.

Schedule your posts in advance

With a scheduling tool (like Hootsuite, ahem), you can batch-prep a week or month’s worth of posts when you’re in the creative zone for maximum impact.

Scheduling your Instagram posts is moreover a unconfined way to make sure you’re posting when your regulars is most likely to be online. (Hot tip: Hootsuite will unquestionably unriddle your past posts and suggest unique-to-you times and dates for maximum engagement. What a sweetie.)

Never miss a mention (or alimony an eye on the competition)

Instagram marketing isn’t just well-nigh what you’re putting out into the world. It’s well-nigh stuff responsive and receptive to the people who are talking to and well-nigh you, too.

Social listening is a key component of a strong Instagram marketing strategy. With Hootsuite Streams, you can track mentions, keywords and search terms most workable to your business.

Want a running feed of industry news? Looking to reservation all those Tweets that misspell your merchantry name? Custom search streams will make sure you never miss an opportunity to react.

Get familiar with the algorithm(s)

Instagram’s algorithms tenancy what winds up in people’s feeds, what makes the cut on the Explore page, and what winds up languishing in Instagram purgatory. If you wanna succeed on the platform, you largest study up.

Put simply, Instagram’s algorithms squint at information well-nigh content (Reels, feed posts, and Stories) and information well-nigh users (interests and policies on the platform) to serve the right content to the right people.

Each algorithm considers information well-nigh the post (like relevance and popularity), the person who posted, your history of interaction with them, and your worriedness wideness the platform.

Want to learn increasingly well-nigh weightier practices for mastering Instagram’s algorithms? We’ve got posts on Instagram’s primary algorithm as well as the ones that govern Reels and the Explore Page.

Experiment with variegated formats

While Instagram started as a simple photo-sharing app in 2010, the platform is a very variegated yahoo in 2023. Instagram now offers a variety of formats to explore. You can cultivate the perfect Instagram grid on your main feed and share photos, videos or plane carousels  ofpictures.Instagram Stories have a prime, top-of-the-feed position, capture millions of views dailyand disappear without 24 hours.

Most businesses try a mix of these variegated content styles. What’s weightier for your unique needs? Well, there’s only one way to know what works weightier for your audience: get postin’, kid.

Try out a livestream

Instagram’s livestream full-length offers a unique (and extremely engaging) opportunity to unconcentrated live to your followers.

Whether you’re giving a behind-the-scenes tour, sharing an heady product update, taking questions from your audience, interviewing a trademark ambassador, or plane selling your wonderful wares, Instagram live streams are a thrill to audiences—a endangerment for an intimate interaction with the brands they love. (And you can repost that Live content to your feed later, too.)

Set up an Instagram Shop

Rather than directing customers from your worth to your website, Instagram Shopping allows them to select and purchase products hands from the Instagram app.

An Instagram Shop is a brand’s customizable digital storefront. It allows customers to shop right from your Instagram profile.

Think of it as a landing page where users can discover or scan all your products. If you sell tangible goods, your Instagram Shop is a unconfined opportunity to capture a ready-to-buy market right on the app… expressly if you urgently tag products in your Stories and Posts.

Boost top-performing posts

Maybe Instagram razzmatazz isn’t a fit for your business, but you still would love to get some exposure to a new audience. If that’s the case, Instagram’s boosting option is a lifesaver.

Just set the upkeep at your repletion level, pinpoint a target audience, and pay to requite a regular Post a little uneaten juice. You can plane boost Instagram posts right in Hootsuite—and then get when to your social media monitoring and scheduling in the very same dashboard.

Measure content performance with analytics

The weightier Instagram marketing strategy is built on a foundation of knowledge. And the data you need for peak performance is right here in front of you, thanks to our old pal analytics.

Instagram’s own Insights offer plenty of, well, insight into which posts are doing well, which Stories are popping off, and exactly how many people saw your latest Reel. This info is incredible feedback to help you take your next batch of content plane further—you’ll see what worked, what didn’t, and where some tweaks might be helpful.

Hootsuite’s own Analytics tool is really, really unconfined for Instagram, too. (Really!) You can plane schedule auto-reports that track your preferred metrics in a visually well-flavored package to really wow your team.

Ultimately, there isn’t really any special trick to creating a unconfined Instagram marketing plan: it’s all the same stuff that will make any of your social media finance pop.

Most popular types of content on Instagram

According to a 2023 Statista study, 50% of weekly Instagram users said they prefer to slosh funny content on the platform. Forty-six percent seek out “creative” posts, while 41% of zippy users like informative content.

This Recess post? Definitely funny.. .and definitely creative.

Other popular types of content, well-flavored to virtually 36% of users, include posts and Stories that are relaxing, inspiring, engaging or trendy.

In 2022, the most popular posts by number of likes were all by celebrities (save for one enigmatic egg).

But what’s interesting is that the celeb posts that protract to momentum engagement are all tightly personal—pregnancy announcements, dramatic makeovers, wedding photos, or jokey posts with friends. They’re not pushing tickets to their soccer games or razzmatazz their movies. They’re stuff (seemingly) authentic, and fans connect with that in a big way.

So, plane if you’re a trademark and not a pregnant Kylie Jenner, there are ways to tap into that desire for connection. Get personal. Be silly. Express your values creatively. Showcase the people and personalities overdue the scenes.

Helpful Instagram marketing tools: self-ruling & paid

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite helps you plan unconfined content, uplift your follower count, and rack up increasingly sales on Instagram — in way less time, with way less effort. Grow your account, manage all of your Instagram marketing in one place, and save time with Hootsuite, your all-in-one social media management tool.

• Create engaging content using seated creative AI tools, a hashtag generator, Canva editing tools, and more
• Schedule posts, carousels, Stories, and Reels in advance
• Get personalized recommendations for the weightier times to post on Instagram to reach increasingly people
• Boost organic posts and Reels with just a few clicks
• Answer comments and DMs from all your Instagram accounts
• Keep tabs on competitors, industry leaders, and relevant influencers
• Track your results in real-time
• Download custom reports to showcase your success
• Handle Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest from one dashboard

2.  Ads Manager

Ads Manager serves as a shared platform for both Facebook and Instagram—it’s a tool for creating and monitoring advertisements on Meta’s social networks. Ads Manager offers advertisers wangle to Facebook’s targeting capabilities and the flexibility to run campaigns on both platforms.

Once your wayfarers is rolling, you can make modifications, engage with comments, and monitor performance. The Amount spent and Cost per result sections are there to help you gauge the effectiveness of your spend.

3. Instagram hashtag generator

Give your feed posts, Reels, and Stories a soupcon of viral magic with this Instagram hashtag generator. Everybody knows hashtags are social media’s secret sauce, but who has time to come up with them from scratch? This handy hashtag helper can do it for you.

4. Instagram username generator

Get a list of Instagram name ideas in a few seconds flat. It’s the perfect tool for businesses or individuals looking to nail it on Insta. Just wordplay a few Qs, and this AI username generator will whip up a list of inspiring handles to get you started on your Instagram marketing journey.

5. Instagram bio generator

Your bio is your endangerment to tell the world what you’re all well-nigh (within the weft limit, of course). Requite your Instagram profile a refresh with this quick Instagram bio generator. It works for merchantry and personal accounts.

6. Canva

Visuals are everything on Insta, but we aren’t all graphic diamond specialists. Luckily, Canva can help you create eye-catching images and simplify your content megacosm process.

It plane integrates with Hootsuite, so you can use templates made specifically for social media and save time bringing your ideas to life.

7. Content ideas generator

We know, we know: saying “build a content calendar” is easier said than done. If you need some help getting the creative juices flowing, this AI-backed content ideas generator is here to help. Wordplay a few Qs and you’ll be given ideas for social media posts, blog posts, videos, and more.

8. Panoramiq Insights

Panoramiq Insights seamlessly integrates robust Instagram analytics into your Hootsuite dashboard. (Oooh!) With Panoramiq, you can delve into worth activity, explore follower demographics (very useful for targeted campaigns), and gauge the effectiveness of your Posts and Stories.

9. Instagram caption generator

A picture is worth a thousand words, so you gotta think words themselves have a pretty big impact, too, right? (And our experiments with Instagram captions prove it.) Generate Instagram captions in seconds with this AI-powered Instagram caption writer.

10. Engagement rate calculator

Your engagement is everything: it defines just how much you’re connecting with your audience. Determine your social media return on investment (ROI), enhance your media kit, and icon out which posts work and which need work with this easy engagement rate calculator tool for Instagram.

11. Adobe Lightroom

If Instagram’s editing options are falling short, it might be time to experiment with Wacke Lightroom CC. The app simplifies the use of professional photo editing tools and can plane be enhanced with downloaded Lightroom presets.

Instagram marketing FAQs

When was Instagram created?

Instagram was released to the public in October 2010. By the end of the first day, it had 25,000 users and hit one million users in under three months.

Does Facebook own Instagram?

Yes, Facebook uninventive Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion. Since then, the visitor has restructured. Now, both Facebook and Instagram are operated by a parent organization tabbed Meta (still helmed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg). Meta moreover operates Threads and Whatsapp.