When used correctly, Instagram can be an excellent tool to advertise your brand. In fact, a recent study confirmed that compared to other social networks, Instagram providers brands with approximately 25 percent more engagement. What this means for you, as a business, is that incorporating Instagram in your marketing strategy is going to easily boost your brand’s awareness and recognition.

However, just like many other social networks out there, there are good ways and bad ways you can use Instagram in order to build a large following and increase engagement. In the post below, we’ll take a close look at how you can leverage it effectively so that you can increase your online presence.

5 Ways to use Instagram for business

Show Your Products

From a client’s point of view, being able to browse through products is a lot of fun and it also allows him to get a better idea of what you are selling. In fact, by allowing your visitors to do some window shopping, the chances that they purchase something or recommend your products/services is greatly increased. Just make sure that you share a photograph of a lesser known product or a new product/service that you want to launch and you’ll have taken the first step to stirring up your visitors’ curiosity.

In case you have a business that offers various services, then you may want to show off some of the supplies and equipment that play an important role in the services you provide. For example, if you’re offering network management services, you could show graphs of how much your services can improve a company’s bottom line.

Use Promo Codes To Reward Your Followers

If you want to make sure that you’ll keep your audience engaged, then you need to know exactly what they use and what they want. Think about the exact things you know about your audience, from their age, their hobbies, to their demographic info and take those things into account the next time you want to put together an editorial calendar for Instagram. The reason you should use one is because it helps maintain consistent content. It’s a very effective strategy that allows businesses to keep their followers on a wide range of social media platforms.

Now when it comes to posting a picture, it needs to be a picture of something that you know for sure is going to keep your audience on its toes. Don’t forget to also reward your audience by offering them certain gifts, including promo codes, discounts or even physical products.

Use Instagram Contest to create engagement

Did you know that creating a contest on Instagram is very simple, yet at the same time has massive returns? So the way it works is that you as a business can request your audience to use a certain hashtag if they want to sign up for the contest and tag some of your pictures. You can also recommend that they vote your pictures and then you can pick one or more winners.

For instance, if you’re a computer business, then you can create a contest called #computers. Then all you need to do is ask people to follow you and post pictures that represent anything computer related. As for the prize, you can choose a winner every 3 or 5 days.

Feature Your Clients And Let Everyone See What Your Products Can Do

If you want to tell the story of your business through the perspective of someone from the outside (i.e. customers), then featuring your clients is the best way to do that. Since there are probably hundreds or even 1000s of reviews about your products/services or company online, it would certainly be fair to include some reviews of your clients, don’t you think so? You can do this by showcasing the values of your brand while highlighting clients’ experience. By using Instagram to feature your clients, you’ll easily be able to better and facilitate the connection you have with your following.

There are times when our imagination takes us very far. The good news is that you can easily ask your following to imagine novel or new uses for the products or services you offer and then use Instagram to create demand. On top of that, doing so also invites user generated content. Just make sure that you ask your following to submit photographs that demonstrative creative use of one or more of your products and then choose the best one of the bunch and post it on your account.

Get More Interest In Your Events

When it comes to events, one of the main reasons they are organized is because they have a great power to attract attention from people and teach them about your services or products. Of course, the final goal is to turn those people into loyal customers and luckily, Instagram can easily help you achieve that by offering a location and visualization for your event. The majority of conferences actually feature a “#” which can be followed by attendees on Instagram or Twitter and use it in order to show their friends and everyone else what is going on.

When you add Instagram to your event marketing mix, you can convince a lot more people to visit your booth and eventually boost engagement with your following. Using a hashtag to help people find your booth is especially useful at both large and small conferences since people can find you quicker and you also manage to stand out from the crowd.

Remember that if you plan on using a marketing strategy for your events, it’s recommended that you use your booth number. Not only should you make it a breeze to be found on the internet, but you also need to put it on every material (flyers, etc) that you give out. By doing so, no matter if they’re online or offline, people will have a very easy time locating your booth.

All in all, Instagram is one of the most effective ways of getting your business out there, but you do need to know how to use it. Luckily, with these extremely useful tips, increasing brand awareness and recognition is going to be a breeze.