It is only when you know about your target audience you will be able to deliver them with exactly what they want. This will not only raise the level of engagement but will also assure the success of your business marketing campaigns.  

Therefore, the first thing that you should do if you want to use Instagram in the best possible way is to determine your audience that you want to reach with your products or services before you even start marketing on Instagram. 

In order to know about your audience, you should also take a cue from your other marketing strategies that you may have in place. This will ensure that your efforts are consistent. When you do so, pay special attention to factors such as:

• Age
• Gender
• Income
• The pain points
• Location
• Motivations as well as 
• The interests.

If you do not know where to start, you are recommended that you track and monitor popular interest and event hashtags, especially those that are related to your business. Check for it that are using and engaging with these hashtags and also check their profiles out. You will also be far better off if you also check out the followers of your competitors.

Instagram with its tools and useful features will make things easier for you in determining and defining your audience as it makes it easy to win more real likes for businesses that use its features and tools in the best possible way.

Conduct an analysis

Once you have determined your Instagram audience, the net important thing that you should do is conduct a competitive analysis of the different posts that are related to your specific business or industry. Once again, you can use the best tools that the platform itself has on offer. These tools will help you to see what the other marketers, especially your competitors in your field are up to and are posting.

• If you know the top competitors in your field already, you should start reviewing their Instagram profiles. 
• If you cannot then you should search for terms that are related to your specific business and industry. This will help you to find similar accounts like yours.

In order to make your analysis more competitive, you should conduct a quick audit of all these related accounts. This report will help you to see several things such as:

• The type of posts that are getting the highest rate of engagement from the followers
• The type of hashtags that are popular and they are using
• The type of captions they are using
• How fast they are growing in terms of follower count as well as in their business and 
• The type of frequency they are maintaining to post their content on Instagram.

All these facts, figures and information will serve as your benchmark when you start growing your own Instagram account.

Also, make sure that when you audit the contents of your competitors, you take note of the opportunities that they may have missed out on. Add unique content in the mix so that your business stands out from the rest.

Create and maintain an editorial calendar

You may not know that according to research it is found that on an average, most of the business brands post their content on Instagram quite frequently. It is also found that they post about six images in a week on Instagram. This means that they post more than 300 posts in a year. 

When images are posted by companies at this rapid rate, it is really very hard to keep pace with it when it comes to finding out what you must post now and what you have already posted on the platform before.

The best approach is to create an editorial calendar. This will help you in a lot of ways but the most significant ones are:

• It will help you to save time and effort and 
• It will help you to manage your Instagram presence. 

Also make sure that you plan your actions, hashtags, captions, and posting times well in advance.

• The editorial calendar is also a good place to record key events. This will help you to highlight these on your Instagram account as and when required. These events may be anything from a new product launch to announcements of special offers.
• The editorial calendar will also help you to monitor and keep a close watch on the real-time opportunities and grab it as soon it occurs rather than scramble for a last-minute post.

Therefore, make sure that your editorial calendar is full with some Instagram posts of different types. You will find a lot of free editorial calendar guides and templates on the internet that you may use to manage, plan and post your Instagram contents.

Engagement is the key

Instagram efforts will pay off well when there is a higher level of engagement from your users as well as from you. This is a reciprocal relationship that will build trust between you and your users. Therefore, always include elements in your contents such as:

• A call-to-action in your caption to engage your audience. Such calls to action will encourage the audience to like a post, comment on it, and share it with others.
• You may also use your caption in a way to direct people to your bio link and from there they can visit your website to check out the new product you may have launched or gain info on the existing product from your blog posts.

You will simply have to remember to change the link in your bio from time to time so that it corresponds with to the most recent info on the website according to the product on your post. 

Ending with a protip

When you use a link, make sure that it is short. Shortened tracking links in your URL will enable you to see the amount of traffic that came from your own Instagram account or from any other specific post.

Lastly, add a geotag to your posts to ensure higher engagement.

Author’s Bio:

Pete Campbell is a social media manager and has immense knowledge about email marketing and Instagram promotion. He delights his clients by helping them buy real Instagram likes. He loves to travel, write and play baseball.