How to Utilize Brand Marketing for Instagram

Christin Hume on Unsplash

Are you looking to market your business on Instagram? Depending on who you’re targeting and where your audience is, this free platform is a great inbound marketing strategy to add to your plan.

Below we’ll share what brand marketing is, the Instagram stats you should know and 3 important tips to uncover.

What is Brand Marketing?

Let’s start off the boat with the definitions.

• Brand: The expression of your business and how the public views you. Some people may mistake a brand as “just design” but it’s more than that. It combines together the fundamentals of your brand’s tone, personality, design, values, strategy, and goals.

• Marketing: On the other hand, this is a strategy on how you can build brand awareness to the public. How your strategy helps generate sales for your products or services.

Combine those two words together and you get “it is a publicised way to promote your products or services through stories. A way to highlight your entire brand or company”.

The whole purpose of brand marketing is to establish and grow your relationship with consumers and build the brand’s value. This means you need to maintain a good and consistent brand-consumer relationship along with your brand’s marketing attributes (the thing that makes people be reminded of your brand).

Instagram Facts You Need to Know for Your Business

So why use brand marketing for Instagram and how do you know if it’s right for your business? Well…

Is your business visually pleasing and in the creative field? This social media app is great when it comes to sharing photos and videos with the rest of the world. Here’s what you need to know:

• This platform has over a billion monthly active users.

• If you’re aiming for the millennial demographic, then this is a great marketing platform as a majority of Instagram users are aged between 25 - 34 (about 33.1% globally).

• The good thing about marketing your business here is that 60% of Instagram users are actively finding new products.

• Smart tip: “Instagram’s video content is twice as likely to see engagement as photo content” (So it’s best to utilise Instagram reels too).

Anyhow, what are some ways you can start marketing your brand on Instagram?

How to Add Brand Marketing on Instagram

Follow these 3 important tips on how to improve your brand marketing on Instagram.

1. Optimise your business Instagram account

First up, optimise your professional profile. Here's some advice to help you out:

• Profile Picture Make sure you have a clear and high-quality profile picture. Your Instagram profile should be 110 x 110 pixels but you can make it 320 x 320 pixels just to be on the safe side. If you're a company, you can simply add your logo. But if you are your own brand, you can add a professional picture of yourself. Some advice: I like to add my brand colour to the background by editing this on Adobe Photoshop. You can also do this on Canva Pro by using their background remover tool and filling in the background colour.

• Headlines (Name) From the advice I've taken from many business owners out there, they suggest you add your keywords in the "Name" section. This can help get your account to appear in the search bar when people are searching.

• Username Make sure your username reflects your brand name (that means no spelling errors, random numbers or special letters). If your username is taken, you can always use an underscore ( _ ) mark.
  

• Website Since you can't link URLs in your Instagram post, a recommendation to add here is your own website, your lead magnet page or if you have more links, use a custom link bio tool (for me, I use Canva's website builder template along with Bitly to shorten the link).
  

• Bio Description Make sure you add what you do, who you do it for and a call-to-action (CTA) to what you want your potential consumers to do.

For example "click the link below to access your free PDFs", "reach out to us via DMs", or "contact us to book a free consultation call!".

• Instagram Highlight Covers

Having these set up will help you set the tone for your viewers who visit your profile for the first time. This is great when it comes to mixing your covers with your Instagram feed aesthetic. Make sure your covers are suited to what your brand represents and that they're in JPEG or PNG files of the same size as your Instagram stories/reels (1080 x 1920 pixels). For example, if your brand is all about minimalistic, you can add basic colour covers from your brand palette.

• Contact

To put the topping on top, add your professional business email or phone number so that your potential customer can find an easy way to contact you.

1. Figure out who your audience is

Who are you serving too? Who is your target market? Answering these questions can help you prepare for current and future content.

You can start by creating a "customer/character profile" - this is where you get to do research and create a "dream-like" target audience persona. You can create as many personas as you wish.

For example, if you're targeting a millennial demographic interested in building their own small business after they quit their 9-to-5, then you can create Instagram content related to "setting up an eCommerce shop", "5 management tools for small businesses" or "5 small business ideas to start today".

If you already know your target market, great! It's time to move on to the next step.

1. Defining your brand goals

What results do you want to get out of brand awareness? How will you reach your online presence? Do you want to reach this certain amount of engagement by the end of a certain date?

Coming up with brand strategies and finding ways to achieve them will help you grow on Instagram (this same applies to growing a business). You can come up with different objectives and use different tools to help you achieve those goals.

Use the "SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound)" strategy to help you come up with your Instagram brand goals.

But if you need a little help, here are three simple questions to ask yourself when coming up with a brand marketing strategy:

• "Who is your target audience?"

• "What is your brand's primary goal?"

• "How does your brand define success?"

Author Bio

Ellen Tran is a Melbourne-based freelance content writer and the founder of Designs & Art by Rae, which features branding designs, illustrations and copywriting catered to female businesses. Influenced by her “Gen-Z” style of writing, she loves anything related to astrology and the law of attraction.