7 Timesaving Tips for Instagram Marketing Campaigns
The days when Facebook and Twitter were the most popular platforms for business promotion are far behind us. With marketers on the lookout for reliable and productive avenues for promoting their brands, Instagram is getting the lion’s share of the attention.
Over the last decade, the Instagram community has grown to one billion users and 62% of the existing user base are people aged between 18 and 35 years, the most coveted demographic. Moreover, an average user spends 53 minutes on the platform daily, as specified in one report:
Not only can marketers reach out to their potential customers on Instagram, but it’s also easier for them to interact with followers as people spend a lot of time on Instagram and most of them are highly engaged.
Simply put, running Instagram marketing campaigns is beneficial for businesses of all sizes and niches. However, planning and executing your Instagram marketing strategy can take much time and putting your Instagram marketing campaign on autopilot is a must.
Whether you’re a small business with a limited number of workers or a big brand with a solid following on Instagram, it’s important to find timesaving tips that work best for your social media marketing campaigns.
Here are the top 7 timesaving tips for Instagram marketing campaigns:
1. Use Marketing Automation Tools
With the right tools, automation speeds up a majority of marketing processes. From automatic hashtag management to post scheduling, there are many Instagram marketing routines that take time.
Luckily, marketing automation tools help to avoid doing the same actions over and over again.
Instagram growth solutions, scheduling and management tools, brand mention monitoring are just a few types of marketing automation tools that work well for Instagram marketing campaigns.
Obviously, not every business can afford to use all of these tools.
To find the best marketing automation software that suits your business needs and wants, it’s important to gauge the brand-centric preferences and streamline relevant activities to the concerned campaign.
For instance, if a majority of your time goes into strategizing hashtags for posts, automated tools for generating relevant tags come in handy. But if you publish 6-9 posts a day, it’s a good idea to find a post scheduler.
In short, there’s a great variety of marketing automation tools on the market, so every business can find a solution that helps to make Instagram marketing easier for your team.
2. Turn On Notifications
Brands thrive on sensible engagement with users. Instagram has become a new communication platform where people can get in touch with brands. In fact, 90% of Instagrammers follow at least one business in-app which means people crave communication on the platform.
When people reach out to your brand, it’s important to react or they will lose interest in your business. Therefore, you must keep up with everything that is happening on the platform and ensure that the associated marketing strategies are in sync with the latest market trends.
This is why it is necessary to switch on ‘Push Notifications’. This underrated yet effective approach is a market basic that helps you never miss a comment or a direct message (DM) from your audience.
What is more, this feature can help you understand your target audience or competitors better. As businesses follow certain personal and business accounts, it is necessary for them to stay updated with the social happenings across diverse verticals. This is where ‘turning on’ notifications for a select account becomes critical.
In other words, it helps you prioritize content based on preferences. In addition to filtering our irrelevant content, this time-saving strategy also helps the brand with:
- Enhancing consistency
- Tracking metrics
- Increasing conversions
- Learning about user preferences
- Retaining users
- Stimulating engagement
3. Create Instagram Post Templates
Did you know that 65% of people are visual learners?
Instagram is all about visual content. With the love for visual content, people pay close attention to posts and stories you publish on your Instagram profile. Incorporating elements like Gen Z slang words into your post templates can make your content more relatable and engaging to younger audiences. Having an aesthetic feed is one of the best ways to show your brand identity and raise brand awareness.
Let’s take a look at M&M’s, for example:
Having a beautiful Instagram feed is one of the best ways to stand out from the crowd.
Using Instagram post templates helps to:
- Save your financial resources
- Improve brand recognition
- Increase user engagement
- Establish brand as consistent
Want to feature stunning posts without hiring expensive designers? It’s a great idea to create Instagram post templates with photo editing apps. For example, you can use InstaSize that allows you to apply filters, edit visuals, and resize images with ease. Not only can you put your brand logo or fonts as a visual element, but you can also save these elements as a template to save time in the future.
4. Set Up Quick Replies
In the last few years, social media has become the preferred customer support channel for customers under 35. As a result, more and more people use this platform for customer service.
If your company receives direct messages from potential customers, Instagram offers tons of resources to the marketers. For instance, the ‘Quick Replies’ is one of the most valued options. Besides saving a lot of time, this approach helps you counter questions having a similar set of keywords and queries. Plus, it allows your business to avoid typing the same response to different people.
5. Hire a Social Media Coordinator
If you have an in-house marketing team, that’s great. But if you want to save time and money on executing Instagram marketing campaigns, it’s a good idea to hire a social media virtual assistant who can help you create a winning strategy for your Instagram and consult your company on demand.
In other words, you should connect with a credible, resourceful, and legitimate social media coordinator to make your Instagram marketing campaign more scalable than before. Hiring a coordinator is like getting a dedicated manager for each of your social profiles. This approach allows you to allocate every resource at your disposal for creating the best possible content.
What is more, you can create a practical guide for social media moderators where they can find tips and tricks on solving the most popular problems with an online ebook creator like FlippingBook. Here you can collect all tips on customer service and send the copies to your freelancers.
Looking for a social media coordinator? Freelance marketplaces like Fiverr or Upwork can help you find a perfect candidate:
As you keep generating consistent content for your extended social family, the coordinator takes the charge of promoting the same, via engagements, prudent usage of automation tools, and instant replies. In addition to the mentioned perks, there are other benefits of hiring an experienced social media manager or coordinator which include:
- Envisioning a new avenue for customer generation
- Boosting brand engagement across diverse verticals
- Linking resourceful Instagram platform to other social media accounts for maximizing exposure
- Focusing the entire in-house workforce towards content creation
To create a
6. Repost User-Generated Content
Wouldn’t it be great if your customers could create content for you?
It’s no longer a dream! Moreover, people love sharing their customer stories with other potential consumers, so they take photos or videos that feature products they love.
The popularity of user-generated content (UGC) is growing, so both customers and brands make the most out of this content type. Plus, UGC leads to Instagram growth as it serves as social proof and for businesses it helps to save time on content creation.
Look:
Creating new content readily projects the brand creativity while user-generated content validates the same as legitimate and credible. Besides, Instagram hashtags allow users to repost brand-centric user-generated content by pairing the brand-generated hashtag with a new post.
Here’s how Starbucks Egypt uses its brand hashtag to collect user-generated content and repost it to its business profile:
In case you are still skeptical about UGC, here are the most immediate benefits for resorting to this approach as it:
- Increases brand trust
- Connects better with real and organic prospects
- Increases conversions
- Builds a strong brand community
- Automatically amplifies Instagram engagement
- Helps brand save resources
- Improves product and service recall
- Encourages more customer testimonials
If you want to encourage your customers to create fan-made content for your brand, you can give influencer marketing a try as working with Instagram opinion leaders is a proven way to set an example for your customers who trust niche influencers as much as recommendations from their friends and family.
7. Plan and Schedule Content in Advance
Planning is an essential cog in any marketing wheel. While almost every social media platform requires you to preplan content, Instagram requires a separate discussion courtesy of the discrete nature of the posts and the visual element that comes along.
Therefore, a good start would be to plan out a brand grid using a visual planner. Once you have a plan ready, the focus should be on batching — an approach to increase productivity and maximize concentration by creating several posts at once. However, as a business profile, random and sub-par content pieces are expected to do more harm than good.
This is the reason why a discerning approach is necessary to pre-plan and create Instagram in advance. For instance, once you have decided upon a content timeline, it is important to dedicate a single day to photo capturing. Once the harder part is out of the way, you must create individual posts upon subjecting the images to the pre-defined preset or template.
Then, uploading them onto scheduling tools should be the next step. Most importantly, you can automate the post captions, hashtags, and timings as per your understanding of analytics and post engagement metrics.
In a Word
Lately, Instagram marketing has picked up the pace, making it harder for certain brands to survive without targeted and time-intensive strategies. With the above-mentioned strategies, businesses of all sizes and niches can bring Instagram to the next level without spending much time.