Instagram is often overlooked by B2B companies, yet the channel has become a fantastic platform for B2B marketers. It provides a space for establishing new relationships in almost any industry and is a goldmine for connecting with your current clients and potential prospects.
Thus, the question becomes – how can you make Instagram work for your B2B marketing efforts?
Create an Instagram Business Profile
As a brand, you can have an Instagram Business Profile, which can equip you with rich analytics of your profile and posts and the ability to schedule Instagram posts using third-party tools.
Align Instagram with Your B2B Strategy
At first, it may be tempting to leverage Instagram simply as another channel for broadcasting your existing content. Unfortunately, this strategy won’t gain you as much traction as you could achieve.
Rather than just repackaging your Facebook or Twitter content strategy and pushing it to Instagram, we recommend taking a more strategic approach. Determine how Instagram will fill any gaps in your current social media strategy and consider these tactics to offer your new audience a different view of your brand:
- Reveal Company Culture. A key to having a successful Instagram Business Profile is humanizing your brand by sharing a raw, authentic, and informal glimpse into your company. Take your audience behind-the-scenes – inside your office(s), show off employee spirit, etc.
- Tap into Employee Advocacy. Your company shouldn’t be the only one sharing content. More often than not, you’ll find that many of your employees are happy to post about their company experiences to Instagram.
- Share Customer or Client Success Stories.
- Engage with Followers. Look for ways to have a conversation with your audience. Supply a brand hashtag and monitor it for activity.
Leverage Instagram’s New Business Features
Instagram offers a lot of tools to help Digital Marketers engage with their audience. Here are some of the newest and most useful features:
- Advanced Profile Settings: Due to the inability to include links in posts, there is a slight barrier to lead generation on Instagram. That means B2B marketers must think out-of-the-box when crafting calls-to-action. One way business profiles make this easier is by allowing you to create various contact buttons on your profile bio.
- Links in Instagram Stories: Instagram Stories are similar to Snapchat in that they exist for 24 hours before disappearing forever. With this time-sensitive nature, a sense of urgency is created that can help users pay attention to your message. An Instagram Business Profile gives your brand the ability to add links to Instagram Stories and lead Instagram users to a landing page.
- Story Highlights: Story Highlights allow you to pin a story that is meaningful or valuable to your brand to the top of your profile page. Think of it as a way to group images or videos with a common theme, like company culture, client success stories, or events, allowing new visitors to quickly skim through and learn about your company.
- Instagram Advertising: With an Instagram Business Profile, there are three ways to run Instagram ads:
- Create ads directly from your Instagram Posts. Similar to Facebook, you are able promote your organic social posts and stories to an ad in Instagram. We recommend that you only promote posts that are receiving high engagement.
- Create ads from your Facebook Page. When you create promotions from your Facebook Business Page, you can choose if you would like this ad to appear on Facebook and/or Instagram.
- Create ad campaigns in Ads Manager. Facebook’s Ads Manager provides comprehensive tools to help you create ads for any of the brands under the Facebook umbrella, including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger or Audience Network.
#4 Stay in Tune with Your Instagram Insights
Once you begin using Instagram to promote (organic or paid content), you need to check your Instagram Insights regularly. Instagram Insights is an analytics tool within the platform that provides follower demographics and data about the success of your content. This tool makes it simpler to see what kind of content is working and to measure the effectiveness of ads.
To access Instagram Insights, click the three lines (the menu) at the top right of your profile and then “Insights”. In the Activity tab, you can track weekly Interactions, Reach, and Impressions. The Content tab gives you insights on the performance of your posts, stories, and promotions. The Audience tab gives important insights on your audience.
Ready to jumpstart your brands’ Instagram Advertising Strategy? Contact the Social Media Advertising experts at MoreVisibility.
