Instagram is no doubt the king of today’s social-scape. Now owned by social networking giant Facebook, Instagram and Facebook collectively hold the largest pool of users. That’s why many businesses spend a lot of money on creating Instagram marketing strategies that would help them engage and communicate better with their target market. However, as businesses use every opportunity to optimize their Instagram posts, it is getting harder to grab your potential consumer’s attention. If you want to leverage your visual content, you’ll need to consider the pros of cons of Instagram marketing.
Pros
On Instagram, every picture has a potential of becoming viral. If you hit the public’s soft spot, you might be in the running to getting thousands to millions of views. It’s not impossible to meet your sales quota in a few hours after a viral photo goes out.
You can show off your products or services through a well-thought of visual content and your followers will do the marketing for you. When they like your photo, they may re-share it. And of course, any liking and interaction you acquire, in turn, puts you on the good side of Insta’s temperamental algorithms. That’s really what you want at the end of the day.
Cons
In the grand scheme of things, it’s not all that easy to market your products or services on Instagram. There are many audiences who are simply wasting their idle time online by browsing through their Instagram. So, if you want real customers, create posts that busy people and even those who have no Instagram accounts would take interest in. Not everyone who shares your photo is a potential customer. So, don’t mistake your number of shares as metrics of your potential revenue
How effective is Instagram marketing?
Now that we’ve covered the pros of cons of Instagram marketing, what makes it so effective? A successful Instagram marketing campaign includes metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of the company’s social marketing efforts. Many companies use software service with analytics program which is efficient for most companies because they can track whether or not the posts are actually helping them reach their goals. But, you can create your own metrics.
Here are some features of a comprehensive Instagram marketing evaluation tool:
- Evaluating the connection between the sales and Instagram interaction
- Checking the connection between the comments on its posts with the boost in sales
- Determining which posts get the most positive reaction from the social media audience.
Of course, you can always sell via Instagram by posting direct sales campaign. But, in most cases, Instagram is used as a marketing strategy to share information with a wider range of audience. It is often used to supplement an existing online presence, like a website or Facebook page.
Since Instagram is about images, your content marketing strategy must heavily incorporate visual content to generate more views and engagement. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, as long as you’re using Instagram, visual content matters. So, if you have a blog, insert an image at the beginning of your article, and include the said image in the snippet section (main page) of your blog.