Instagram Promotion: The Ultimate Guide For 2020

The first stage is the preparation of the profile in Instagram Promotion

Promoting your Instagram profile is a lot of work in which you don't depend in any way on how lucky you are. It's just an algorithm of actions, and if you follow it, everything will work out. First, decide why you need it. Usually any SMM promotion is aimed at increasing profits. But there are also exceptional cases - when a person just wants to become famous and useful. In any case, you will have to go through several stages, the first of which is preparing your account for promotion.

Business profile connection

Go to your business profile. This is necessary because additional opportunities will immediately open before you, one of which is access to statistics. Go to your profile settings, in the "Account" section, and select "Switch to a professional account".

After switching, choose what topic your blog belongs to. This could be a personal blog, an online store, etc. Choose the right category to make Instagram algorithms work for you.

Ribbon layout: visual content

Promotion of an Instagram account is impossible without high-quality visual design. First, the user looks at the picture and only then at the text content. That is, in order for a person who visits your page to remain there and become interested in your brand or product, the profile must be beautiful. How to plan your ribbon:

• Create a content plan for the month . Describe which posts should come out and when. For example, if you are a fitness blogger, you can tell your audience about the principles of training, proper nutrition, the benefits of certain exercises. When you decide what text will be in your posts, think about what photos will fit this text.
• Take quality photos . The era of photos on mid-range smartphones with yellow or blue filters is a thing of the past. People love quality live content without heavy processing.
• Decorate the ribbon in the same style . It's simple: choose which colors will appear in the profile. For example, if you run a personal brand and wear light clothing more often, it is more convenient to post content in light colors. That is, decide for yourself that milky, white and pale pink tones will prevail in your tape (conditionally).
• Use helpers . Assistant applications such as Content Office, UNUM or Planoly will help you quickly and easily plan your feed.

For example, let's take a tape, decorated according to all the rules of color ratio - it is pleasant to look at it, you want to study it.

This is a photographer's blog. The ribbon is designed in the same style. Both the work of the photographer and his personal photos are made in the same colors.

Interesting! According to statistics, photos in which people are dressed in light clothes and smiling gain about 70% more likes. A great life hack if you need to increase audience engagement.

Competent copywriting

Instagram promotion starts with visual content design, but without high-quality text content, you won't get far. Expertise is important. People are tired of useless "info-gypsies", whose main task is to enrich themselves at the expense of subscribers, but not to benefit. So what should your content be like?

Expert and helpful . If you are writing about proper nutrition, you do not need to talk about how this topic is relevant in the modern world. Skip straight to principles and practical advice.

Literate . People do not like to read illiterate texts. Be at least three times Nobel laureate, if you write "zhi" and "shi" with the letter "s", you will not be able to promote your profile.

Easy to read . Leave abstruse professional words to surprise the employer or client. When blogging, explain it as if you were talking to a child. A person who wants to learn something from you will never lead to a text that is difficult for him to read.

Interesting . No one is interested in knowing the history of the discovery of the seventh element in the periodic table, but interesting experiments on a blog about chemistry will be accepted with a bang.

Think about subscribers

If you create a profile with your readers in mind and not yourself, you will succeed. Create content by posing as your subscriber. What would you like to know in his place? An example is a girl who runs a blog as a PhD student and writes for those who want to follow the same path.

The girl sees what her subscribers are interested in, and answers their questions simply and competently.

Profile icons and trending stories

It would seem that such a trifle as profile icons does not affect large-scale promotion on Instagram. Globally, this is really a trifle, but their incorrect design or lack of design can scare off large customers or picky readers. Several principles of icon design in actual stories:

• - icons should be created in the same style. Perhaps you entrust this job to a professional designer;
• - icons should correspond to the visual content of the feed. If your ribbon is decorated in milky colors, black and burgundy icons will be out of place;
• - in the icons, you can lay down the style of your brand. For example, draw your logo on them. This will increase profile awareness.

A well-planned feed, beautifully designed icons of stories and an avatar in the same style create a feeling of completeness - it's a pleasure to visit such profiles.

This is the designer's profile, and everything is good here - the avatar, the icons, and the profile header.

Profile header

Promotion of an Instagram account can be perfect in everything: in content, in visuals, in communication with subscribers, but if you did not design a profile header, you will lose about 30% of customers. Header design rules:

• - If you are promoting a personal brand, write down who you are, what you write about, where you live, your achievements, which you are most proud of. If you have a personal project, give a link.
• - If you are promoting services or products, write what kind of product or service it is, how to find you offline (if there is such a place), how to contact you and other significant things.
• - There shouldn't be any mysterious inscriptions. It is important! For example, if you are promoting the profile of a lingerie store, do not write in the cap: "a woman should be a mystery." Trust me, potential clients don't want to solve the riddle written on your profile, they want to be told what and how.
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• Consider an example

A well-designed profile header is something that stands alongside high-quality visual content. To understand the essence of the topic, we give an example of a profile, where everything you need is indicated in the header.

Everything is good here. If the user looks at this header, he will immediately understand that this is a design course account, that the course starts on February 17 and will last 2 weeks, that he is in demand among students, since the 14th stream is already being typed, and he will also see that he can contact the organizer can write a message in "Direct".

Second stage - active promotion

If you have successfully prepared your account, you can be proud of yourself: you did the most difficult thing that can be in promoting a page on Instagram. Then all that remains is to attract users and support the developed strategy so that the audience's interest does not fade away.

Use all Instagram tools

The methods for promoting on Instagram are virtually limitless. The platform itself provides many ways to help you become more recognizable. To speed up the process of engaging your audience, use each of them.

Ribbon . Publish new expert posts regularly, but do not bother subscribers with your presence in the feed, otherwise they will simply unsubscribe or hide your posts. For a personal brand, the optimal number of posts is 2-3 per week, for a store - 5-6. The exception is accounts like "Daily Motivation". They, as the title suggests, must publish motivating content every day.

Story . The profession of "story maker" has already appeared, and it is paid no worse than the services of an SMM specialist. This is due to the fact that stories have become a full-fledged channel for promoting and interacting with the audience. Here you can get in touch more often than in posts, and people react to stories more warmly and actively.

Live broadcasts . To get closer to your audience, periodically broadcast live. It can be anything: a question-and-answer conversation, an expert webinar, just a broadcast of your leisure or work.

IGTV . You can upload long videos here, and they won't bother your subscribers, because they are not in the feed. This is a great way to show that you know how to create expert content, but for some reason few people use such a tool.

Professional ways to promote . They are worth highlighting. This includes targeted advertising, interaction with bloggers and mutual PR, but we'll talk about them in more detail below.

Engage actively with your audience

Before embarking on the professional ways to promote on Instagram, it is worth noting that without active interaction with the audience, subscribers will quickly cool off to your product and to you as a person. Therefore, along with setting up a promotion strategy, it is important:

• - Conduct a dialogue with the audience. When publishing a new post, ask at the end what your readers think of it.
• - Respond to comments. Give feedback in the comments. Even if the subscriber simply thanked you for a good post, reply him with something nice. In the future, you will be more likely to comment.
• - Give gifts. It doesn't cost anything to give away a little present, but your subscribers will be pleased and engagement will be high.

Only those accounts that are written for people are read.

Targeted advertising

Let's move on to professional methods of business promotion. Targeted advertising is one of the main, if not the main method. Its essence lies in the fact that through the facebook or Instagram ad account, you configure the parameters related to your audience, launch ads, and it is shown to people who fit the specified parameters. Targeted advertising is a paid tool. First, you fill in the budget in the advertising office, and only then you can release an advertisement. The more money, the more people will see your ad, the more subscribers there will be. Several nuances:

• - setting a target is a complex analytical process. A person who does not know how to deal with it runs the risk of simply draining the budget;
• - the blog will always have natural unsubscriptions. To block unsubscriptions, you also need money for targeted advertising.

If possible, it is better to entrust the setting of the target to a professional. You will pay him for the work, but without his participation you risk spending several times more.

Working with bloggers

Everything is simple here: you pay money to a famous blogger, he advertises your account. But there are several pitfalls:

• - To promote a brand on Instagram, it is important to choose only those bloggers who themselves used white methods of promotion. Pages with fancy likes and followers will not bring you a good audience. To determine if a blogger is cheated, ask him for profile statistics. If he has 1,000,000 subscribers, but at the same time 50 likes on the photo - a reason to think. If a blogger has 50,000 subscribers and 30,000 likes on a photo, it is not followers, but likes, because such a ratio is unlikely.
• - Choose bloggers related to your blog topic. If you sell strollers, there is no point in buying an ad from a soccer player.

There is such a profession - "blogger manager". If you are not sure if you can select suitable blogs, you can hire a specialist.

Mutual PR

This method of promoting on the Instagram social network is similar to the previous one, but with minor differences:

• - You are advertised by a blogger in exchange for his advertising on your blog. For someone to want to advertise you on the terms of mutual PR, your blog must already be promoted, and mutual PR is just a means of its further promotion.
• - Competently organizing mutual PR is a whole art. Usually it takes place on the terms "I will tell about you, and you - about me." No one thinks about the effectiveness of such advertising and profile statistics, but in vain. A competent approach allows you to turn mutual PR into a full-fledged promotion channel.

When learning the basics of promoting on Instagram, do not forget to think about how the followers of the blogger who will post it will react to your ad. If he has ads after ads in his profile, it is quite possible that his readers are already tired of this and will not even notice your ad.

The third stage is audience engagement

We analyzed what a competent online promotion looks like on Instagram, but did not consider the subtleties on which the fate of an already promoted blog depends.

All about Instagram algorithms

Remember that promotion is not only about attracting subscribers, but also a constant struggle for their attention. If you have, for example, 500,000 subscribers, but you suddenly stopped releasing interesting and useful content, some will unsubscribe, some will simply stop reading you. Coverage will drop anyway, and what does that mean:

• Instagram will think that you have stopped posting something useful;
• subscribers will not see your new posts, since Instagram will lower them down the feed;
• in a chain reaction, the coverage will fall even more.

Getting out of this quagmire is difficult enough, so if you have already taken up the promotion of your blog, do not leave it.

How to thin the tape

The expert posts alone tire readers. To increase engagement, thin the feed periodically:

• interesting news;
• contests among subscribers;
• comic content;
• viral content;
• your personal reasoning;
• polls;
• any other posts you can think of.

Effective promotion on instagram is versatile content, including a vacationer.

What not to do

Help in promoting Instagram is often offered by people who ask for ridiculous amounts of 200-500 rubles, for example, for 5000 subscribers. The first thing you can't do is use Instagram promotion services from such "specialists", and here's why:

• - They use gray methods of promotion through Instagram cheating likes, followers, comments. Instagram bans for this.
• - They are not responsible for the result. If their actions lead to a ban, no one will try to unblock the account.
• - As a result of such promotions, bots will come to you - dead pages, from which there is no benefit.

Summing up, we can conclude that the design of the profile, live communication and professional methods of promoting a profile on Instagram are good, and cheating subscribers and inaction in your own profile is bad. If you are not sure what you can do efficiently, contact an SMM specialist.