However, the sheer number of users is not what makes Instagram so interesting for businesses worldwide. Numerous studies show that the platform is great at engaging the audience and turning followers into verified leads:

• There are over 25 million business accounts on Instagram, while 200 million users visit at least one business profile every day.
• 60% of Instagram users discover new products on this platform.
• Instagram images get an average of 23% more engagement than the same content published on Facebook.

In such circumstances, you should be thinking about how to make this network work for your own business. We are here to help you with that, so keep reading to learn five tips to start promoting your store on Instagram.

1. Create a Standout Instagram Account

If you want to promote your store on Instagram, you can’t do it through the private profile. On the contrary, you need to create a standout business account and distinguish yourself from the crowd of competitors. A business account has several components that you need to take care of, so let’s check them out one by one here:

• Choose the right name and photo: Allow fans to find you easily by creating a business-related Instagram name and adding a branded profile picture. If possible, it would be best to give your account the official brand name (like Reebok or Adidas).
• Create a bio: A bio section is where you want to describe the purpose of your business, its goals, and vision. Let the followers know what you do really do without too promotional statements. Instead, try to build a unique style and explain what makes you better than other businesses in the same niche.
• Add a link in the bio: Instagram is not exactly URL-friendly, which means that the link in the bio is the only place where you can actually give people the chance to visit your website or landing page. You can change it from time to time in case you are launching a new campaign.

2. Create High-Quality Content

The secret of Instagram’s popularity lies in the fact that it’s an image-sharing network. Namely, humans are visual beings who process photos and videos much faster than plain textual content (60 thousand times faster, according to some reports).

This means that the road to success is made of high-quality Instagram images. You can use the platform to publish product photos, but the goal is not to make it too pushy or sale. It’s all about the context and putting your products in the perfect surrounding that resonates with the needs and expectations of the target audience.

For instance, Nike does a great job promoting women’s sportswear as part of their Tokyo 2020 campaign. They build a story around the Tokyo Olympics and put the products in the perfect context, which is exactly what makes their campaign so successful.

Of course, each photo you publish has to be highly professional. It must reflect the overall style and vision of your brand, while you can also create images that show how things work behind the scenes. The audience loves this feature because it proves that you are not some alienated organization but rather a group of individuals who share the same values as their followers.

3. Make an Image Branding Guide to Maintain Consistency

Quality content is not the only thing that can help you raise awareness and improve brand recognition. You can also play with visual effects, layers, and filters to design a consistent Instagram account and make it different than other similar pages.

You can notice it immediately because every serious Instagram account pays attention to the principle of consistency. However, the real question is: How can you achieve this level of harmony and coordination among images?

Jake Hudson, a professional writer, and a digital marketer say you need to find a color scheme that fits the style of your brand: “Once you’ve discovered the best color palette for your Instagram account, make sure to use it regularly and build a compact set of Instagram photos.â€

Before you make the final decision palette-wise, keep in mind that each color has a special meaning and connotation. There is a whole science behind the psychology of colors, so you need to be careful while choosing the ideal color scheme.

4. Grow Your Reach

Now that you know how to create quality content, you can focus on another important segment of Instagram marketing – growing the fan base. This tactic is the only way to boost the popularity of your store and keep attracting more followers long-term.

There are so many ways to increase the discoverability of your content, but we want to concentrate on three basic hacks. And even in some cases knowing that who viewed your Instagram profile can also help you grow your reach. Let’s check them out here:

• Create a hashtag strategy: Instagram users publish millions of posts on a daily basis, so you’ll need a tool that enables fans to discover your content. This tool comes in the form of hashtags. It’s not easy to find the best hashtag options, but you can do it by brainstorming, analyzing competitors, and using intelligence platforms like Analisa.
• UGC: User-generated content is the second way to grow the number of Instagram followers. The tactic is simple as you only need to find nice images related to your store or brand and share them on your own feed. It makes users feel acknowledged and appreciated, so you can expect more of them to come and join your community.
• Influencer marketing: Instagram influencers are a major force in digital marketing because users trust their opinions and recommendations. You should build relationships with influencers and ask them to promote your store occasionally. With a little bit of push from their side, your business can earn major Instagram publicity.

5. Mind the Engagement

The last advice on our list is to keep users engaged at all times. This is easier said than done, but there are lots of proven methods to ensure constant interaction with your followers. Firstly, you need to write appealing captions containing actionable suggestions.

For example, you can show a product photo and ask fans to pick the best color. That way, you give people the opportunity to express their opinions and make decisions, which is always a great engagement booster. If you are not sure how to write a nice caption, we recommend you to consult with professional writers or any other content creation service from the GradeMiners review.

Contests represent another very interesting tactic engagement-wise. The logic is clear: people love competing, so you should invite them to participate in your branded games.

For instance, you can publish an image of the big prize and share contest details in the caption. Almost every store exploits this marketing mechanism because a typical company increases the number of followers by 34% with a single contest campaign.

Conclusion

Instagram is not only a popular image-sharing platform but also a powerful business tool that you can use to promote your products or services. It gives you a plethora of features to market your company and it wouldn’t be wise to miss out on this precious opportunity.

In this post, we showed you five tips to start promoting your store on Instagram. These are not the only Instagram marketing tricks, but they are definitely most important, so make sure to use them as soon as possible. Of course, don’t hesitate to leave a comment if you have other suggestions to share with our readers – we would be glad to see it!

The post 5 Tips to Start Promoting Your Store on Instagram appeared first on Tricky Enough.

I believe that by now you’ve already sorted out almost everything – from the topics of your blog post to what you want to achieve through blogging. That’s great!

However, blogging requires more than that. If you want a job well done, you’ll need an effective strategy. To create a good strategy you must know yourself, your main goals, and you must find your own style of blogging.

Perhaps you haven’t imagined that through blogging you can do really amazing things, and if you do a really good job, you’ll be able to bring lots of loyal customers for your business.

Therefore, if you want to make the best out of your blog, stick with us and find out all you need to know about finding your own style of blogging.

What is Blogging Style?

To put it in simple words, your blogging style is shaped by the rules and guidelines that you’ve established according to the language style and tone, the imaging, and the design of the blog page and blog post. Of course, all this information is best to be kept in one place so you can make improvements easier.

It’s all a strategy after all. The blogging style you’ll stick to will serve your company’s best interests. Everything will be in accordance with everything. For instance, the language tone you use will be in accordance with your target audience, the same as the web design.

Why Do You need to Find Your Own Style of Blogging?

Just imagine writing a blog post with no fixed structure, in whatever writing style and tone that comes in your mind, and with images placed randomly throughout the article. Basically, you’ll write a blog post that serves to no purpose, at least not to one that benefits you.

It’s crucial to find your blogging style in order to create a strategic blog post and maintain their quality and consistency. Every blog owner should find its own style of blogging and create a document with all the rules and guidelines that help him serve his purpose.

As well, when your business grows, you most likely won’t be able to face everything by yourself, so you’ll bring on more writers to help you maintain the blog. Imagine how easy it will be for the new writers to understand and meet your expectations as long as you have the perfect strategy of your blogging style in one document.

Finding Your Blogging Style – Guide

1. Target Audience

The first and most essential step to find your blogging style is finding, understanding and knowing your target audience. You can’t write an outstanding blog-post if you don’t know who you’re writing it for. All your blogging style should revolve around your target audience as they are the ones that feed your business.

2. Brand Colors

Colors have the power to make everything feel alive. Black and white are simply boring and common these days, regardless of your target audience. But what’s so important about choosing the brand’s color?

Well, I’m glad you asked. Having a set of 3 to 5 colors wisely chosen and used allows you to spread your brand awareness. Everything from your logo and web design to images, graphics and infographics will be a mixture of the colors you have chosen.

This is a strategy that makes the reader associate the colors with your brand. Therefore, every time he sees those colors it will remember your brand.

3. Imaging Rules

One image can speak a thousand words. Therefore, instead of boring the readers with statistics and details, present an image with a suggestive graphic, and ta-da – the reader is hooked. But the way you’re imaging your blog is more than choosing suggestive images wisely.

There must be a set of rules regarding the selection and structure of pictures, just so you can ensure that everything falls into pieces no matter what. Here are some possible imaging criteria:

• The place of pictures in articles.

• The size and clarity of the images.

• How you credit the images.

• How you format the captions.

4. Choosing Fonts

Choosing fonts may be an obvious step in choosing your style, but not less necessary. The font style and size should be readable and well-chosen. If you work with more writers, then you must know what fonts and font sizes they should be working with.

Be aware as you must choose more fonts. When you write an article, you’ll use a title and more headings besides normal writing. For each, you’ll use different fonts and font sizes.

5. Writing Style and Tone

There are so many things you must decide regarding the writing style and tone. Of course, every decision you’ll make must be in accordance with your target audience, so you should do your research and find out what writing styles they favor.

The experts from Essay Mama suggest several important things that you should establish regarding the writing style:

• Learning the basics of styling – many brands require their writers to learn from the same source about writing styling, in order to have the same knowledge about styling in writing.

• British English or American English? – It depends on your target audience.

• Writing tone – you should create your brand voice that must be in accordance with your niche and, of course, your target audience. So, will you sound friendly and playful? Or perhaps authoritative and distant.

• Language – it’s obvious that the language you’ll use have to do mainly with the age of your audience, so if you’re aiming teenagers you should try a “cool” approach and keep up with the latest trends.

• Abbreviations – would your blog be the type that uses abbreviations or not?

• Quoting and sourcing – how will your writers quote and how do they link the quotes?

• Oxford comma – how do you feel about this rule? Will you follow it or not? There are many writers that don’t follow this rule, will you be one of them?

6. Organize

Now that you’ve established all your rules and guidelines, you can start writing your first blog as you’ve just found your writing style. The last step you have to make is organizing your blogging style rules properly. This way, when you’ll broaden your writers’ team, they will be able to get familiarized with your style of blogging quickly and easily.

Conclusion

Blogging becomes art once you understand its power and dedicate to it entirely. Practice is key.

Many people underestimate blogging and that’s exactly why they don’t succeed. Now that you’ve discovered its secrets and the main things that you should focus on, you have placed yourself on the path towards success.

One more thing you should keep in mind – change is the only constant in this world. Everything changes – people change, things change, laws change, trends change. Nothing stays the same. Therefore, you should embrace and learn how to leverage everything that changes around yourself in order to improve your blogging strategy.

The post How to Find Your Own Style of Blogging appeared first on Tricky Enough.

If you still haven’t started using Instagram for marketing purposes, it’s about time for you to start doing it.

Reasons to Use Instagram as a Marketing Platform

When you think of social media, the word negative may come to your mind. When we see teenagers being mesmerized by social media and doing nothing but scrolling down their feeds, the negative consequences of this phenomenon become obvious. When we become aware of the bullying and offensive language that’s not being controlled enough, it’s even clearer: social media platforms are not for everyone.

But when you need to develop your personal brand or sell products/services, these platforms are an inevitable part of the process. At this moment, Instagram has over 1 billion monthly active users. That number is growing!

Maybe you won’t expose your content to one billion users, but you’ll definitely get it out there. When done properly, Instagramming can make you and/or your brand famous.

But many people tried and failed using Instagram for marketing purposes. That’s because the audience is smarter than they think. Instagram users easily see through heavy promotion. If you want to make great things happen, you have to carefully craft each post you published.

That’s what we’re here for today!

7 Important Tips on How to Create Perfect Instagram Posts

1. Use Great Photos

Instagram is not about publishing random photos you captured with your smartphone. Even casual users don’t see it like that. This platform is all about expressing your creativity through photographs. If you fail to produce original visual content, you won’t grab the attention of your audience.

Since we’re talking about promoting products, you’ll clearly include them in the photographs. You want people to see them and realize what the post is about without even reading the caption. Think about high-end perfumes. They are being presented through gorgeous images that often feature models and the bottle itself.

That’s the kind of composition you want. Depending on your brand’s vibe, you may include the products in lifestyle photos, business surroundings, or anything else that comes to mind. But you have to keep this pattern uniform throughout the posts, so people will start recognizing them.

2. Use Product Tags

Did you know that you can attract direct purchases via Instagram? All you need to do is use product tags and stickers in your stories and posts. With this, you’ll make it easy for your audience to order the products with a few taps on the smartphone’s screen.

Instagram is all about making things easy. When someone sees a great product and a good description that accompanies it, they want to find out more about it. Instead of copying the product’s name and taking it to Google, they can simply tap the tag.

3. Don’t Limit the Campaign to Photos

Video content is a huge part of Instagram. Fun videos are great for brand promotion since they hold a user’s attention longer when compared to photos. The video also gives you more space to express a message, so the viewer will understand what the product is all about.

Film great videos and feature them on Instagram! Professional video production will require an investment, but with a well-developed marketing campaign, it’s a beneficial investment!

You can also upload videos in the Stories. These don’t have to be highly professional; just film someone using the product or recommending it through a testimonial.

4. Textual Content Is Important, Too

If you start scrolling through Instagram, you’ll notice that most users use quotes in the descriptions. That’s a cool strategy if you use a really good quote and you don’t do it too often. But get real: as you scroll down a feed full of quotes, you start thinking: don’t people have their own words to share? When it comes to brands, you expect uniqueness and creativity. Quotes don’t fit in such a description.

So you have to be more inventive. Talk about the products you promote, but make sure you don’t sound too silly. If it’s hard for you to craft perfect descriptions every time, you may collaborate with a writing service like EssayOnTime.

5. Connect With Your Followers in Real Time

Did you know that you can share a live video with your followers? This is a great way for you to present a product in action. If, for example, you’re selling kitchen utensils, connect with a famous food blogger and film them while using these products. If you’re selling natural soaps, you can show the process of production.

Since the viewers can comment in real time, live videos are a great opportunity for Q&A sessions. You can invite your followers to ask anything related to the products or the brand, and you’ll answer.

See? There are plenty of ideas to come up with. Just get creative and connect with your audience!

6. Share Behind-The-Scenes Shots

You’ll produce several posts according to classic marketing techniques, which showcase the product in a commercial-like setting. These are beautiful posts that grab attention. But you need to spice up your strategy with something more.

How about showing behind-the-scenes moments? You can capture moments of the production or use of the product. You may show the team who stands behind that product. That’s a great way to build trust since your audience will get to see how serious your business is.

7. Engage Your Followers

So do you just post photos and videos with descriptions and think you’re done? No; you’re not done until you really engage your audience. You want them to comment. You want a real discussion. That’s the only way for the wider Instagram community to start seeing your posts.

In simpler words, you want more followers and you want them to comment and like. How do you achieve that? Prizes! That’s your answer. Invite your followers to tag a friend in the comments and share their opinion about your product. Set the rules: both the one who comments and the tagged friend should follow your page. As a prize, you’ll offer valuable product packages to random winners. You’ll provide two packages for each winner, so the tagged friend will also benefit from the contest.

This is a smart way to quickly build a base of followers. But you shouldn’t focus your entire energy on contests. Remember: you need high-quality content on a regular basis, and you cannot afford to give out valuable prizes every single day.

Suggested:

Methods to know to stack your Instagram profile.

Are You Ready for Your Instagram Fame?

It’s not that hard to create an Instagram post. You just upload an image, write a description and click send. Wait; it’s not that easy, after all. This has to be a good post since you want it to promote your brand. The above-listed tips will get you there!

The post 7 Tips for Perfect Instagram Posts appeared first on Tricky Enough.