13 Eye-Opening Instagram Marketing Strategies to Stick to in 2021

Instagram offers a dramatic reach for brands to around 1.16 billion people. Gladly, Instagram Marketing has grown substantially at a whopping 76 million people in just the last quarter.

Today, brands need to look further into their track comments, performance metrics, Instagram story views, shares, and even DMs to understand their audience. Luckily, it’s easy to build your Instagram presence using the following strategies.

Having a unique Instagram marketing strategy is the first step of standing out in the crowd and also for long term survival in the market. Click to Tweet

After spending about a decade in the digital marketing industry, experts at MaxEffect Marketing – the best Digital Marketing in Denver would like to share my knowledge with amateurs who have ventured into this business with a dream of reaching new heights from ground zero. (1)

This article will give you all the necessary knowledge that will help you to rev up your Instagram strategy in 2021.

1. Define your goals

You cannot leverage social media platforms unless you don’t know what you’re trying to build. Every marketer should have an effective Instagram marketing strategy in place. Having a goal will help you to stay focused till you achieve it. Ask yourself the following questions:

Q.1) Do you want to create an online presence for your business?

Q.2) Do you want to increase brand awareness?

Q.3) Do you want to get leads?

Q.4) Do you want to establish your brand as an industry leader?

Q.5) Do you want to sell products directly from the app?

An actionable Instagram strategy will help you decide what matters to you the most in your business. Or else look for a reputable digital marketing agency in the USA to help you with the same.

2. Optimize your bio

Instagram bio offers the first look of your brand. This is the only reason why your bio needs to be informative, captivating, and engaging. Marketers should use their bio to give a generic description of your products and services, the type of content you need to post, other social media platform links, brand hashtags, and many more.

It’s necessary to include a trackable URL that can drive traffic, including your brand’s website link or the product page. You need to track this link to determine your traffic.

Google’s Instagram bio adds curiosity by the word ‘Google unfiltered’. This curiosity gap is the best way to drive website traffic and engagement. Create one depending on your marketing goals to create a meaningful approach.

3. Savage your content

Instagram essentials include comments, shares, and saves. To increase your engagement, you need to create content that lures your customer to take action. Your content should be such that it forces your customer to revisit your profile.

To create saveable content, you need to understand what is essential to your audience and think whether your content will help them find any value. Make it enjoyable by adding funny memes, infographics, reels, inspiring quotes, etc.

We think HubSpot has always managed to knock it out of the park by creating content that aligns with their audiences' needs. Despite knowing the fact that B2B SaaS marketing isn't easy on Instagram. Moreover, it offers high-quality content with targeted keywords and niche key phrases, making it 100% SEO friendly.

4. Use Instagram stories stickers at the fullest

As we dive into 2021, we are pretty sure that you would see more Instagram stories than ever. Stories stickers are the best way to connect with your brand and encourage your customers to communicate and speak their minds.

There are 2 common types of stickers that can be used to engage with your audience:

Question sticker – It helps your followers to ask you related questions. If you ask me, this one is the most used sticker as it gives my audience full information about my products/services. It's the best way to know your brand better.

Quiz – This allows you to share multiple-choice questions and track the results. With each right answer, you can count the total number of votes received.

Many such stickers like the 'countdown' sticker and likewise can help you generate more engagement.

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5. Build the look of your profile

Instagram is a visual platform; thus, you need to give it a meaningful ‘look’ that justifies your brand. It’s advisable to use specific color palettes, desired fonts, and brand image style that resonates with your business objectives. This is one way your followers can connect with your brand.

6. Sneak peek into your competitors Instagram profile

There are days when you might fall short of creativity. It happens with everyone!

Get straight into your Instagram account and look out for inspirations or ideas. Make sure you thoroughly check their kind of content, hashtags used, visual language, and every minute detail present in the post.

This has always helped us to create my own marketing strategy.

7. Influencer Marketing helps in growing your customer base

Fact Check:

The influencer marketing industry is on track to be worth up to $15 billion by 2022, up from as much as $8 billion in 2019, according to Insider Intelligence estimates, based on Mediakix data.

To reach more and more people, investing in Instagram influencers are the best alternative. You are simply leveraging their follower base and bringing you more business for the brand. The first marketing technique is to identify the right influencer to partner with.

The follower base of your followers trusts the products used by influencers. Ask them to pose with your product or service means you’re adding them to your customer base, increasing brand awareness, and increasing your sales simultaneously.

In today’s world, social media influencer marketing has turned into a full-time career. Your work is to research, set a budget, determine goals, find your influencer, and review and revise. Reckon the force of Influencer Marketing in this social media world!

8. Turn to Sponsored Ads

Instagram ads are the best tool to advertise and market your products and services. These ads allow the user to control how much they should spend by setting up an ad budget. As a matter of fact, an Instagram advertisement can reach around 52.9 million youth audience as it allows you to target your target audience on a whole new level.

It allows you to decide the location, budget, age range, gender, and other such features to connect with your potential audiences.

You sponsor these ads in different ways like photos, videos, dynamic ads, stories, etc. You can also run multiple ads for diverse audiences to gain much more engagement simultaneously.

9. Use as many hashtags as you can!

Unique hashtags play a pivotal role in Instagram marketing. Interactive hashtags can yield you more engagements and brand online visibility across all social media platforms. You can use it in different ways:

• Motivating your followers and other Instagram users to use your hashtag is an excellent marketing technique. Along with high engagement, you’re also aiming to get advertisement and awareness among users.

• Hosting contests, giveaways, and featuring consumer pictures on your Instagram profile is done to encourage your consumers to use the hashtag.

Let us show you the power of hashtags through some statistics:

• Brands that use at least one hashtag in their posts on Instagram get 12.6% better engagement than those who do not use any hashtag.

• Using hashtags on tweets exposes the tweet to twice more clicks, retweets, replies, and favorites.

• Research conducted by Buddy Media revealed that having just one hashtag can increase engagement with your post by 100%.

These small digital characters are very powerful and promise to generate outstanding results for your business.

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10. Be frank about your brand and business

The power of authenticity is likely to be stronger in 2021. More and more brands are revealing their real and vulnerable sides of their businesses. Showcasing the good with the bad or real-life struggles helps build a stronger connection to your audience. By doing so, your brand becomes more relatable even to vulnerable audiences.

Influencer, Sarah Nicole Landry, shared one of the most vulnerable and authentic moments with her followers, and she has grown from 70K to 1.7M followers and counting.

It's better to bring transparency to your products and services. This year and beyond, you may see more business leaders and marketeers sharing behind-the-scenes, host live Q&As, or podcasts focusing on real issues.

11. Share relevant data with your audience

With the advent of machine learning and personalized content, posting data-driven and personalized content is the latest fad. Spotify's Wrapped Campaign has helped users to celebrate artists, playlist creators, and podcasters who have helped them to survive in 2020.

Try out this trend and see when people liked to shop or identify the month's biggest sale. This will exactly tell you where you stand. Although data-driven content will take some extra time, effort, and money, it's worth the effort.

12. Focus on creating more video content

After the introduction of Instagram reels, Instagram users are showing no signs of slowing down. Video marketing can increase your engagement drastically. It's easy to make with so many applications available on the Internet.

In 2021, we would recommend you to get into Instagram reels and captivate your audience with relevant content. This bite-sized content enables you to explore a new creative video feature and attract your community at large.

13. Longer captions are in trend

Your Instagram caption can be up to 2,200 characters long. For many marketers, 'time spent on the post' is one of the factors that affect your Instagram posts' performance. The solution: Writing long captions and using line breaks.

You might be knowing that inserting spaces in the Instagram app can be difficult, and the best alternative is to create line breaks in your Instagram captions by using symbols between the lines.

Long caption length is proved to boost engagement according to influencers' marketing platform, Fohr. As per the reports, the average caption length has more than doubled since 2016, and the ones with longer captions have generated high engagement.

Did you know?

Our feeds will be filled with an average caption length of 405 characters – which averages out to be 65-70 words.

Writing a few sentences can actually earn you more engagement. Just like this one:

Also Read: Top Digital Marketing Strategies 2021: Get your Digital Marketing Strategy Back on Track

Engagement - the only key to unlock Instagram Marketing

The engagement ratio is an important factor that should be considered when speaking about Instagram marketing. To have a successful marketing strategy, you need to understand the mindset and needs of your customers.

Let us end this article with a few key takeaways:

• Curate high-quality, engaging, and shareable content.
• Build a consistent and aesthetical profile.
• Post your Instagram stories regularly.
• Opt for carousel posts. (posting multiple pictures in a single post)
• Add CTAs to increase the conversion ratios.
• Increase engagement via giveaways, contests, live videos, BTS, and continually responding to followers.

Instagram offers you a plethora of marketing options, and you also cannot deny the fact that Instagram is evolving and comes with new features every time. So, stay up-to-date and learn to convert these features into opportunities.

We hope to see you adopt some of the above marketing strategies and wish they work for you just like it did for us. Till then, climb the ladders of success with these 13 marketing strategies.

The main objective of MaxEffect Marketing is to attract clients to our business and matching our clients with partners, consumers and clients. Meeting a client's goal is our ultimate goal. We grow with our clients, which is the best measure of success! Join with the most reputed web design and Internet marketing company in Denver.