Instagram is designed to be used with the iPhone, iPad, iPad Touch, and Android. This social media platform allows you to share your photos with the community and gain new followers. Instagram marketing can be effective, but it takes some planning, care, and commitment.

In this article, we’ll consider four actions that you can engage in to use this massive mobile photo sharing network effectively as a marketing tool.

Advertising Versus Marketing

Before discussing the four points being offered, it’s important to differentiate between marketing and advertising. With advertising, you are sending your message out to a mass audience in an attempt to sell your product or service. You may or may not pay for advertising, but the fact is an advertisement is an attempt to sell something. That’s it.

Marketing often takes a less direct approach. Consider marketing to be an attempt to create long-term and or ongoing interest in a product or service by connecting with people in a manner that allows you to share useful insights and information.

This is done in order to gain their trust. Marketing allows you to be a resource and/or to reveal yourself to be an expert in the field, and in doing so you make the necessary connections needed to develop a client or customer relationship with those who are exposed to your marketing efforts.

A Complete and Great Looking Profile

If you’re trying to gain trust and create interest, then your Instagram profile should be three things: complete, interesting, and attractive. The idea of having a complete profile is fairly basic. You need to have all of the blanks regarding who, what, and why you are complete.

Make it interesting and attractive by offering information that people will want to know about and hopefully know more about . Create an attractive profile by choosing your image well, as Instagram is primarily visual. The end effect is that people should want to know more about you, what you do, and how you can be a resource to them.

Great Images and Fresh Content

Great images are the essence of effective Instagram marketing. That means carefully choosing what you publish via the social media site. Images should be tasteful, reflective of your Instagram account and business, and provoke appropriate interest.

Daily, fresh content on Instagram is great to have, but it needs to be done in a selective manner. It’s better to have one great photo on the photo sharing network, rather than 10 mediocre ones. If you cannot post things on a daily basis, then shoot for at least three times a week.

Themes. Series, Humor

Three interesting marketing approaches on Instagram are developing images that have a related theme, creating a series of photos that in some way are connected, and/or developing humorous offerings that may appear once or twice a week along with other posts.

A theme for a florist might be “springtime flowers,” or for a massage therapist “favorite relaxing vistas.” Perhaps you’re a travel agent, and you decide to publish a series of photos from a specific vacation spot, or you’re a trainer, and you develop a series showing how certain muscle groups work.

On the humor side, as a trainer you might offer images on sports blunders, or as a clothing retailer, you could provide pictures of outlandish outfits you’ve coordinated.

If you do decide to go with a series, theme, or humorous approach, remember to change it up and don’t keep repeating the same thing every day for weeks on end. Keep it interesting and you’ll get people’s attention.

Connecting with Others

In the area of connecting with others, there are three things that you can do to help your marketing efforts. The first is to follow people on Instagram who you would like to see follow you. Keep adding appropriate people to follow everyday.

The second is to connect your website to your Instagram account and/or blog. Make sure that they work together and that people who visit your site and/or blog can link with your Instagram account with just one click.

Finally, connect your Instagram with the other social media outlets you use. Re-post on Facebook, Tweet your images, post them on Pinterest, and do whatever else you can do.

Stay connected with others by being connected to as many different outlets as possible, thus giving you maximum exposure.

Everyday marketing

Social media is most effective when it is used prudently on a daily basis. Constantly posting content will get old, and it will start to annoy people, but Instagram users who are able to offer those on the Internet inspiring, clever, and/or unique images, rather than a long list of uninteresting and random photos, are sure to succeed in their marketing efforts. Be smart when using Instagram to market you services or products.

Use an Instagram Bot for Automation

Much of the marketing can be fully automated so that you get more followers, traffic, popularity, and sales on virtual autopilot. There are high leverage activities you should be doing and others you shouldn’t.

Grab your 2 hour free demo of Ninjagram at this link. It’s consistently ranked the #1 marketing software. See for yourself why.

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