Lately, Instagram has come a long way from being just a photo-sharing social channel to develop into an influential weapon for brand marketing and advertising. Over 600 million Internet users are surfing the Instagram platform to seek out new products on a daily basis.

Instagram has moved a level up in the marketing field considering today's competitive world, but driving real results is not a cake-walk, it requires a proper, strategic action plan to promote your business on an Instagram page.

Proactive marketers are seeking different ways to increase Instagram and by doing a proper study and learning from them, we have come together with these tips to ensure inorganic and organic marketing campaigns turn into every business owner’s favor –to safeguard your Instagram marketing tactics now and in the future. So, scroll down and have a look to make the most of them.

1.   Post consistently and on proper time 

We all know, brands need to be active in order to attract followers and increase engagement rates, but there is a limit to being active and not spamming your followers with updates every hour. A consistent 1-2 post on a daily basis is considered okay to keep your feed fresh and relevant attracting more eyeballs to your content. A study says posts posted between 8:00-9:00 AM in the morning or 2:00-5:00 PM in the noon reach a larger audience than any other time of the day.

2.     Make use of Instagram Carousels

Usage of carousels is considered to be one of the ways to keep your audience engaging in your post for a longer time that usual. Instagram allows you to post 10 images in one post, forming a carousel post. These images could be text content or a set of images and videos. Most famous ones are the guest carousels, where a Brand can take a review from all of its customers and create one video carousel posts.

3.     Have a Visually Engaging Instagram Feed

Instagram is a visually driven platform. A feed that is aesthetically pleasing would attract a lot more eyeballs than a feed with just images posted. A feed with a combination of video posts, image posts, quotes and carousels as their content will be a lot engaging as users gravitate towards diverse perspectives and authentic expressions. The perfectly positioned pictures and high saturated pictures are now being replaced with candid shots and earth tones.

4.     Pick the correct Hashtags

Choosing the perfect hashtags related to your posts can make a lot of impact on the audiences you are going to attract on your feed. Making use of hashtags that are too generic will face a lot of competition, rather use a mix of trending and industry specific hashtags to connect with the targeted audience. Create your own brand hashtags, pace it in your bio and make sure you use it on every post. It can make your brand hashtag a trending one, getting new audiences to the page.

5.     Instagram Marketing Ads 

It is observed that the story ads give a better CPA when compared to other modes of advertising even better than the Facebook ads and the news feed sponsored Ads. The platform offers three formats to create ads- Videos, images, carousels. Choose as per your requirements the exact mode of advertising and don’t forget to add a link directing it to your website.

6.     Explore the various Instagram video formats 

A picture may speak a lot for itself but a video is worth a lot more. Instagram offers you a suite of video options for the marketers to choose from. From Instagram stories that can me a combination of videos and stills into a single screen to a standalone 60 sec videos for long-form features, use them wisely and effectively as per your brand.

You can consider going live with a general Question and Answer session or reveal big about the new products being launched by your brand or maybe talk about the behind the scenes of a product design to deployment and development stories to your followers to increase Instagram engagement.

The latest released Instagram feature, IGTV allows you to create long length video content. Being the first mover on IGTV may help you engage in a lot of audience as you have less competition for views.

Make sure to add subtitles to your videos, there are a lot of people who watch a video muted. Hence, enabling the subtitles in the video would help the core message to be delivered onscreen alongside visuals.

7.     Contests and Giveaways 

Contests are a powerful engagement medium on Instagram which generates almost into three times likes and comments than a usual post would. Giveaway contests are the most popular type of contests on Instagram. This involves a product or service giveaway to the winners of the contest by following your account, liking the post and tagging their friends in your post. If this is executed well, it can be a powerful idea to boost engagement and brand awareness.

And for the Final bonus tip – You Instagram profile is like your online business – a module that is constantly growing and evolving, and its progress is calculated based on the number of followers and likes on the posts. By following the above tips, you can maximize your Instagram channels potential in 2020 no matter how the network evolves; you can evolve with it too, by getting those likes, comments and shares coming.