From being acquired by Facebook, to incorporating Stories, to introducing IGTV, Instagram has become a cost-effective, streamlined platform that offers friends, businesses, and entrepreneurs the opportunity to reach mass numbers of people. Instagram’s offerings in direct messaging (DM), sponsored ads, and customizable posts continue to help smaller fish grow in larger and larger ponds.
If you want to better market yourself on Instagram, you should absolutely leverage DMs, ads, and posts as ways to connect with influencers and your target audience.
But how should you frame these marketing offerings? How should you approach them? What should you convey when you implement them?
Here are 3 To Do’s that will significantly enhance your marketing approach and impact on clients, potential partners, and followers:
- Be authentic. Don’t use Instagram solely as an ESPN highlight reel. Highlights are great, but more people are interested in watching the game behind your highlights because the game is more relatable and representative of your life. When you share your authentic self, in the form of your trials and your triumphs, you display your humanness and your humility. You automatically connect with your audience and develop relationships based on trust, vulnerability, and transparency. Authenticity is the key to connection and will allow you to stand out amongst the noise of highlight reels.
- Be personal. On top of being authentic, you need to be personal with your audience in order to more deeply connect with them. If you’re using DMs to initiate relationships with influencers, you should personalize your message to connect with the individual influencer. Nobody feels a connection when they open up a generic message – even if you have a general approach to your messaging, at least personalize a couple sentences to connect with the recipients. And in your posts, you can be more personal by tagging others and leaving powerful messages that help personalize different topics for your particular audience. The more personal you become with influencers and with your audience, the deeper you connect with your target market.
- Be engaging. Instagram is a community – engage others by liking their posts, leaving insightful comments, and offering to help others along the way! When others see and feel your support, they are even more inclined to connect with you and reciprocate your initial support.Engagement sparks further action, opportunity, and connectedness with other influencers and your target audience.
Look at these 3 To Do’s as tiers for enhancing your marketing, relationship building, and connectedness. Quite frankly, all three of these topics are one in the same.
When you’re authentic, you present your full self to your audience as a way to represent yourself. A one-way street.
When you’re personal, you individually connect with your audience members and allow them to open up to you. A two-way street.
By Scott Bartnick
