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While Instagram is the ideal platform for artists, you can promote your business there even if you can’t draw! Find out how in this blog post.
Instagram is mainly about telling your story to the public by sharing images and their captions. A lot of your time dedicated to Instagram will be taken by creating graphics and photos, but it’s not the only thing you do.
Before you even start with your Instagram marketing, you have to determine your audience, and find your voice and style. After that, you can start creating your visuals, engage with your audience, and convert them into readers, customers, or subscribers.
In this article, I’ll guide you through all of these steps, one by one. In the end, you will have a solid understanding of Instagram’s basics and will be able to start with your marketing journey.
I, personally, am not doing much of Instagram marketing, because I don’t have the budget or skills to take photos. However, this article serves as a kind of information archive for me – I will return to it myself once I start with marketing on Instagram.
Finding Your Audience
If you’ve done any marketing in the past, you know how important knowing your audience is. I know it’s kind of an overused cliche at this point, but your thing is not for everyone. You have to find who will like your products, your blog posts, your books, your anything, and you have to get to know them inside out.
Of course, this isn’t individual people. You want to find certain groups of people that you’ll target. Write down a few key traits these people share. What they like, what they do on their commutes to work, what they’d never buy, etc.
If you want to visualize this a bit better, you can create what’s called a persona. You will basically create a fictional person that embodies your ideal customer. This helps because you’re no longer targeting the abstract group of “middle-aged entrepreneurs”, but rather “Adam Mills”, the fictional entrepreneur in his forties. Write down some of his hobbies, traits, and dislikes.
Voice & Style
Social media is very, very saturated. Because of this, you have to find your way to stand out. Your voice is the thing that can make that happen.
Determine how you want to speak to your audience. Do you want to be seen as formal? Conversational? Do you want to be using swear words from time to time? All of this will make your audience recognize your content in seconds, if you stay consistent with your voice.
Style is similar to voice, but it’s all around writing. What images you post on Instagram? What color palette do you use? How are the your photos framed?
If you determine your style and voice to cater to your audience, and stay consistent with it, you’ll arrive at a point where people will recognize your work without even seeing your name next to it.
Graphics & Photos
Your visuals are the thing that will catch your readers’ eyes on Instagram. It will make them stop scrolling and click on your post, read the caption, and maybe convert to followers, subscribers, or even customers.
If you aren’t an artist, you need to create photos. Make sure your photos are well-lit, non-cluttered, focused on what subject you want to show, and are consistent with your style.
If you personally are not a photographer, you can either learn, or find someone who is a photographer. If you want to hire one, you can look on sites such as Fiverr. For learning, I can recommend a nice beginner course on iPhone photography on Skillshare. The teacher goes through the basics, such as setting up the camera, composition, focus, etc. You can get 2 months of Skillshare Premium for free through that link.
Your profile should be mostly photos. However, from time to time, you can sprinkle in a graphic. This is an image made by you that includes a quote, or a snippet of your book or article, whatever you think your audience would resonate with. To make this, you can use Canva, which has a ton of free templates, or Figma, which gives you a bit more control.
Personally, I use Figma, but I have used Canva in the past when creating pins for my Pinterest account. Try out both, see what fits you best.
Be sure to use user-generated content, as well. If some of your fans post something featuring your product, repost it (and give them full credit). Here’s a great article on reposting content on Instagram!
Engagement
Your posts are worthless if there is no engagement. On Instagram (and many other social media sites), engagement is what drives the post to be seen by more people. You need to get people to comment on your posts, and always respond. Strike up a conversation.
One of the best ways you can do this is by asking a question at the end of your caption. Make sure it’s relevant to your post and to its caption.
Stories
Instagram Stories are an amazingly powerful tool for you to use. Stories stick around only for 24 hours, so you can experiment very well with the types of content you share there.
You can show a bit of your background, talk to the camera, tell something about your business, share a bit about the behind-the-scenes. You can also tease posts you made – that will drive people to your main feed.
Conclusion
Instagram can be an amazing tool for marketing. You can share the story behind your business, create eye-catching visuals of your products, and transform users to followers, subscribers, and customers.
If you have any thoughts about this article or experience with Instagram marketing, please share in the comments. You can also reach out directly to me via email; darezar@eledris.com.
I would also like to invite you to sign up for my newsletter. You can get a ton of free exclusive resources for my articles, such as checklist, worksheets, and exclusive extensions. I also send out emails about my business, worldbuilding, and all the related fields.
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Skillshare Class
A lot of the information I learned to write this article came from one Skillshare class – Instagram for Business: Build an Engaged Community | Learn with Iconosquare.
It’s a 90-minute crash course in Instagram marketing for non-artist. If you’re seriously considering using Instagram to promote your business, check the course out – the teacher, Tyler McCall, has much more experience with Instagram than me.
You can get two months for Skillshare Premium for free and watch the class via this link.
Other Social Media
While Instagram is an amazing platform and you should be on it, there are other social media that are great for promoting your business.
Twitter has you posting Tweets, small snippets of text and images. Tweets are extremely rapid-fire, as they die after about 30 minutes. However, in that small amount of time, you can still get a ton of engagement.
Pinterest is, on the other hand, extremely long-term, and is my favorite marketing platform. On Pinterest, you post images (pins), along with a description and a link. The thing about Pinterest is that it isn’t exactly a social media site, as much as a visual search engine. Because of this, pins can drive traffic even years after their posting.
If you’re interested in marketing on Pinterest, I can help you out with your pin design and your strategy! Check out my Fiverr profile for more info.
FAQ
Instagram can be to promote your business via posting images with captions telling engaging stories. In order to do well in Instagram marketing, you have to determine your audience, find your voice and style, and create your visuals and captions.
First things first, determine your audience. Then find your voice and style to ensure you stay consistent within your post. After that, you can start creating visuals (photos and graphics), and post them with engaging captions.
