Building a solid, trusted online presence is paramount to your local business’s success. Instagram is a powerful marketing tool that has the second-largest user base of social media platforms. 78% of marketers worldwide use Instagram to grow their sales and increase brand awareness. Hence, local businesses need to try out and incorporate new Instagram growth solutions to maintain a steady IG account growth.
Instagram’s growth strategy begins with the number of followers. However, in addition to the number of followers, a higher engagement rate is essential for developing a sense of trust in your local business. This article will look at some best practices for local businesses to grow their Instagram business account positively and effectively, turning it into a strong selling point in their favor. Then, if you are interested in exploring more how to drive new customers to your profile and persuade them to check out your local business, continue reading this post.
1. Create an Instagram Business Account.
As a business owner, first of all, switch to a public business account. An Instagram business account gives you access to various tools and features, including Instagram analytics, clickable link in Bio, Instagram shoppable posts, ads, and more.
The Importance of Using an Instagram Business Account
Additionally, try to optimize and update your business profile by including crucial business information such as email, phone number, or a link to your website. Use your bio strategically to draw in more visitors to your business page.
2. Invest in a Proven Instagram Growth Service
Choose an Instagram growth service that increases the number of your real followers naturally and gradually over time. An efficient Instagram growth service will offer you organic growth without bots, spam, software, or fake followers. It will use targeting filters such as your location, brand, the type of followers you want to target, niche relevant hashtags, the industry competitors, and more to find new potential targeted customers for your business.
3. Collaborate with the Right Influencers
Influencer marketing can also bring a bigger, more engaged audience to your local business account. If you have a limited budget and want to achieve more targeted and interested followers, working with local micro or nano influencers and converting their fans into your followers is the best option for you. However, finding the right influencers aligned with your business and relevant to your product or service – especially in such a competitive Influencer market – is not easy at all.
One efficient way to find relevant local influencers is to do a local hashtag search on Instagram. To do this, you search for specific and relevant keywords within your industry to discover the popular posts that use local hashtags. Through this method, you may find the local influencers’ content that you seek. The other option is social listening. Look for people talking about your business on the platform and know it well. But if you don’t have the time to deal with it yourself, you can outsource it to an experienced Influencer marketing agency.
4. Use Instagram Hashtags to Reach More Targeted Followers
Local, specific, niche-relevant hashtags in the content can help you reach a much larger share of local customers. If used wisely, it will grow your Instagram account, providing many opportunities for your local business. Be sure to include the keywords in hashtags that your target audience is more likely to use.
5. Post Regular Engaging Content
Regular social media posting will keep your account at the top of your followers’ minds. Sharing high-quality videos and images, taking advantage of carousel posts, Reels, Instagram Stories, or Live, and writing exciting captions will help you achieve a higher engagement rate. Moreover, picking the right time for publishing your posts when most of your followers are active and online will provide a more personal touch with the audience.
6. Keep a Relevant & Fresh Instagram Account
In switching to the Instagram public business account, you may decide to clean up the old, irrelevant, and outdated content. Note that for creating a powerful brand on Instagram, you need a cohesive feed. Whether you plan to change your content strategy for achieving more engagement or revamp your Instagram feed, the official Instagram app only allows you to delete posts one by one. For bulk deleting posts on your Instagram account, you can use an Instagram post deleter to remove lots of selected posts in one click.
7. Interact with Your Followers
Build loyal relationships and establish your online presence on the platform. For achieving a higher engagement rate on Instagram, you should have an active and engaging presence there. To do this, you should actively join the talks, respond to the comments, questions, concerns, and fears. Sharing your followers’ content, or exchanging advice, tips, recommendations, or small talk through Instagram stories or Instagram Live can establish a more friendly and trustable connection with your followers.
8. Run Instagram Contests and Giveaways
Instagram Contests and giveaways have become a helpful strategy for businesses to increase their follower count and generate more engagement rates. Picking suitable prizes related to your business or brand is an excellent idea to improve your brand awareness and drive more sales.
You can use an Instagram giveaway picker to choose a random winner for your giveaway, contest, or promotion. It can handle the process of picking a winner in a way that is fair and unbiased. Otherwise, you will lose the trust of your followers, destroying your hopes of establishing a positive reputation for your business.
Image Source: Instagram Contests Receive More Comments & Likes than Regular Posts
9. Get Rid of Inactive or Spam Accounts
If you are looking for better levels of engagement on your account, ghost (or inactive) followers can make your follower-to-engagement ratio shaky. However, having many dormant accounts and unfollowing them all at once will result in a temporary Instagram ban. Moreover, this task can be highly time-consuming and tiresome. That is why you need an Instagram unfollow app to clean up your account and improve the engagement rate efficiently. The app will help you analyze and manage your Instagram followers, helping your marketing efforts scale quickly.
10. Keep Track of Your Performance
Instagram Insights makes it easy to monitor your marketing performance and improve it over time. It helps you learn what’s working and what’s not. You can also use other Instagram analytics tools to access additional metrics for an even more detailed overview of your performance. Based upon your business goals, set up your Key Performance indicators (KPIs). Then continually review and assess the metrics. Fix the problems and enhance your current performance to achieve your sales goals.
Final Notes
There are many great marketing tools and techniques that can assist you in gaining more targeted followers, driving more engagement and revenue from your Instagram page. Hopefully, the practices outlined here will help you win over new targeted followers and turn them into potential loyal buyers for your local business. If you have not leveraged Instagram to promote your business yet, now is the best time to set up your Instagram business account and give it a chance to surprise you!
