10 Tips To Grow Your Business On Instagram In 2023
Last update: 29 May 2023 at 08:19 pm
2.33/5Instagram is a goldmine for growing small businesses on social media. Over 200 million companies on this visual platform are fighting to grow their brands, attract more target audiences and boost sales. Every marketer’s most practical advice is to grow your business on Instagram.
The competition is fierce, and it has become the survival of the fittest!
While a few businesses are winning, others struggle to make an impact.
Are you on the losing side?
No worries, this guide will empower you with tips that can turn things around in 2023 and place your business on the growth path on IG.
Why Grow Your Business On Instagram?
Instagram isn’t the only social media platform. Other social media platforms include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and the like.
Why choose Instagram?
The answer is simple – the power of visuals!
Visuals move audiences on Instagram and also shape their purchasing decision. People on IG want to learn about brands, interact with them, and check out their products and services.
So small business owners that sell products and services are eager to establish a significant presence on Instagram.
Another is that Instagram as a visual medium generates 4X engagement for brands than Facebook, which has over 2 billion users.
Let’s dive into tips to grow your business on Instagram in 2023.
Let your profile reflect who you are
Your Instagram account says a lot about your business. That’s the first point of contact for an audience wanting to learn about your offer. First, you need an Instagram business account, not a personal one.
Make a switch now to enjoy the features IG business accounts offer and for Instagram’s algorithm to boost your visibility. Use a profile picture that depicts your business – an easy-to-recognize logo will do.
This is because when users search on Instagram and business accounts show up, they tend to click on those that represent what they want. Ensure your own Instagram account has an appealing logo.
As for a username, use keywords that relate to your business. Although it’s hard to get one, you can play around by adding numbers, prefixes, or suffixes to the keyword to get a username that works.
Include your primary keyword when writing your Instagram bio. This boosts your visibility on IG explore when users search for terms related to it. And ensure your bio is short and precise.
You can take a clue from Derma.e Instagram business profile:
Enable other features on your business account you think can give you an edge over your competitors.
Invest In AI Content Tools
It’s time to move away from the manual approach that keeps your hands on intelligent devices all the time to create content and invest in AI content tools.
While this might be capital intensive, you can get a small business loan or grant to ensure your business survives on IG.
Whether it’s content planning, creating content, or schedule, there are AI tools that handle them.
Let’s assume you want to make Instagram posts, write a blog post, or any other social media post. AI writing tools like Writesonic have templates for them.
Is it images? You can use Jasper Art to generate plenty of them.
And for video content, Animaker has an Instagram video maker which creates IG videos in minutes. This is not to say that you should rely heavily on AI content tools. It’s for you to know they can help boost your content production.
Keep in mind that visual Instagram content is the fuel that drives the growth of your business. And anything to keep it up should be on the cards.
To schedule your Instagram posts, some tools can get you on a consistent posting schedule, thereby doing the heavy lifting for you. Within a few minutes, you have a month’s content scheduled on IG.
Automate Conversation
Conversation marketing is standard on Instagram. Potential customers would want to ask questions and make inquiries before they decide to spend their hard-earned money. Some will send a DM using the Instagram app or reply to your post in the comments. Keeping up with this isn’t easy because you won’t be available to engage every buyer persona in a conversation.
You can have 4 or 5 users flooding your DM with messages simultaneously. In this case, automating conversation with chatbots is the way out.
With the emergence of services that give you instruments for creating chatbots, the task gets more manageable. Manychat was a popular go-to solution, but SendPulse has been receiving more love recently due to its landing page builder, GPT-3 integration, and other marketing tools on top of a chatbot for Instagram DMs.
For example, you can set an auto-reply that tells a customer the price of an item, the locations you ship to, and the estimated delivery time.
With chatbots, you reduce the cost of hiring sales and customer representatives to engage customers on IG.
Share User Generated Content
Happy customers sometimes create an Instagram posts of them using the products they bought from you on their Instagram accounts. Do you notice that? Check your notifications, and you’d see that some of them tagged you on IG. That’s user-generated content, and it can boost sales.
It’s like a customer advertising your product to their followers. The cool thing is that you could use it to your advantage. Collect all user-generated content, package them into Instagram using the Instagram stories template, and add them as story highlights.
Post them and tag customers that generated them. The after-effect is that your target audience who are skeptical about using your products and services could be enticed to try it. That’s more leads that can convert to sales to grow your revenue.
See how Starbucks shared content generated by a customer who is happy with their product:
Go Live
Instagram live helps to build relationships and trust with your target audience. People want to see the human side of you and the person behind the excellent content they consume on their Instagram feed.
It’s an opportunity to interact with them in real time and answer questions about your business. You can even turn it into a training section where you show some striking features your products have and why you’re better than your competitors.
It’s easy to go live on IG – inform your audience about it, prepare the content you want to deliver, connect your PC or smartphone to the internet, and choose a suitable background. That’s all, and you are good to go.
To ensure a wider audience, you can also consider using the best VPN to connect seamlessly while maintaining privacy and security.
Try Reels
The Instagram reel is a powerful feature that creates more awareness for your business.
According to a report, reels take up 30% of users’ time on IG. And it is shared one billion times via DM daily.
Imagine your Instagram reels getting 0.003% of such shares in a month!
That would be 30,000 shares, and this would drastically boost your reach.
It’s not only for Gen Z to create short-form videos for entertainment. You can use it as a content strategy to showcase your products and services value.
Say you’re a video editor; you can show your audience the tools and processes that lead to professional video editing. A body cream seller can use it to display their new arrivals for customers to order.
Creating a reel is simple. Select Reel at the button of your IG camera. Other enhancement features like Align, Timer & Countdown make it appeal to your audience. After which, you share it with your followers while others can discover it on Instagram explore.
Host Giveaways
Instagram users like free stuff. Hosting a giveaway is a strategy to bring them closer to your business. It creates more awareness for your business and earns you followers and potential customers.
Let’s say you sell hiking shoes and have new products in stock. You can announce to your audience that you’re giving out the five latest hiking shoes on IG.
The process could be:
- Post the images of hiking shows you want to give out and caption it,’ We are giving out five hiking shoes to 5 lucky followers.
- To qualify for one of them:
- Follow our IG page
- Use #hikingshoesby (name of your business on IG)
- Like, share, and tag 10 of your friends on IG
- We will announce five winners in the next two days
- A lucky winner, out of excitement, can post it on Instagram and tag you to show appreciation. That’s a sort of awareness, and you also have user-generated content you can brag with. Upon using the product and realizing it’s worth it, they will likely buy it when they next need it or tell their friends about it.
The screenshot below shows how Dermae hosts a giveaway on Instagram:
Partner With Instagram Influencers
Instagram marketing isn’t complete without influencers on Instagram that shape the behavior of many Instagram audiences toward a brand. Partnering with them will create more awareness for your small business, increase brand recognition, boost your followers, increase engagement, and generate more leads.
A 2022 report states that 80% of brands engaged in influencer marketing used Instagram Influencers.
What will happen if a top Instagram influencer in the fitness niche creates content about your latest gym equipment for a flat tummy and uses a branded hashtag to promote it?
Many of their loyal audience will flood your handle to learn more about your products. You will get new audiences; some will even place orders without blinking an eye since an influencer they adore recommended it.
Below is a screenshot of an Instagram influencer promoting a product to her audience.
So research or use tools like Upfluence to identify top IG influencers within your niche whose charges are within your budget.
Try IG Ad
If your goal as a business on Instagram is to boost sales, using content to drive it organically will take time. You may consider an Instagram ad, which gives you access to a target audience who Instagram thinks will be interested in your product based on their behavior.
Keep in mind that running an ad on Instagram isn’t cheap. You need a massive budget because the more you spend, the more Instagram shows your ad to a broader audience. And to avoid flushing money down the toilet, hire the services of an Instagram ad expert if you can’t run an ad that can yield desired results.
Track & Analyze Performance
You won’t know if your business is growing or your Instagram marketing strategy is working unless you track and analyze performance. Whether you use content to grow organically or a paid ad, key metrics show you are on the right or wrong track.
For example, a post that generates massive engagement shows that your audience derived value from it. A product that sells more than others indicates that people want more. These are some of the key performance indicators that should matter to you.
Instagram has an analytics feature that shows you the performance of your content over time, the number of followers, and other metrics.
Although it isn’t advanced, it’s an excellent place to start until you switch to any advanced Instagram analytics tools.
As for paid ads, you see the performance on your dashboard at the end of the ad.
If you drive sales to your online store using IG, use Oribi analytics to track traffic that comes from IG to your store.
Ultimately, you figure out what works, what to adjust, and what to do away with to boost performance.
Final Thoughts On Tips To Grow Your Business On Instagram
Seeing tremendous improvement when you grow your business on Instagram in 2023 requires drastic action. I’ve shared ten tips that could move the needle and help you achieve Instagram success. It’s up to you to overhaul your Instagram strategy, drop those that don’t work, and implement the tips you’ve learned today.
Begin by setting your business profile to reflect what to do and take it down to tracking and analyzing performance.
That’s how to create more awareness, grow your followers, boost your engagement, generate more leads that can convert to sales, and above all, build a brand and loyal customers on IG.
