Digital Marketing is all the rage these days. The influence of digital marketing has swollen by a great margin. Hence, digital marketing is now embraced as a vital component of a mainstream marketing strategy.
People are dealing with more digital content in the contemporary era than they used to. Hence, digital marketing is highly feasible, fruitful and future-proof.
Digital marketing comprises of numerous elements including; SEO, Blogs, E-mail Marketing and social media marketing.
Source: http://www.go-gulf.com/blog/social-media-influence-businesses/
The above figures clearly indicate the influence of social media on consumers’ purchasing decisions. Thus, it can be concluded that social media plays a vital role in driving sales.
Instagram has recently emerged as a hub for marketers and is all set to overtake some of the renowned social networking giants.
The growth of Instagram is one the major reasons for it, as the number of active users on Instagram has swollen to over 600 million.
Instagram has also become highly accommodating towards marketers. They recently unveiled Instagram Business tools, aimed at assisting marketers.
The suite of tools provides separate business profiles for brands, Insights and promotional prospects.
User Generated Content
User generated content or UGC potential is why Instagram stands out. Instagram is a great, possibly the best, platform to extract and utilize User-generated content.
UGC is a highly effective technique to stimulate engagement/interaction with followers, resulting in an influential promotion.
UGC refers to content created by users, which helps in the promotion of the particular product. Companies usually trigger their audience to create UGC via unique promotional campaigns.
Instagram has emerged as a platform for promotional campaigns. Almost all of the renowned brands initiate promotional campaigns on Instagram, encouraging their audiences to produce more user-generated content.
GoPro’s ongoing Instagram campaign is a remarkable example of driving engagement through UGC.
GoPro was able to associate the brand with a healthy lifestyle and encourages consumers to share inspirational experiences, which are uploaded by GoPro on its official Instagram page.
GoPro utilizes the UGC in an extremely effective manner and the results of their campaign are promising.
Impact
All the content present on Instagram is either picture or video-based. As a regular consumer would prefer visual adverts over lengthy text-based adverts, Instagram obviously has the edge here.
Visual ads are more appealing compared to text-based adverts and they exhibit the message more clearly.
Every day, 95 million photos and videos are shared on Instagram, which makes it the perfect platform for visual adverts.
Including an efficiently-designed Instagram marketing strategy in your mainstream digital marketing strategy will help you drive engagement and maximize ROI.
Instagram is also cooperative with the cross-platform promotion.
Including Instagram in your digital marketing strategy will promote interdependency among a few social networking platforms, resulting in the smoother execution of your digital marketing strategy.
Brand Awareness
Instagram is an exceptionally effective means of spreading brand awareness. It can play a vital role in popularizing the brand. Instagram provides numerous prospects for you to grow your brand.
Initially, organic methods can contribute to stimulating the popularity of a brand, which includes cross-promotion, hashtag campaigns, and giveaways.
If you can afford to shed away some bucks, sponsorships and affiliate marketing can also be used to spread brand awareness via Instagram.
For sponsored promotion and affiliate marketing, a brand must hire individuals with great influence such as celebrities or Youtubers, and they’ll fuse promotional content into their daily posts, stories, live videos etc.
Affiliate marketing and sponsorships are quite fruitful as they give you access to larger and more diverse audiences.
Artificial promotion is another ‘trending’ technique to popularize brand and expand brand awareness.
There are tons of third-party Instagram marketing tools such as Vibbi that can be used to purchase ‘real’ followers, likes and views for Instagram pages and posts.
Purchasing followers for your Instagram page will make it seem more credible, appealing and trustworthy.
Start-ups and striving businesses can use artificial promotion in order to popularize their products/services in the shortest possible time span.
Instagram also stands out due to its ‘hashtag friendly’ approach. Hashtags were introduced into mainstream marketing by Twitter, followed by Facebook. But Instagram has made hashtags more useful than they previously were.
Instagram enables you to use hashtags to find relevant posts, individuals and campaigns.
Businesses can identify the most popular hashtags among their target audience and use those hashtags in their posts to maximize engagement from their audience.
Drive Sales Directly
Instagram can bring huge success for your digital marketing strategy as it can be used to drive sales directly.
Multiple third-party Instagram marketing tools, like Shoppable Instagram can be utilized to convert Instagram galleries into shoppable feeds.
This allows consumers to explore and shop products directly via the brand’s Instagram page. It offers greater convenience to consumers. Hence, is highly likely to drive sales.
Verdict
Promising figures of Instagram’s growth and increasing popularity, along with the changes in marketing dynamics and alterations in consumer behavior/preferences, clearly suggest that Instagram is the most relevant platform to cater to the latest trends.
These factors suggest that it is high time you included Instagram in your digital marketing strategy.
Author Bio
Qurban is a freelance writer who offers ghost writing, blogging and copywriting services. He works closely with businesses providing digital marketing solutions that increases brand awareness and search engine visibility. He’s currently working for Vibbi.com, which provides quality Instagram followers, likes and views.
