Instagram can be very beneficial to your business. In order to utilize all of the features to capture the attention of your prospects and convert them to clients, optimizing your profile should be your top priority. Use these 5 tips to make the most of your Instagram account and take your Instagram marketing efforts to the next level.
Profile Picture
Your profile picture is what represents your account. As a business, your profile picture should be your logo. This should be a high-resolution image that can be cropped to fit within the circle without cutting off any parts of your logo. For personal brands, the profile picture should be a photo that is mostly your face.
Your profile picture is a great way to create brand awareness. The more active you are on Instagram, the more your profile picture will be seen, and it becomes more recognizable.
Business Account
One of the most important “growth hacks” is to be sure your profile is set up as a Professional Account. There are a lot of features that come with the professional accounts, such as linking a website and advertising.
Bio
Your bio should be used to briefly describe what you do. Be sure to keep it short and simple, and use any keywords your prospects might use to search for your products or services. If emojis are on brand for you, you can use them to capture your reader’s attention. Feel free to include branded hashtags that you want your followers to use.
Website Link
To utilize Instagram as a lead generation tool, it’s crucial to drive traffic to your website. Instagram only gives you the option to include one link (and you don’t have the option to put links in captions of your posts like we have the option on other platforms). It’s common for brands to use sites like LinkTree in order to drive traffic to more than one URL. If you have the capabilities, we recommend creating a landing page to house multiple links that can be easily edited as you promote different URLs. Be sure that the sites you’re linking to are mobile friendly.
Highlights
Stories are only active for 24 hours – but highlights allow you to save the most important ones for as long as you’d like. We recommend breaking up your highlights into categories, such as New Products, Sales, Employee Spotlights, etc. Create graphics that are on brand to keep these organized and looking nice. Be sure to keep these “neat and tidy” by deleting old highlights that are no longer relevant.
Once you’ve fully optimized your Instagram account for success, you’ll need to produce great content consistently, engage with your audience, and learn from your analytics to continue to grow and convert followers to customers. If you’re stumped on content, be sure to check out our monthly content ideas to try!
