INSTAGRAM FOR SMALL SCALE BUSINESSES
As rightly said by Amy Jo Martin, “It’s a dialogue, not a monologue. Social Media is more like a telephone than a television.”
Today, with innovative updates, content preferences, as well as memes budding on various social media platforms, the world has become a stimulating turf wherein marketing strategies are bound to break-through the ideas of the conventional and big marketing agencies. Amidst the various platforms, Instagram is one of the most popular, especially among the millennials, with approximately 300 million active users every second. Hence, it is the best promotional tool for start-ups and small-scale businesses. To get started one needs to simply create a business profile, and undoubtedly the procedure is effortless and worthwhile. Whether a start-up chef or patisserie, a coaching class, a fashion jewellery retailer, painter, or any other form of entrepreneur or artist, Instagram provides the core benefit of setting a business up with zero investment, thereafter ensuring no fear of any losses in the initial blooming stage of the business, which often acts as a challenge otherwise.
Advantages of using Instagram Marketing
Instagram has advanced significantly, with live streams, IG TV, highlights, stories and other modes of innovative aids to showcase content to our selective audience. It assists in generating a lofty engagement per follower, thus enabling an opportunity to communicate and contact other entrepreneurs professing the same or similar profession.
Instagram is now linked to Facebook. Therefore, it provides a dual advantage when we want to promote a product or service, whether in a paid or non-paid form. Tie-ups, shout-outs and collaborations make it easier and effective to reach out to a larger crowd.
However, to be successful on such a widely used platform, focusing on just the objectives is not the only crucial thing. Keeping in mind other methods and tools of handling a business profile like usage of hashtags, an aesthetic feed, a creative theme of colors and fonts, planning frequent giveaways for engagement, tagging accounts, etc are of utmost importance. All these factors can assist in keeping up and becoming aware and alert of the competitors as well as the practices that they take up.
Innovation is the key to excel
One can excel by devoting quality time to researching content ideas through other users who tend to have a similar audience as they themselves do, and thus observe what type of content is actually working out best. One can also check their progress on their feed through the Insight section provided by the platform. It gives one the opportunity to create posts, stories, and finally promote the business through its content feature. Nonetheless, one can become aware of the interactions, reach and impressions received over days, weeks and months, which is the key element to know that the business is taking a positive step towards elevation. Finally, it provides us a feature to notice the audience we are catering to- their locations, age range, gender and so on. All these resources and channels helps to bring out and up-rise the entrepreneur in each and every one of us. A small idea gets an opportunity to be recognized by not just one’s near and dear ones, but to a scale of individuals that one never thought they could benefit just by a passion accompanied by vision and creativity to present those thoughts on social platforms like these.
There is one important thing that every business holder shall keep in mind when posting stories or pictures- an out-of-the-box watermark is a must for one so that it catches the eye of the customers. Further, a crisp display picture is significant too, for it calls for more buyers. Now, here’s something that most people are not aware of. There are websites which allow you to even customize your Instagram feed in order to make it appear more appealing on a business website- for example, www.lightwidget.com.
There are end number of options today that enhance our chance to showcase our hard-work to the world and boost our leads and sales. Hard selling is not the only key to getting out there. For any small-scale business, a spark of innovation in one’s mind can create a unique business, and thereafter, social media will do its right job. There are tons of users today who resort to social media to mark their presence and establish themselves, but it is not yet a passing trend. It ensures communication of authority, awareness, authenticity, engagement, support, and finally to grow affordably.
“Social Media is not a media. The key is to listen, engage and build relationships.” Instagram is a platform created solely for this purpose and is instrumental in transforming passive shoppers into your most valued, confident and long-term customers.