Why Instagram is Now the Best Platform to Increase Brand Awareness

We are in the age that is so driven by social media. We are long away from the days when activities are controlled by traditional media and their old rules. With millions of smartphone users, the world is not only turning to social media; it is tightly linked and connected with social media such that the new media now influence the way we relate with people and things in our world. However, as it is expected with things used overtime, there seems to be a gradual deflated interest in the use of social media platforms, while some other keep growing. One of those social media platforms that keep enjoying a bludgeoning growth is Instagram. Why is Instagram now the best platform to increase brand awareness? We answer this question.

Another great post on this subject: 3 Steps to Increasing Customer Retention and Commitment with Social Media Marketing

A report has it that it has currently over 150 million users. That’s not all, activities on the Instagram social platform shows it is a fertile ground for marketing and advertising with over 55 million videos shared every day. There is, therefore, no doubt that Instagram is a great means to achieving good business ends. A good marketer and advertiser would not pass this potential opportunity for great marketing and advertising for anything. And that explains why marketers are adopting the medium in their droves. Of great advantage is the visual capability of the Instagram media.

Brands are latching on the ability of Instagram to greatly promote visual contents, and they are using it to drive their brand’s growth. Instagram may be a place of great entertainment; it could also be a place to get your targeted customers especially if your brand offers services or products that appeal to the young. Instagram has the highest percentage of those in the young demography. That information alone should tell you there are services and products young people would find enticing will sell on the platform. No wonder, therefore, Instagram is quikly becoming a place many brands want to come on.

Instagram does not only help a brand to sell itself; it could be a space where brands have the potential of building a base of loyal fans and customers. A good brand is not only after customers that make purchase. However, they want to retain their customers and turn them into loyal customers for the brand. Among many things, loyal customers tend to bring in the referrals that ensure consistent good sales.

Below are, therefore, the many ways Instagram is significant to marketing and advertising to bring about brand awareness:

Quality engagement

Instagram gives your brand the opportunity to relate with your customers in ways other social media platforms do not offer. With its visual content feature, you can create amazing visual contents that hook your audience. On Instagram, there is a greater tendency of keeping your customer mesmerized by your brand. It is enough to be able to get your audience attention. What matters most is making them stay attentive. This is one of the core rules of marketing. Instagram could then be used as an effective means of great marketing and advertising. In this era of flimsy attention lifespan where one has to struggle to get any internet user’s attention, Instagram makes the job easy. Instagram is a modern-day multimedia television. And because people love their televisions because of the continuous entertainment it delivers, Instagram has become of those go-to apps on the phone for entertainment and visual media contentment. Unlike most media platforms like twitter and facebook that heavily relies on texts, Instagram uses videos and pictures, combining the strengths of both media to give ensure your users never have any dull moment. In this way, one can say Instagram is both a YouTube and facebook at the same time. What a great app it is then!

There is no end to the many possibilities of quality engagement Instagram offers. For instance, a well-designed and curated photo could say so much about the brand it represents. Instagram seizes the visual sense of the body to pass messages in a very effective way. Of all the senses a human being has, the sense of sight is the most powerful media to hook a person’s attention. Instagram main attention focus is on the sense of sight. This is why it is possible to get a quicker conversion through Instagram. For marketing and advertising, Instagram has fully substituted the functions of both the television and the print media. That is so as Instagram can be used for video-based advert and text-based marketing. It’s livestreaming function also conveniently sweeps the often expensive traditional live broadcasting off the ground, replacing it with affordable live broadcasting that virtually anyone with an internet connected phone could initiate at no cost. Advertising and marketing in this way has been made more accessible to increase even greater engagement. Unlike in traditional media where advert runs at slated time on air, Instagram gives a brand the opportunity for a continuous ad strategy as once an ad is posted, it can always be seen whenever an audience wants it. This again gives grand engagement.

Great traffic rate

A lot of the young demography spend most of their time on Instagram because the platform seems to satisfy their need for sophisticated display. Due to that, getting traffic on twitter for your brand’s ad strategy. No wonder therefore that brands have always looked to Instagram as a platform that promotes better traffic when other marketing chips are done. There are so many features on Instagram that contribute to this great traffic on the platform. Some of those features are the like, hashtag, comment, and description tag features. For example, the like feature allows you to favorite a picture or media content by just lightly tapping on it. It is that simple; you do not have to go through any rigorous process of showing your positive disposition towards a picture. This in itself encourages more participation and time spent on the platform. And when a social media user spends more time on a platform, it does mean more traffic potentials for advertising moves on that same platform. The hashtag platform is a valuable tool for trend-setting and monitoring. As a brand, you can see how popular a hashtag is by clicking on it. That allows a brand to knowledgeably plan its advertising and marketing drive towards a trend. It is amazing how much traffic advertising like this could generate. The rate of traffic that could be amassed through this means can only be limited by how creative the brand’s drive is, as there is no end to the rate at which the traffic could flood in on an ad. The comment feature is also a great tool of great participation, as the section could be great participation as it tends to be placed for interaction and connectivity. This feature could be a traffic boost for an already soaring traffic rate. A brand could chip inmore replies to comments to increase the traffic even more. The description tag is a great feature that allows users to describe their uploaded and shared contents more. This features most especially come in handy for pictures and videos that need more of a backstory to make the audience understand and appreciate the content more. This is indeed amazing.

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Also, brands may not have to worry much about importing their audience from a different platform like Facebook to Instagram. There’s a good sync between both social media platforms that make it possible for your followers on Facebook, for instance, to know you are now on Instagram. This notification is a great tool for marketing and advertising to generate inter-app traffic.

User Generated advertisement

This is an interesting part of using Instagram for advertising and marketing. On Instagram, you can ask your users, not limited to those following you to do your job of publicity for you. You can ask your brand to do your publicity job for you and sit down, relax and watch as your brand’s visibility grows. A lot of brands have opted in on this kind of advert drive to push the frontiers of their marketing. This is simply an advertisement strategy made so easy and handed over to public trends. This result from this could be great. This is another reason Instagram is very significant for marketing and advertising. You just cannot beat the reach. However, this kind of advertising and marketing does not take total responsibility for coordination and proper management of you. A lot of brands have got it all wrong with this kind of advert thinking users on the platforms can do the whole job for them. When users’ made contents and adverts are not well managed, the result could go awry. There must be some level of coordination makes everything to make things go successfully. You do not want to be caught in that mess. When you launch a user based advert drive, do not leave it to the wind and expect result, it could be hijacked by competitors, and you certainly do not want that for yourself.

Also, user’ made adverts need some level of motivation to work really. That is why most users’ made adverts campaigns are usually tied to giveaways. These giveaways are good motivation to get everyone up and working. Launch out competition on a curated hashtag and ask users vie for the giveaways using the hashtag. This has often been a very good way of generating an amazing advert drive that is cheap, almost free even, and very effective. You do not want to miss this effective way of marketing. And what’s more? There is a very good way to monitor how much the advert is faring through the hashtag. This way, you can always click on the hashtag to see how much of a trend storm the campaign has gathered. This has often been a very good way of not just getting your brand out there, but a way to save on advert cost and maintain a trending visibility. This mode of Instagram of use has also shown the platform as being very crucial to marketing and advertising.

Keeping a tab on your competitors

The marketplace is a battle ground. The reason why so many adverting and marketing move does not go through to achieve the intended result is that many other brands are also being as creative as they have never been in advertising. What this means is that people are not sleeping on their oars in getting ahead in the marketplace. And only the most creative wins. Instagram gives a brand that extra secret button to have a good cutting edge. This secret button is one that allows you to creatively spy on your competitors. Creative spying could be healthy though. It allows brands, among many other things, to know what industries’ trends are and to be able to keep up accordingly. That is very crucial as an advert or marketing move made in ignorance does nothing to improve a brand’s visibility. If you do not know what your competitors are doing, then how can you devise a way to beat them? It is impossible to do. However, with the hashtag feature of Instagram, a brand could spy on competing brands offering same services and products like them. With that, a brand has the best way to strategize and plan their next advertising and marketing move well.

Investing beautiful ideas in advertising and marketing move is all great, but it does not get a brand anywhere when the move is blindly done. You have got to know the newer ways service delivery is done and how other brands are relating with their customers on the same social media platform. Nothing makes your advert move more beautifully and well planned than when you have the right information at your disposal. The marketplace is constantly evolving. Any ad strategy that does not reflect the revolution will certainly lag behind in the game. Instagram’s hashtag feature, therefore, gives any brand that access to up their advertising and marketing game.

It is in those many ways Instagram matters to marketing and advertising.

Your thoughts? I encourage you to share this and comment.

References

6 Benefits of Using Instagram For Your Business