Usually, marketers ramble these days on how to get business with the help of Instagram.
Instagram remains one of the most used platforms for marketing. According to Instagram statistics, more than 25 million businesses use Instagram to promote their services and products.
Because of its visual nature, just about anyone can be creative with the branding of their product on Instagram.
Still, for new brands, it’s harder to look past the common mistakes and become a success on the platform.
Fret not!
We designed this article for you to learn the mistakes that beginners make while marketing their products or brand on Instagram so you can learn how to avoid them in the first place. With these tips, you can take excellent command over branding your product on Instagram.
1. Using Incomplete Bio
Creating a perfect bio for your business or brand is really half the work. Generally, new brands miss out on writing a proper and relevant bio on their Instagram account.
How to avoid this?
First, don’t make your bio information too boring or too long. To be honest, we’d recommend not posting too much about your product or brand. Try to keep it as simple as can you can.
People are not willing to stay and read a long biography of your company. If you want that a larger number of people connect with you, it is best to keep your information short, concise, and relevant.
Second, utilize the space given to you for posting the link to your product page. If they are interested, the links will take them to your product page, where the actual product can be described.
Shoppers don’t want to be overloaded all at once with media and text. Also, consider including emojis and line spacing to make it easier for your audience to read. If you complete your information wisely, you will potentially get a lot of eyes landing easily on your product!
2. Not Responding to Your Followers
Responding back to your followers is the one key activity that helps to expand your business. However, if you are not doing this activity, then you are at a major risk of harming your brand image.
When somebody leaves a comment regarding your product or brand, take the time to respond. Even if they are only giving you some kind of suggestion, you should accept and respond to it very modestly.
Also, any customer or follower may need some assistance in terms of your product or brand. You should provide them with genuine customer service. Sometimes, it’s necessary to address any personalized concern by offering the option of emailing you directly to handle the issue.
Building relationships with your followers and responding to them through message exchange is a great way to incorporate value into your brand. Responding to your followers shows you are concerned and interested in engagement as well.
3. Posting Random or Poor Quality Image
Images are everything on Instagram. The quality of the images you use says a lot about your brand. Poor quality or wrong-sized images look unprofessional, and no one wants to see these types of images.
So, one should be very careful about the quality of the images. Suppose you are posting images of your brand or product that are of poor quality and don’t match the image size guidelines of Instagram. As a result, followers may lose interest and won’t prefer to follow your brand or business any longer.
So, you may need to take lots of gorgeous photos of the same subject and create them in the correct aspect ratio.
While posting from SocialPilot, you don’t need to worry about the dimension hiccups and auto-cropped images on your brand profile. Every time you upload an Instagram image with improper dimensions, the error message will pop immediately.
Then, comes the best part!
Instead of jumping to an external editor, you can use SocialPilot’s inbuilt image editor to fix your image dimensions.
You can easily crop your Instagram images in a 4:5 or 1:1 ratio to get them right. If your image is for a story, crop it in a 16:9 story aspect ratio.
Apart from pre-defined social media cropping ratios, you can use several of its features to enhance your image quality in a jiffy.
In a nutshell, do not simply accept the first photo you create and be done with it. Don’t be satisfied easily. Take the help of some of the image editing tools like Pixlr, PicMonkey, or the easily accessible SocialPilot image editor for your pictures. You can even take advantage of Instagram filters as well. Use them to edit and enhance your images to be the best representation of your product.
4. Not Using Hashtags Properly
Hashtags play a vital role in the discovery of your posts on Instagram. On the other hand, be prepared to see no results if you are using improper or irrelevant hashtags.
Hashtags should be relevant, short, and easily searchable for all. Make sure that you follow some popular hashtags pertinent to your niche. Doing so will help you grab the right people’s attention toward your business.
Instagram users search popular hashtags to discover new things. The more relevant hashtags you include in your post, the more potential customers will see your profile. There is a direct correlation between the number of hashtags used per post and post engagement.
However, don’t overdo hashtags.
Instagram allows for a maximum of 30 hashtags per post. But that doesn’t mean you have to cram hashtags unnecessarily to complete the number. Mindful use of 3-5 Instagram hashtags is good enough to get you a killer engagement.
Look how on-point and limited Swarvoski’s hashtags are.
5. Posting Boring or Repetitive Content
Instagram is one of the most creative platforms out there. With tons of features available to create inspiring content, being boring on Instagram is not an option.
You need to be inspiring with your content. Spamming your followers’ feeds with a plethora of images or repetitive content every day is not a good idea.
In order to keep your audience engaged, you need to post engaging content regularly, or your fan base will go stagnant. When this happens, you will lose them to competitors who are creating more valuable and fun content.
6. Over Posting or Under Posting
If you are a wise user of Instagram, you might know that posting super often on Instagram is a big no-no!
Followers will get annoyed with your constant posting on Instagram. On the other hand, when you are not posting enough, your follower will think you are no longer active.
So, what to do?
The key here is to create a balanced Instagram management strategy. One should decide on a proper time interval for their posts to go live. Timing is everything.
You want to create your posts at an interval your audience can set their watches by. This way, you help craft their expectations of how your brand will conduct itself.
The best course of action is to determine your best times to post on Instagram. Yes! Every account on Instagram has its own personal best times to post when most of its audience is available on Instagram to engage with the content.
Once you are done choosing the best time intervals to publish your content, leverage the power of a social media scheduling tool.
For Instance, SocialPilot enables you to schedule posts on Instagram well in advance to easily explore all your post timing options.
7. Buying Followers
We all know how challenging it is to increase followers on Instagram. No wonder lot of new brands on Instagram end up buying fake followers to increase their follower count overnight.
However, buying followers gives you nothing but a big follower count to allure organic accounts and increase your influence. Other than that, they harm more if you are not careful.
So it’s best to grab your followers’ attention in an organic way, rather than going unnaturally.
Let’s discuss in detail why buying followers may backfire:
Less Engagement
When you buy followers, you are not getting people who are attracted or eager to engage with you. You are just buying numbers. After paying for followers/fans or engaging in aggressive follower churn, you will probably only get a large number of fake accounts among your number.
Loss of Integrity and Reputation
Ethics may be more tricky to define in our world, as everyone has a different perception of it. People might not discern that you’ve bought followers. However, if you quickly go from 30 followers or likes to 30,000 in just two days, people may get suspicious and even question your integrity. Long story short, buying followers is akin to cheating.
8. Setting Your Account to Private
If you believe your content is valuable for your Instagram community, then by setting your account to private, you are only limiting your opportunities.
It’s similar to building a wall between your audience and your brand. This factor is the most common and fastest reason behind hurting and losing your followers on Instagram. Two key reasons play a major role behind it:
- If you have set your accounts to private, followers will need to wait for you to approve the request, which can take an hour or more. This makes your brand too complicated and cumbersome to follow.
- Posts of a private account are not visible to non-followers. It harms your chances of getting in touch with potential customers who don’t follow you but are interested in your brand.
Make sure your account is set to public. To do so, go to your privacy settings and change your account setting to open, and see how quickly your follower count goes up.
9. Ignoring Analytics
Ignoring Instagram analytics is the direst mistake of all. Tracking your data on Instagram will eventually keep you from making every other mistake mentioned above.
Still, most marketers make the mistake of incessantly creating and posting content but never taking the time to check their performance analytics.
Without knowing what’s working and what’s not, you will never be able to grow on Instagram.
Instagram analytics shows you the bare picture of your ongoing Instagram marketing strategy. It allows you to take the necessary steps to target the right audience, create better content, and uplift your overall Instagram growth.
But if you are handling multiple Instagram clients at once, analyzing the data of different accounts can be a strenuous task.
This is where you need to use a social media management tool like SocialPilot. Its analytics feature gives you a bird’s eye view of the analytics of multiple Instagram accounts.
Conclusion
Making mistakes is part of the journey for every social media marketer. But. the problem starts when you are not improving over those mistakes.
It’s common for you to make all the above mistakes; there’s no need to beat yourself up. It’s time to improve them. And the first step to improving your mistake starts with recognizing them.
We have discussed most of the notable and frequent mistakes marketers make on Instagram. If you take anything away from this article, remember to know your brand inside and out. From there, you can easily do the legwork and create an unbeatable Instagram marketing strategy.
