With social media marketing becoming increasingly more important, green businesses are now employing a broad range of marketing methods to boost the impact of their online presence. Among these new strategies is growth hacking, or the act of using various quick marketing methods to maximize online brand visibility.
Usually a trial-and-error process, growth hacking can yield massive returns for companies trying to expand their overall audience, but lacking a structured plan of attack can cause “errors” to stack up and hinder a business’s marketing strategy as a whole.
However, knowing what to expect beforehand can reduce hindrances and allow businesses to reap the benefits of growth hacking much more quickly. Here are five tips you need to consider to growth Instagram engagement.
Define Your Business
Before brainstorming new content and engaging followers, it’s important to clearly define your brand’s concerns, goals, and audience.
The pitfall of many growth hackers is rapidly firing off as many posts as possible, regardless of how unrelated they may be. With growth hacking’s shortened timeframe, it’s understandable that many can mistake it for a false sense of urgency and release content as quickly as possible without putting much thought into brainstorming beforehand.
However, growth hacking, like all marketing strategies, requires foresight and deliberation to be successful; therefore, skimping on certain steps like audience research and content refinement can be hugely detrimental to the long-term success of a business’s Instagram presence. For maximized chances of growth hacking success, businesses should spend the extra time to define their brand’s image, so that their posts have relevancy and weight when viewed in the public eye.
This primary step is crucial not only to the success of growth hacking campaigns but for a business’s online presence as a whole.
Use Appropriate Hashtags
In the same vein as the last point, releasing posts mindlessly is not the optimal method for Instagram success. Just as relevant, polished content is valuable for defining a brand, appropriate hashtags are essential for sparking widespread discussion.
It’s easy enough to slap a few similar-sounding hashtags on a photo and send it off into Instagram’s public space, but such a strategy bears little fruit. In the shortened span of growth hacking campaigns, audience discourse can be just as, if not more powerful, than brand activity.
Therefore, hashtags are equally crucial as an avenue for audience members to share and discover ideas, opinions, and related content. All of these actions ultimately benefit the business providing the hashtags in the first place. Therefore, using the most relevant hashtags can reveal content to new audiences and increase the efficiency of growth hacking campaigns.
Use Third-Party Apps
For businesses familiar with social media optimization techniques, the slew of third-party marketing apps available comes as no surprise. Just as they’re useful for increasing brand awareness, these applications also serve a similar purpose for short-term growth hacking campaigns.
For Instagram in particular, apps offer a variety of new features that create an entirely new experience of audiences and equip businesses with new and powerful tools of communication and advertising.
To name a few, these third-party apps can pinpoint the best times for posting, track the most popular topics, schedule predetermined posts, edit photos, insert shop links for products, and so on.
For growth hacking campaigns, third-party apps are a must for the much-needed features they bring to the table. By simplifying certain functions in Instagram, these third-party applications are essential for Instagram growth hacking.
Interact with Followers
Although growth hacking campaigns are accelerated, that doesn’t mean taking the time to slow down and assess your audience is a bad thing. In fact, engaging followers during the growth hacking process can have both short-term and long-term benefits, with brand discussion and visibility spreading as a result of producer-consumer interactions.
Standard engagement strategies like giveaways and following sprees can work wonders in this situation, especially because of their emphasis on speed and direct interaction. Although providing ample posts and hashtags for audiences to view and discuss is important for growth hacking success, failing to provide any semblance of direct audience interaction can be a risky proposition.
Ignoring consumers rarely results in healthy business-follower relations and can topple even the most stable of growth hacking efforts. Businesses should not only provide frequent polished content to ensure a successful strategy, but they should also pay attention to audience concerns and communications.
Provide Quality Content
As stated before, the time constraints of a growth hacking setting can often result in a loss of quality in favor of sheer quantity. However, businesses trying to pump out as much content as possible can miss the mark with their brand’s concerns and their audience’s interests, leading to an overall loss of efficiency.
Aside from defining business interests, engaging audiences, and using appropriate hashtags, the best way to curb this issue is taking more calculated steps for producing high-quality content. Whether it’s more discussion before content curation, more research into audience interests or the use of high-powered photo and video editors, businesses who take these extra steps are better equipped to reap all the rewards that growth hacking has to offer.