Instagram Tips for Beginners 2022 and What is Instagram Marketing?

Are you struggling with your Instagram marketing strategy? Well, let me give you my 5 smart Instagram tips for beginners for 2021. I believe that most businesses should have an Instagram marketing strategy because the platform is one of the easiest to build a following which can be easily used to attract more customers to your business. Here is how to grow your Instagram followers and maintain a killer Instagram account.

1. Post-Good Content that Brings Value to your Followers

• How to create content for Instagram: The saying is content is king and no matter what Instagram strategy you use if your content isn’t good or engaging your audience won’t care. I like to use websites like Canva or Adobe Spark to make images and videos for Instagram. Instagram as a platform is more visual and it’s a smart Instagram marketing tactic to use to your advantage and create good graphics. It doesn’t have to be something special, templates are amazing. I usually advise that people create content that is engaging, ask questions and ask for comments. I like to use polls and Q and A’s to interact with my audience on Instagram.

2. Do some Hashtag Research

Hashtags can help people outside your following to be able to find your content. I use an app called Lee tags which lets me put in some keywords and it gives me 30 popular suggested Instagram hashtags related to those keywords. You can have your content on the most recent section of those hashtags and potentially bring in more followers to your account.

3. Bring in Followers through Hashtags, Locations, and Competitors

I’m a big fan of Gary Vee’s $1.80 Instagram method and I use a variation of this. The theory behind this is to use these platforms for what they were intended for which is for you to be social.

What is the Gary Vee $1.80 Instagram method?

Find hashtags related to your business, find people who posted in your business area and find accounts that follow your competitors. Comment, like, follow and engage.

Don’t be spammy, be nice, be funny and offer value and people will follow back and engage with you. If they need your service you will be on their minds. Often times I have seen people work with and buy from people they like over who is cheapest or positions themselves as the best. Nothing beats great PR and customer service.

4. Use Instagram Live, Reels. Stories and IGTV

• Instagram Live is a feature where you can go live even with another account and your following can join and ask you questions. I have seen accounts use this feature for questions and answers, live podcasting, raffles and showcasing products.
• Instagram implemented IGTV for content creators to post more long-form content similar to Youtube.
• Reels are Instagrams answer to Tik Tok which are mostly easily edited and humourous 60-second clips.
• Instagram Stories are 10-second videos or images you can post that your following can see. These are great for bigger graphics, short advertisement videos, Questions and Answers or Polls. I find on any account I worked on that Instagram stories always got more reach than the feed. Because Instagram wants to promote these features and are in competition with other platforms, early adaptors can see huge success with new features as they get way more reach than traditional feed posts.

5. Use your Bio to Bring your Followers to your Website

You can add only one external link on Instagram and that is in your Bio. This is perfect to add your website or any landing page or other platform you want to send your audience. If you have a new service, new amazing product or article you can use your story and feed to encourage your followers to click the bio. You will increase your website traffic and bring more customers through your sales funnel which will convert more followers to customers.

6. Do Instagram Cross Promotion

There is nothing wrong with mutually beneficial cross-promotion with another relevant Instagram page. There are many ways that Instagram accounts can support each other. You can create an Instagram engagement pod with a group of similar accounts supporting each other’s content for better reach. You can do an  Instagram live with other pages so you both can benefit from each other’s following or even a simple cross-promotion shout-out with another page. Just remember never be spammy. nobody likes a spammer. 

Conclusion

We hope you enjoyed our Instagram Tips for Beginners guide hopefully this can help you start growing your business or brand on Instagram for 2021 and beyond. Let us at Brandigital Ireland know if any of these tips helped you, you can contact us at [email protected]