5 easy Instagram marketing tips for startups

With Google Adwords bids going sky high and Facebook charging you for even breathing on the portal, does promoting your startup give you the chills?

You can heave a sigh of relief because there are social media platforms which are still free or have very less advertisers and engage millions of people. Instagram is one such platform which engages a huge chunk of Indian youth.

Here are a few tips for startups to launch and actually get visible traction from your brand’s Instagram accounts:

1) Don’t be shy, follow people!

In spite of the fact that Instagram is still at a nascent stage in India, most of the youth is using the platform to share pictures with their friends. However, nobody is too sure about how and what else can be done.

So following people isn’t a disgrace or a bad thing to do when you’re talking about Instagram. In fact, people love it when their follower count increases! So, Follow! Follow! Follow!

About 40% of the people you follow will follow you back.

Check out how the brand "Happily Unmarried" also follows and gets followers.

2) But before you follow, keep this in mind

Post a lot of pictures, and by pictures we don’t mean product pictures. As I said, instagram is still at a nascent stage, most people follow less people and have less followers, so here is a chance to get noticed, but don’t spoil the show by shameless advertising. Use a mix of product images and general images, in the follower building stage, try to engage the audience first with general images.

Write quotes, create images, have a visual content strategy in place and see your followers increasing!

3) Good that you have a follower base building up, now do this!

Start posting pictures of your product/service. But wait, there’s a trick, be mysterious! Don’t give away all the information. Let them comment, ask for more details, so that you can build leads.

4) Keep this in mind for sure, nobody wants to go out!

With our experience, we understand that hardly anyone wants to go out of Instagram, so don’t expect any Clicks on your posts. Forget about CTR’s and websites, try to sell on Instagram. Provide the audience with the data they want, do whatever it takes to keep them from drifting away.

5) The most important – create a follow up mechanism

If people ask for more details, ask how they can buy, simply ask them to use another easy mobile app. – Whatsapp. Ask the people to send queries on whatsapp. This way, you can easily send a sweet reminder message every morning. Just like you send emailers on the computer, you can use Whatsapp to broadcast a daily reminder on mobile phones.

This small business owner has a follow up mechanism to update everyone on whatsapp who messaged her for price. And the posts that she sends are too good to feel offended :)

About the author:

Garima Juneja is the co founder of a digital marketing agency www.viralcurry.com based out of Delhi/NCR. Her first love is content marketing and social media! She can be found rambling at @busiestvehli on Twitter