Instagram Algorithm Solved: Your Instagram Marketing Guide

There are nearly five billion social media accounts worldwide; launched in 2010, Instagram now has more than two billion active users alone. Although the average consumer uses seven different social media platforms per month, US adults spend 30 minutes per day strictly on Instagram — and IG’s even more popular with the youth. Instagram is the fifth most visited website that exists, and 79% of marketers used the social media app to promote their brand last year. In fact, even with ad costs increasing 55% in the last two years, Instagram generated more than $40 billion in ad revenue in 2022. Why? Instagram is the top social media platform for people to connect with brands, the top social media platform for brand research, and the second most preferred social media platform for customer service. Plus, Instagram now includes Instagram Shopping for selling directly from the app.

Point blank: Social media is the best place for brands to connect with their target audiences, build brand awareness, boost online engagement and generate leads. And alongside TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube primarily, Instagram is an 18-34 favorite that must be prioritized by any B2C brand.

What is Instagram?

How do you use Instagram? Instagram is a photo and video sharing social networking platform launched and operated by Meta. The visually oriented desktop and mobile app is designed for users to upload media that can be edited with filters and organized by geo-tagging and hashtags, shared publicly or privately with pre-approved followers. Primarily used for posting photos and videos and browsing funny or entertaining content, Instagram’s largest cohort is users aged 25-34, with a full six in 10 users aged 18-34. People that self-identify as men and women each account for about half of Instagram users, who search and post most about love, fashion, photography, art, nature, travel and style — plus, the brands they love!

What is Instagram marketing?

Seven in 10 consumers look to Instagram for their next purchase; 90% of all IG users follow at least one brand; and more than a third of all users will make a purchase on Instagram in 2023.

Instagram marketing is another term for Instagram for business; it includes all the social media marketing strategies and tactics your brand employs specifically on Instagram to connect with your target audiences, build brand awareness, boost online engagement and generate leads. 

Marketing on instagram can (and usually should) include: 

• Organic content, including photos, videos, carousel posts, Lives, Reels, and Stories
• Paid content, including boosted posts, Instagram campaigns, Stories ads, and Shopping ads
• Messenger chatbots and auto-responders
• Shopping tools, including the Shop profile tab, product catalog, product tags, live shopping, Instagram Checkout, and Shopping ads
• Influencer marketing and user-generated content 

If you’re wondering how to market on Instagram, follow my top tips.

What does an Instagram marketing strategy look like?

An Instagram marketing strategy includes your target audience(s), goals, KPIs, editorial plan, content calendar and content development and distribution processes and procedures, as well as the campaigns you’ll run and the AI and other martech you’ll use to achieve your goals. There are seven steps to developing and optimizing an Instagram marketing strategy that works.

7 Steps to Developing Your Instagram Marketing Strategy

1. Define Your Audience(s)

Here’s how to find yours:

• Use your zero-, first- and third-party data to learn as much as you can about your existing customers, subscribers, website users and Instagram followers
• Use any feedback your Instagram marketing managers and coordinators may have logged to identify gaps and opportunities
• Use surveys and focus groups to learn more about what customers, prospects and the general public think of your brand, products/services, and Instagram presence
• Develop user personas, including personal background, professional background, user environment, preferred content types, preferred devices, preferred communication methods, attitudes, interests, motivations, needs, goals and pain points, buying motivation(s), and buying scenarios
• Map out the customer journey, identifying all the different paths an Instagram user might take toward making a purchase; the thoughts, feelings and actions of your prospects and customers at each stage of the customer lifecycle; and how you’ve been using Instagram to recruit, retain, upsell and/or partner with customers
• Use a CDP and/or DXP to organize and manage all your customers and prospects, segment audiences based on your user personas, and improve the empathy and personalization exhibited in your marketing on Instagram

2. Establish Your Instagram Marketing Goals

To ensure clear direction for your Instagram marketing strategy:

• Define goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-based (SMART)
• Start with your overall business goals, proceed to your long-term strategic marketing goals, move on to your social media marketing goals, and conclude with your Instagram- and campaign-specific goals
• Identify the social media marketing KPIs against which you’ll measure your Instagram campaign performance — found exclusively in the full report, The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing
• Outline your expectations for each stage of the customer journey

3. Conduct a Competitive Analysis

To understand what your competitors are doing well or poorly on Instagram, and identify successful tactics you can incorporate into your social media strategy:

• Use your SEO tool, apps like Glassdoor and the various social media platforms to identify your key competitors
• Confirm the social media platforms used by your key competitors
• Search your competitors’ names, account handles and relevant keywords on Instagram to determine what they’re sharing and how their audience and the public are responding (social listening)
• Track your competitors’ Instagram performance, using your predefined KPIs
• Track characteristics of your competitors’ behaviors on Instagram, including when and how often they post, and which and how many hashtags they use
• Focus on your top five competitors, and audit their most popular and most engaged followers, as well as any influencers or users who generate content for their brand
• Benchmark your Instagram marketing performance against the competition
• Perform a SWOT analysis, determining your Instagram strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
• Identify gaps in your existing Instagram strategy
• Strategize methods for addressing any gaps, weaknesses, threats or opportunities

4. Audit Your Instagram Account, Content and Campaigns

Once you’ve clarified who you’re targeting and what you hope to achieve with your marketing on IG, look back at what you’ve already created — and how it performed — to identify trends and determine what can and should be repurposed. 

Start by asking yourself:

• Which types of content have and have not worked?
• Which types of campaigns have and have not worked?
• Which of our user personas have been most and least engaged?
• Which of our user personas have been most likely and least likely to convert to customers?
• Who are our most and least valuable business and influencer partners? (Learn more about influencer marketing.)
• How does our Instagram presence compare to that of our competitors?

Then, perform a Keep, Kill, Refresh on your Instagram content marketing and paid and organic campaigns, as follows:

Content

• Delete any off-brand, inaccurate, stale or erroneous content (Kill)
• Properly name, file and store any content that can be reused as is (Keep)
• Optimize any content that could provide added value if updated and enhanced (Refresh)

Campaigns

• Replicate any campaigns that performed particularly well (Keep)
• Optimize any campaigns that could perform even better with behaviorally informed edits and enhancements (Refresh)
• Archive any past campaigns that underperformed (Kill)

5. Outline Your Instagram Content Development and Distribution Responsibilities, Processes and Procedures

Before you begin planning and then creating custom content for Instagram, you need to secure buy-in from all parties on how your content will be produced and disseminated. Specifically:

• Who are our Instagram content marketing strategists?
• Who are our Instagram content creators? Writers? Graphic designers? Video editors?
• Who are our partner content creators, including Instagram influencers, other brands, and customers who provide user-generated content?
• Who are our Instagram content reviewers?
• Who are our Instagram marketing managers?
• Who are our Instagram marketing coordinators?
• Who are our Instagram data and performance analysts?
• How are the content themes and subjects determined?
• What types of content are being created? And what unique step(s) does each type require?
• How are deadlines determined?
• At what cadence is the content released?
• How is content posted? Do we use a social media marketing platform or other third-party AI-powered social media app? (I list my preferred social media martech solutions in The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing.)
• What type of project management style are we adopting (e.g., agile)?
• What project management software are we using (e.g., JIRA, for agile)?

6. Develop Your Instagram Editorial Plan and Content Calendar

Finally, you can flesh out your Instagram marketing ideas, based on your findings from each of the preceding steps.

Be sure to supplement what the customer data and platform and web analytics tell you by:

• Interviewing internal stakeholders on trends, topics and techniques they think most appeal to your IG audience
• Asking your Instagram followers — and, in particular, your most engaged followers — what inspired them to follow you on IG and engage with or share your content
• Asking your customers what, if anything, you’ve done on Instagram that has contributed to them making a decision to purchase your product or service
• Asking your partner Instagram influencers what it is about your brand, products/services, values or Instagram presence that inspired them to work with you
• Asking past IG followers and customers what it is about your brand, products/services, values or social media presence that inspired them to unfollow you or stop spending

Once you’ve finalized your editorial plan, you can create your Instagram content calendar. 

Use the project management software you selected earlier to build out a master calendar, as well as the timeline for each campaign, project and assignment, assigning all roles from development to approval and from distribution to monitoring, analysis, iteration and optimization.

^{An example of an optimized and strategically focused Instagram profile}

The Top 10 Instagram Tips for Marketers

1. Instagram is a visual platform, so leverage designers and video editors for everything
2. Optimize every aspect of your profile, including your profile photo, about section, Highlights thumbnails, Business Category, multiple links, and CTAs
3. Ensure a consistent brand aesthetic across your Instagram posts, as your profile page displays your posts as a single tapestry
4. Post often (at least once per day)
5. Get verified (unlike on Twitter, it still helps)
6. Use Instagram Live, Reels and Stories, and the applicable tools
7. Showcase what’s most important or most timely to your brand or customers using Stories Highlights on your profile page
8. Stay up to date on trending Instagram hashtags, but use them sparingly
9. Create and promote your Instagram Shop
10. Leverage lookalike audiences and all third-party user data still available to target and segment your user personas for the most effective ad campaigns

7. Monitor, Analyze, Report, Iterate, and Optimize

Based on the KPIs you’ve identified as being most appropriate for your organic and paid efforts, your analysts should be constantly monitoring your Instagram campaign performance and providing reporting to your Instagram marketing strategists, managers and coordinators to inform ongoing iterations and optimizations. 

The truth is: You can always split-test something else. And you can always optimize further.

Before you get started, be sure you’re set up to measure performance against the most important metrics — available now, if you download the full report, The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing.

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Image Credits (in order of appearance) 

1. Photo by geo uc on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/iUgYLk7R59I
2. Photo by Unsplash+ in collaboration with Philip Oroni on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/mot7ustt-AI
3. Photo by Unsplash+ in collaboration with Ben Iwara on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/ENNE51_rkD0
4. Photo by Vitolda Klein on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/naBjwpl5R4k
5. Photo by TheRegisti on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/ziSzilQLSOM