How Visual Content Build Your Business Identity on Instagram

Instagram is a powerhouse of visual content, has over 1 billion active monthly users and more than 80 million pictures are posted each day. The platform released enormous new feature updates including IGTV-standalone video platform, Shoppable Instagram posts, new ways to drive traffic from Stories, Advanced Analytics.

Instagram is a prime place to promote your brand, connect with customers and reach the new target audience. Follow these visual content tips to get more followers, engage your fan base, drive sales and build a business identity on Instagram.

Set Your Business Goals

Set your business goals by carefully considering what your business needs to achieve on Instagram:

• Brand awareness
• Customer and brand engagement
• Lead-to-deal conversions

Plan your business goals to choose objectives that will aid you in achieving these goals and come up with an effective content strategy in order to achieve your results. Every picture is worth a thousand words and visuals are the best way to communicate which gets your message across people.  Focus on product images, videos and stories and make them more interactive to engage followers and potential audiences.

Create Visual Style Guidelines

Make a good first impression to attract a steady stream of new customers and build customer loyalty to your brand’s long term success. The brand identity is more essential before creating a visual identity. Create a visual style guideline to enforce consistency in your graphic design, branding, and marketing.

• The theme of your brand.
• Font styles, typefaces and color palette.
• Relevant taglines.
• Guidelines on composing imagery.

Design Templates

Design Templates for a consistent stream of images and gives your feed certain aesthetics to build your brand personality. Most brands follow a default template with a certain color or type of imagery which increases brand recognition and identity among the audience.

For example, backgrounds for text posts, borders, image filters can be designed as a default template which makes people remembered. These templates can be used in for sharing quotes, customer feedback, testimonials and user-generated content that you would like to share on your feed to increase brand authenticity.

Post Consistently

Quality images have become more important with algorithmic changes hitting the Instagram feed. Judge your audience preferences and get your own graphics correlating with filters to inspire the audience. Profiles that posted seven times a week with interactive hashtag gets more impressions than less frequently posts. A brand portrayed consistently will naturally admit to your target audience and results in higher growth.

Follow your competitors and find inspiration from their marketing strategies to reach the target audience. Users engaging with your competitors are more likely interested in your brand and will give you a better understanding of your market.

Schedule Your Posts

Once you plan the content, post them at the right time when your followers are most active. Research your Instagram insights, previous post impressions, and Instagram analytics to find the best time to post.

You can also use social media management tools to help plan your Instagram schedule. You will get access to a visual content calendar where you can save details regarding the post and also set up multiple content queues to add updates so that your content is published automatically.

You can also read: How Instagram Influencers can help grow your Brand

Types Of Visual Content For Instagram

There are various ideas of visual content that you can create for your Instagram business account. Experiment with all content and find what kinds of content works best for your Instagram audience.

1. Photos- Product images, behind the scene images, Quotes, Testimonials.
2. Videos- Product videos, Demo Videos, Product tutorials, Product Teasers to build hype among the audience.
3. Instagram Live- Audience interviews, Customer Feedback.
4. Behind-the-scenes: Engage and demonstrate company culture and make sure you create authentic content.
5. Educational/ how-to- content: To provide value to the viewer about the products or services.
6. Tips or Advice: Provide value and engage the audience by providing useful tips or advice.
7. Listicles- Listicles make great stories. They are highly engaging and informative.

Boost Engagements

Respond to comments that people have left on your feed. Answering questions is a great way of engagement. A quick response can help users feel that you take concerns seriously and value customer service.

• Insert links of your website in each post on Instagram captions to increase web traffic.
• Come up with a unique branded hashtag and share it effectively to reach the target audience.
• Build a community of like-minded people and share your content.
• Work with Influencers to reach the new potential audience.

Trends On Visual Content

Instagram is serving as the best visual platform providing creative and engaging opportunities for brands, constantly updating, adding new features, switching up their algorithm. Let’s stay ahead of the curve with these Instagram visual trends and updates.

Question Stickers: ‘Ask me anything’ question sticker on stories encourages the audience to ask questions.

Polling Stickers: Polling stickers help brands to find popular products with higher votes.

IGTV Preview Video: We are quite familiar with IGTV, Instagram has launched a new update where users can create a 60-second preview video to increase viewers to the long-form content.

Shoppable Ads: Users can buy products without leaving the Instagram page. Price details will be tagged on the product posts.

Augmented Reality: Augment Reality filters on ad posts lets users ‘try on’ products before purchase.

Measure Your Growth

Instagram gives an artistic outlet, lets brands connect with the audience and a great place to market your business. Focus on your important metrics and get a clear picture of how your content strategy is performing, identify the gaps and improve your tactics to gain better results.

Measure your metrics at every step of the campaign with specific tools. Align your metrics obtained each month to ensure every campaign is achieved its pre-defined objective. Have a bird-eye view of identifying your top-performing content and fine-tune your upcoming campaign.

Related articles:

• 15 Simple steps to build feasible Instagram engagement
• How To Use Instagram Videos To Kickstart Your Business
• 5 Ways Instagram influencers can help you grow your brand

Author Bio

Claire Divas- A dedicated, detailed and capable research social media blog writer with six years of experience. Extensively published in social media marketing technologies, with related expertise in Digital Marketing. If you would like to keep up to date with my posts, you can follow me on twitter.