How to optimize your Instagram profile for business, crafting and content strategy

Instagram Business accounts are helpful analytics and promotional tools. Business accounts provide users with analytics related to post performance and follower growth. Since 80 percent of Instagram users follow at least one brand, Instagram allows Business accounts to include a contact button that sends a message via Instagram direct message, email, or SMS to the brand representatives. This makes social media customer support far easier than before Business. accounts can "boost" content with just a few taps.

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This relatively inexpensive paid promotion ensures that you reach a wider audience no matter what post you choose to boost. An Instagram Business account provides social media marketers with greater flexibility when it comes to creating an effective social media presence on Instagram.

1: Choose a Quality Profile Photo That Related to Your Branding

Your Instagram profile photo must represent who you are. For a brand, choose an instantly recognizable brand logo. Your logo is also the easiest solution because it helps you stay visually consistent across all of your channels. However, if you’re an influencer, entrepreneur, or blogger, choose a picture of yourself that communicates who you are and what you do.

2: Include a Keyword With Your Name

To ensure people can find you, make sure that the name you share on Instagram is your name, not your Instagram username. Because people who search for you on Instagram will use your real name or your company’s name, matching your name to your Instagram handle decreases your searchability.
Because Instagram users also search for keywords, putting a keyword in your name triples your searchability scores. Even if your username doesn’t contain the keyword, people can still find you through the keyword in your name. 

3: Incorporate Target Keywords in Your Description

Because your Instagram bio has less time than an eye blink to make a great first impression, making your bio easy to scan helps people quickly understand what you’re all about. For optimal scanning, target keywords are your best friends because they clarify what kind of content people can find on your account.

4: Add a CTA Before the Link to Your Blog or Latest Offer

Because Instagram wants its users to stay on the platform, the places where you can put URLs that drive the audience to external domains are limited. However, driving traffic and measuring your website clicks are important Instagram metrics for business. Currently, if you have over 10,000 followers, you can put a link in Stories and drive traffic from there, but this tactic doesn’t work for smaller accounts. Your Instagram bio is your only opportunity to organically drive traffic to your domain or special offer.

5: Use Line Breaks, Emojis, and Custom Fonts to Fine-Tune Your Bio

After you cover the fundamentals (like keywords, URLs, and cross-promoted hashtags), add some personality to your bio as a final touch. For example, add a favorite quote you live by or share a funny line that represents your brand well. 

How to craft and content strategy Instagram

Think of your Instagram strategy as your roadmap for using the social network to grow your audience and business. Starting with a clear roadmap helps you build trust with your audience, making coming up with content that drives conversions a breeze instead of a burden.
You need to get clear on what you’re planning to share, who you’re hoping to attract, and how you plan to reach your business goals—all while still running your business.

Step #1: Define your Instagram goals
Success on Instagram means different things to different people. Before you start planning out your Instagram strategy, consider what you’re hoping to get out of your time on the platform.
Whether you’re a coach, a freelancer, or a blogger, you need to make sure your Instagram strategy supports your overall business strategy—even if Instagram only makes up a small part of your business strategy.

For example: you’re working toward launching your new small business related to lead generation, name is "LEADSLOCK", and you’re trying to grow a broad audience of potential customers. You’ll probably want to focus on increasing your follower count and increasing engagement on your every post. And you should probably focus more on driving qualified traffic to your lead magnets and landing pages.
After you decide on your Instagram goals, you’ll also need to clarify how you’ll track your progress. The best way to do this is to choose a single Key Performance Indicator (KPI)—a metric you’ll follow over time to see how well your Instagram strategy works.

Step #2: Get to know your Instagram audience
Instagram is a busy place. With over one billion users browsing the platform each month and more than three-quarters of US businesses posting to Instagram in 2020, it’s more important than ever to make sure your marketing efforts aren’t lost in the noise.
If you already have a well-defined persona for your business, you can use the same information to guide your Instagram efforts. You can also check out the people who already follow your business on Instagram, along with the people who follow your competitors, and look for similarities among your audience.

Step #3: Scope out the competition
Now you’ve defined who you’re trying to reach, it’s time to get some inspiration from your peers and colleagues. You can learn a ton by looking at what your competitors are already sharing on Instagram, and those insights can help guide your Instagram strategy toward success.
Analyzing what other people in your niche are posting (and how strategic they’re being) should take less than an hour. Look at your top competitor’s Instagram accounts, or find others in your industry or niche by searching for keywords or hashtags.

Step #4: Define your Instagram brand
Before you start sharing content, you need to get clear on how you want your brand to be perceived on Instagram. Creating a consistent identity and making your brand a core part of your Instagram strategy makes you instantly recognizable to your audience and helps you grow your audience more quickly.

Building your Instagram brand involves more than just adding your logo to your profile picture and keeping the same color scheme in your posts. Your brand includes every part of your Instagram profile—from your bio and profile picture to your feed, captions, hashtags, and even the accounts you follow.
As you develop your Instagram strategy, think about how you want your audience to perceive your brand on Instagram.

Imagery
Try to stay consistent with your color palette and design style, so your audience can instantly recognize who’s posting without even seeing your profile. If you already have brand guidelines around fonts, colors, and other branding elements (take some inspiration from our branding guidelines!), make sure you use those consistently in every post.

Copy
Your branding doesn’t just apply to your visuals, either. The words you share in your bio and post captions give you the perfect opportunity to demonstrate your brand and attract your target audience—but only if you keep things consistent. Your Instagram bio and post captions should both reflect your brand and business values.

Step #5: Review your existing Instagram content and profile
Now you have a solid plan for where you’re heading, let’s take a look at where you’ve been. Auditing your existing Instagram content against your new strategy ensures your entire profile—past and present—is working together to help you reach your goals.
First, take a look at your profile and bio.
Does the language you use accurately reflect your brand?

Step #6: Plan the content you’ll share
Now we’re finally ready to get into the fun part of your Instagram strategy: your Instagram content strategy.
Creative, compelling content needs to be at the core of your Instagram strategy. Being deliberate with the content you share on Instagram helps you generate more followers and grow your audience more quickly than sharing random content.
Uncovering the right balance of content and growing an audience on Instagram means finding:
Topics your audience is interested in
Topics you’re interested in
Content formats you love creating
Content formats your audience enjoys

Step #7: Set up a consistent posting schedule
Now you have a plan for what you’re going to share on Instagram, you need to define when you’re going to share posts and how often.
Uncovering the best times to post on Instagram takes a little work, but it’s worth the effort. You always want to post when your audience is most likely to be online—that way, you’ll have the best chance of potential customers and subscribers coming across your content.

Step #8: Track your progress against your goals
As you begin putting your strategy into action, you’ll want to regularly check back in against the goals and KPIs you set earlier to make sure you’re moving in the right direction.
Instagram Insights includes plenty of valuable data on which content is performing best (or worst). That way, you can make educated decisions about the best content to post—and grow your audience more quickly.
Make a habit of regularly checking your analytics to see how your content is performing. Are your KPIs meeting the goals you set earlier? If not, what can you tweak to improve your performance?
Keep an eye out for any posts with above-average engagement—perhaps you used a different hashtag or shared a different type of content than the norm. Try to work out why that post performed so well, so you can duplicate it in your future content.

Be strategic with your Instagram growth

Coming up with a clear strategy for how you’ll use Instagram is a great first step to growing your audience—and your business. Once you have a roadmap for where you’re heading, you’ll find it much easier to attract new followers, convert them into customers or clients, and reach your business goals.

Don’t forget:

Define your goals
Know your audience
Understand the competition
Illustrate your brand
Review your existing content
Plan what you’ll share and when
Track your progress

Although your Instagram content and captions are important, your profile is the first impression you make on the platform. With the limited time you have to make that impression count, use the tips in this article to tweak your Instagram profile and improve the return on your efforts.

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