Instagram, with more than 500 million daily active users, is one of the most popular social media platforms globally. Today, many brands and influencers use this platform to promote business on Instagram and reach a new audience. In this article, we’ll show how to promote business on Instagram, run ads and promotions, and grow your followers organically.
Looking for the best Instagram management and growth tool? Try AiGrow for free now!
Does Promoting On Instagram Work?
An Instagram promotion, similar to any other paid ad, allows you to expose your content to a targeted audience, get more followers and increase your reach. This tactic can’t help your growth on its own, but with other long-time strategies, it can be very helpful.
In the following, we’ll show you how to use this tool and other tactics to make it more effective.
How To Market on Instagram?
Instagram promotion is a tactic that allows you to convert your posts, Stories, and highlights into paid ones. Next, your content can reach more audiences, you can add call-to-actions, and increase your brand awareness. Also, Instagram promotion posts get sponsored labels. Here is how to promote your business on Instagram using Instagram promotions:
Note: You can use Instagram promotions from the app, but, If you want to run ads, you need to connect your account to a Facebook business page.
- Log into your Instagram account and go to your profile.
- Open the post you want to promote and tap “Boost Post”.
- If you have connected your Instagram to a Facebook page, select “With a Facebook Ad Account”; Otherwise, select “Without a Facebook Ad Account”.
- Select what results you want to gain by promoting on Instagram. It can be more profile visits, more website visits, or more DMs.
- Next, you can target the audience by location, interests, age, and gender. You can also set it on automatic, so Instagram finds you users similar to your current followers.
- Add your budget and promotion duration and tap “Next”.
- At last, do the payment and tap “Boost Post”.
How To Promote Business on Instagram?
Besides running Instagram promotions, there are many other ways for using Instagram for business, gaining more followers, and growing your account. In the following, we’ll show you the top 13 free hacks to get more followers and promote business on Instagram. It might take a longer time to see the results, but we recommend you use them as your marketing strategy.
1. Switch To The Business Account
If you want to promote your business on Instagram and use Instagram for businesses, the first step is to switch your account to business. That’s because there are more tools and features on business accounts to help you grow your page faster. Here are the two most important reasons:
- Look more professional to your audience: You can add a contact button, address, and service category and make your profile like a pro.
- Access to analytics: This is the essential tool you need when using Instagram for business. When you use a business account, you can take a look at your posts’ performance, followers’ activity, and insights.
Besides these two, there are more tools like sharing links on stories, shoppable posts, and Instagram ads that we’ll discuss completely in the next parts. Here is how to switch your account to a professional:
- First, log in to your Instagram account and go to your profile.
- Tap the three-line icon at the top right corner and select Settings.
- Select “Account”.
- Scroll down and tap “Switch to Professional Account”
- Choose your category and select “Done”.
Now you can start using Instagram for business and promote Instagram posts.
Also read: How to switch back to personal account
2. Share Posts Consistently
Based on the latest Instagram algorithm, the more content you share on Instagram, the greater reach you’ll get. The number of posts you need to share to get the highest reach depends on how many followers you have. If you have a small audience, we recommend sharing at least one post every day so your followers remember you.
3. Use An Instagram Growth Tool
If you are looking for a quick way to promote business on Instagram and use Instagram for business, a growth tool can help you a lot. Especially when you are too busy to put time into interacting with your followers, attracting new ones, and managing your page, an Instagram management tool can help you a lot. With a simple search, you can find thousands of services that claim to grow your audience with organic followers, manage your account, and help you in the Instagram promotion. But do all of them work? Are they safe to use? Do they have a support team?
To help you in your decision, we want to introduce you to the best Instagram management and growth tool available in the market, AiGrow. With this service’s AI engine, you can target users to find the potential ones interested in your content, keep your engagement rate high, and get more than 200 new followers every month. AiGrow guarantees your account safety and protects your account from getting banned, shadowbanned, or action blocked.
Here is how to use AiGrow’s growth tool:
- Open AiGrow’s website and signup for free using your email address.
- Log into your account and click “Add Instagram Account” to connect your page to AiGrow.
- Select “Manage”.
- In the “Growth” tab, you need to target users for the AI engine by hashtags, locations, and competitors’ accounts to find the potential ones.
- After targeting, scroll down to the “Activities” box and turn on “Follow” and “Unfollow”.
- Click “Start Growth”.
After a few seconds, the AI engine provides you with a list of potential users. By purchasing one of the growth plans, your dedicated account manager starts following and unfollowing them safely to increase your followers.
4. Schedule Your Posts & Stories
Now that you know the importance of sharing content more often to promote Instagram posts, you can schedule your content for your best hours. AiGrow has a powerful automatic Instagram scheduler that allows you to create and schedule your content for months ahead to save time. All you need to do is upload the content, and set the publishing time for hours that most of your followers are online. After that, even though you don’t have access to the Internet, your content will be shared. Here is how to use this tool:
- Log into your AiGrow account and select “Manage”.
- Open the “Posts & Scheduling” tab and select “Schedule”.
- Here you can choose the content you want to schedule including posts, Stories, and IGTV videos. Choose “Feed” to share posts.
- In the opened window, you can upload up to ten photos and videos for creating an album. You can also add the link of a video from YouTube to share it as a post with a few clicks, without downloading.
- In the next tabs, search and add hashtags, write a caption, add location, etc.
- When you are done with details, scroll down to the “Schedule Dates” tab and choose “Post in future”.
- Choose your date(s) and click “Submit”.
Read more: Top 3 tools to schedule an Instagram post on desktop
5. Complete Your Bio
Your Instagram bio is the first place your page visitors check and if they find what they want, start scrolling your posts. Also, an incomplete bio looks unprofessional, especially for businesses and brands. Make sure to complete your profile with useful details about your service, introduce your brand, and have a high-quality picture( or logo). You can also add a clickable link to other platforms in your bio.
Read more: 100+ Instagram bio ideas in 2021
6. Direct Users To Other Platforms Using Your Bio Link
When you use an Instagram business profile, you are allowed to share only one clickable external link on your bio and drive your Instagram traffic to other platforms. This way, you can redirect your followers to your campaign page, website, blog, shop, or YouTube channel. Sharing only one link is a big problem for influencers and brands that use different platforms. If you have this problem too, don’t worry; AiGrow has a completely free solution for you, named Bio-link. This tool helps you to create your dedicated landing page and fill it with multiple links and buttons to help users use Instagram for businesses.
Read more: Drive Traffic to Your Website with MyURLs.bio
7. Share High-Quality Content
One of the most important Instagram promotion tips you need to consider is sharing high-quality and eye-catching Instagram posts. This way, you can reach the Instagram explore page and stop feed scrollers to pay attention to your content. You can use plenty of free photos and video editing tools to create your content. Canva, Layout, and Snapseed are the top tools you can try.
Read more: 4 tips to improve your Instagram aesthetic
8. Find Your Best Times For Posting
Even though sharing content consistently is important for your visibility, if you don’t share them at the right times you won’t get enough reach. Based on the country your followers are located in, there are hours that most of them are online. But posting in these hours, you can get the highest impression and reach.
Using Instagram analytics and experiments help you to find them. You can take a look at your followers’ region on the Instagram app by following these steps:
- Log into your Instagram business account and go to your profile.
- Tap the three-line icon at the upper-right corner and select “Insights”.
- Tap the “Your Audience” icon to view more detail.
- If you have more than 100 followers, you can view the top locations, age range, gender of your audience.
Now based on the region you find, experiment and share posts at different hours till you find the best time to promote the Instagram post.
Read more: When is the best time to post on Instagram in 2021?
9. Use Hashtags
Since 2016 Instagram users can follow hashtags to view their content on their feed page, even if they don’t follow the owners. This makes a perfect opportunity to grow your network by using hashtags relative to your business niche. So, if you want to promote business on Instagram, try to use at least ten hashtags on each Instagram post to reach a new targeted audience.
Tip: If you don’t want your caption to look messy, you can add your tags in a comment; they work the same.
Read more: How to use Instagram hashtags to grow your audience in 2021?
10. Find trend hashtags
Once in a while, something becomes a trend in social media, and everyone starts creating content or searching for it. If you want to promote business on Instagram, it’s important to know the new trends and their hashtags to use them for growing your page. By using top hashtags, you can bring your content on top, maximize your reach, get more followers, and promote Instagram posts. We have a quick solution for you to find hashtags for every content you want to share just with a few clicks. Let’s see how to find top tags using AiGrow’s hashtag generator:
- Log into your AiGrow account and select “Manage”.
- Open the “Posts & Scheduling” tab and select “Listening&Repost”.
- In the “Hashtag monitoring” tab, click “Add Hashtags”.
- Write a keyword about the content you want to see its trends. Click “Search”.
AiGrow’s AI engine provides you with a list of hashtags sorted by usage in a blink. You can add the top ones to use whenever you want, view their top posts, and monitor their growth.
Read more: The Hashtag Hack: How to Bring your Posts to the Top of the Explore Page
11. Share content in your Stories every day
More than 500 users check their Instagram stories, and in 2021, there are more tools in Stories for promoting on Instagram. You can now share photos and videos, add music, polls, and different stickers to make them more fun. Here are some Instagram Story ideas to promote business on Instagram:
- Add links to your Stories: Unfortunately, this feature is only available for users with more than 10k followers or a verified account. Once you meet these requirements, you are allowed to share one link on each Story to redirect followers to an external URL.
- Check Instagram Story views and insights: If you use a professional account, you can view your reach and impressions even after the Story disappears.
Read more: How to get more Instagram story views and grow your account?
12. Run Instagram contests and giveaways
If you want to boost your visibility, gain more followers, and get in front of a new audience, you need to start running Instagram giveaways. Since everyone loves free stuff, it will help you get thousands of entries and promote your business on Instagram. But, running an Instagram giveaway or contest requires tons of time and attention to check all the participants and choose a random winner. That’s why AiGrow came with a solution named the Post&Reward tool. With this feature, you can automate your contests and save time for interacting with your audience. Here is how to use this tool:
- Log into your AiGrow account and select “Manage”.
- Open the “Psts&Scheduling” tab then, select “Post&Reward”.
- Click “Schedule a Contest”.
- In the opened window, you upload your giveaway post from your PC or convert a video from YouTube without downloading.
- Next, set your conditions for the participants such as, following your account, using a hashtag, or tagging friends. AiGrow’s AI engine checks the qualified users every 3 hours to make sure they follow the rules.
- In the next part, add your post detail, caption, tags, location, etc.
- Once you are done, you can schedule the post or share it immediately.
Read more: Contests & promotions that generate social engagement and get more followers
13. Use shoppable tags
In 22020, Instagram introduced a new feature named Instagram shop to help brands get more customers and use Instagram for businesses. If you have enabled your Instagram shop, you can add up to five shoppable tags on each post and link them to a product on your website. This makes shopping a lot easier for your followers and can increase your website traffic. Here are some requirements for running an Instagram shop:
- An Instagram Business account: Instagram shop is only available for business profiles.
- Be in an eligible country: Unfortunately, this feature is only available in 46 countries that you can check from Instagram’s official website.
- Create a Facebook catalog: You need to connect your Instagram Business profile to a Facebook catalog to create an Instagram shop.
How to advertise business on Instagram?
There are two ways to run ads and create Instagram ads campaigns; You can either promote a post or use the Facebook ads manager. In the previous parts, we showed you how to promote an existing post on the app. Now let’s see how to work with Ads manager:
- To start, log into your Facebook Ads Manager and click “+Create”.
- Next, you need to choose your campaign objective from the list.
- After selecting your objective, set your campaign’s name.
- In the next step, you can choose your budget and how many days you want to run a campaign then, start scheduling the post.
- The next step is to identify your audience and target users.
- After that, you need to select your ad placement; means choose where you want your ads to appear.
- Finally, review your ad and click “Complete”.
Conclusion
Instagram, with a large number of users, is one of the best places for digital marketing. No matter what service you have, you can find your potential audience on this platform for sure. In this article, we should you top tips and tricks to promote business on Instagram for those who want to use this platform professionally. Also, we introduced you to a top Instagram growth and management tool to help you get more organic followers quickly, AiGrow.
