How Do I Create an Instagram Strategy For My Small Business?

Instagram is the fastest growing social media platform among the “Big 5” (others being Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube) and it’s one of the best places to build relationships with your customers. Through two-way conversations with your followers and behind the scenes content, you’re able to humanize your brand and showcase the people behind the business. With 25 million businesses active on the platform as well as integrated ad opportunity (through facebook ad manager), a robust Instagram strategy is a must in order to grow your small business ….and with so many management tools and platforms out there, it can be overwhelming to know where to start.

Perhaps you don't have time or resources to keep up with consistent posting? Or maybe you don't know what to post at all! Or... it could be that you already have great content on Instagram but you have no idea how to track or measure how you're doing in order to make adjustments and improvements to your content mix.

Tip: coming up with a frequency and cadence on when you will post from each category will help you stay consistent in your posting.

What Tools Should I Use For My Business Instagram?

Next let's take a look at some tools to help you action your IG strategy

To learn more about how to use Instagram Insights and what kind of things you can learn from it, check here.

What Tools Can I Use to Create Content?

Now that you have an Instagram strategy and content pillars in mind, you might be wondering, how do I create high quality content? Photographers and graphic designers are expensive!

Canva is an easy to use graphic design platform with an extensive library of templates and free images that are customizable with your business in mind.

While the basic version of Canva is free, there are limitations to the flexibility and ease of the platform, you might be better served by opting for the premium version, Canva Pro version, which costs $119.99/ year (or $9.99 per month) with the option to pay yearly or monthly. If you are a mid-sized company with multiple people possibly collaborating on creative branding, you might want to look into the enterprise version at $30 per month per person. The enterprise version has additional features like team dashboards and comment and editing tools to help manage assignments and collaboration across your organization.

How Do I Manage and Track My Content?

If you have your other social media and marketing platforms like Facebook, Google Analytics, Google my Business, Pinterest, LinkedIn up and running, we recommend using a productivity platform like Sendible which allows you to manage all your platforms and social networks together in a centralized hub.
Sendible is a super straightforward program that will help you bring your Instagram game to a seriously professional level. You’ll be able to enhance content by scheduling posts to publish at times where you are likely to get the most likes and comments. It also gives you helpful data on what kind of posts perform well and allows you to build custom reports and so much more.

• Free trial- yes
• Startup: $59 per month
• Business: $99 per month
• Corporate: $139 per month
• Premium: $499 per month

Track, Adapt and Grow

Remember to learn and adapt your Instagram strategy as you grow. There is no one size fits all approach and often trial and error is a necessary strategy. Instagram continues to roll out helpful tools for business owners so it's important to stay current and follow and monitor competitors posts. If you see cool or new kinds of posts in your feed, do a quick search on how they might have been created and then repurpose with your own twist.