Digital Marketing in the Age of Instagram

Gone are the days when business marketing was done mainly through print media and television. The internet has taken over, and traditional marketing has now made way for Social Media marketing. The popularity of platforms like Instagram has changed the way businesses and clients interact with each other. The online shift of effective communication channels, both personal and professional, has led to more dynamic marketing work. The transition has neither been sudden nor has been an entirely smooth one. Many professionals are still grappling with the new trend for business marketing. When building successful organic strategies has become overwhelming, many businesses also turn to services like FollowersID to make their progress in digital marketing slightly swift and more accessible.

So, how has the rising popularity of social media platforms like Instagram has changed the marketing world?

The following are a few ways in which Instagram has led marketing practices to reimagine creating brand presence:

1. Building Brand Loyalty

Marketing has always had to concentrate on ways and means of convincing existing and potential consumers because they should prefer a brand over others in the same industry. The art of creating a loyal consumer base requires careful planning and creating execution of strategies as it is easy to oversell oneself and push off customers. Developing credibility and trust for a business needs research and marketing skills that consider the business’s goals and the consumer. Instagram has changed the ways of building brand value and loyalty by changing the engagement dynamics of the brand and target audience. Traditional marketing is essentially one-way dissemination of information, whereas a social media site like Instagram relies on healthy two-way communication strategies to build brand value and loyalty. Effective marketing management now involves figuring out how to create, best, sustain and grow an organic and active follower base. The following have become valuable tools in this regard:

• Using trending campaigns – IG users are often supportive of and actively follow IG handles of brands that engage positively with trending campaigns. When brands choose to organize, support, or sponsor prevalent causes and events, they create opportunities for growing brand awareness for themselves. This method may not necessarily translate to immediate sales, but it increases the brand’s trust and loyalty quotient among active IG users.
   
• Using IG Stories – Most existing and potential consumers use online information for product-related content like reviews, how-to tutorials, FAQs, and customer ratings. Brands have used the IG Story feature to post such consumer-centric content successfully. They have seen great engagement rates on the same too. Successful IG Stories push up the visibility and reach of an account among its active followers and increase its potential for attracting new active followers. By extension, it also helps build brand loyalty and reach.
   
• Using consumer psychology to create content – Instagram is a highly interactive visual social platform. The average user is attracted to well-presented content. Using target audience behavioral research, brands have been able to skillfully use color, light, filters, music, memes, and other add-one to enhance the theme of their posts. What endears the posts to the target audience also helps create favorable public opinion for businesses.
   
• Simultaneous posting on several social media sites – Businesses have also found better brand loyalty when they cross-post or simultaneously release new content on different social media handles. This has helped companies find target audiences, not on Instagram and vice versa.

2. The Shift towards D2C Marketing

Sites like Instagram have rendered obsolete the need for one-way advertising channels. Now brands and professionals can directly engage with their target customers and vice versa. Likewise, many businesses have successfully built a brand presence without the need for retailers and resellers. Companies have run profitably with cloud services with the help of successful social media marketing alone. This makes marketing a budget-friendly affair. With most capital-intensive investments rendered redundant, the marketing arena now has new vital components. Some of these are:

• E-commerce sites. These allow for direct transaction opportunities from the company.
• Social influencers. Their ability to reach diverse audience groups and mold public opinion has made them essential in marketing strategies.
• Consumer ratings. Users trust the word of other users. Hence customer feedback and reviews are becoming a vital means of social proof for any business.
• Consumer data. Target audience behavior online has become a crucial data set for the planning and executing successful marketing schemes.

3. Importance of Brand Humanizing

Digital marketing moves away from the third-person approach to building goodwill and creating content. A social media handle treats brands like individuals, and brands need to create a brand persona to manage their professional accounts on spaces like Instagram. This humanizing of one’s business is further sustained by emphasizing building one-to-one client/follower connections. This has led marketing strategies to consider content creation in terms of increasingly:

• Behind the scenes stories – These include building content around company ethics, employee work environment, stories about the birth and growth of the brand, and so on. Audiences connect better with companies that let them have a peek into what the company is all about.
   
• Demos and interviews – This could be with those working for the company, industry experts, professionals from allied industries, real consumers, and so on.
   
• Recreational posts – These include showcasing employees relaxing at work, participating in trending campaigns and reels, taking up social media challenges, or any other aspect that brings the company’s human side to the fore.
   
• Contests and giveaways – These are a popular means of creating a high engagement rate on one’s handle. Brands frequently employ such self-promoting tactics and host local events and competitions in collaboration or on their own to increase audience reach and impression.
   
• Reciprocating to social media activities – It includes being prompt in responding to queries, tags, and comments. It also includes creating reciprocal posts of appropriate content like appreciation, throwback, and so on. Such posts can be auto-scheduled or created in spontaneous response. The core principle behind such publications is to strengthen interpersonal relationships with followers and potential clients.

How Has Instagram Marketing Been a Boon to Businesses?

Social media marketing is definitely a big improvement on older forms of advertising. Here are some ways virtual marketing on Instagram can be advantageous to your business:

• Fast Coverage of a Big Audience Demographics: Social media marketing is swift. A company can create highly localized and specific campaigns or make posts to reach a larger target audience. Moreover, the promotions have a potential outreach of the entire global arena. It all depends on the company’s budget and the time frame it is looking at to get its micro-goals achieved.
   
• Relatively Inexpensive: Creating social media accounts on most sites, including Instagram, is free. One also does not need to buy post promotions and ads unless essential for one’s marketing needs. Many companies can promote themselves at little or no cost.
   
• Reasonable Conversion Rates: A well-thought and executed digital media marketing plan yields high conversion rates. Most sites, like Instagram, give users free access to insight tracking tools fast enable them to decide when to create promotions, and for how long. They are also able to accordingly choose a budget for the promotion keeping their end-goals in mind.
   
• Profitable Investments: As is clear from the above, companies are able to exert great flexibility in choosing what to invest in and how much. Conversion rates tend to be high when promotions are created with adequate research backing. It follows, therefore, that businesses tend to rarely get poor returns from the investments they make in social media promotion campaigns.
   
• Community Space:  Most brands create a community space for users and followers by being active on social media. At the same time, brands themselve become organic members of various professional and social niche communities. Social media branding helps sustain the company as a member of society and is crucial for its growth and long-term success.

Does Instagram Marketing Have Any Drawbacks?

Digital marketing that is heavily reliant on social media is not without its cons. Here are a few:

• Poor consumer rating – While customer reviews are a significant source of building social proof and brand loyalty, no company can be confident that it will only receive positive reviews. Negative feedback, especially ones that are scathing in their remarks, can adversely affect brand credibility.
   
• Poor influencer marketing – Influencers usually have complete autonomy over their content creation. While this helps build credibility and trust better, if an influencer puts your business in a negative light, you can lose organic followers and potential customers.
   
• Time-consuming – A key to building excellent client relationships is to be prompt in responding to any comment, DM or tag. This unfortunately means you have to be active on Instagram all the time. This can not only cost you time that you can use for other purposes, but also induce much fatigue. You may have to consider hiring professionals for the job or use special automated responses to ease the situation and manage your time effectively. If not, you risk losing valuable time in building a humanized Instagram presence.

• Uncertainty over audience reception – No matter how much research you conduct on target audience behavior and how much time and money you invest in fine tuning your content strategy to iron out room for errors, you can never be hundred percent sure of successful post reception. Human behavior is psychologically unpredictable. What makes a post viral overnight may not work for other posts of similar nature. Moreover, a viral trend does not necessarily convert to real leads and sales. Social media marketing success, in other words, is a complicated idea.  You may find your campaigns very popular online and yet not leading to any direct sales or business queries. On the flip side, you may have directly sold services through a shoppable post with very little recorded social media engagement.
   
• Low ROI – ROI from social media accounts, Instagram included, are generally intense and unpredictable. Followers tend to become inactive and also drop out if a business does not maintain consistent online activity.  Fresh content posted in a predictable pattern is a strong magnet for ROI, but it is never a guarantee. Moreover, maintaining consistent posting schedules with top-quality posts can be overwhelming and exhausting, financially and creatively, for a business.

In Conclusion

Digital marketing in the age of Instagram is significantly different from traditional marketing. Over relying on social media for marketing can have its pitfalls. However, the benefits are by far outweigh the negatives and make the transition to digital marketing worth it for any business. This, after all, is the most effective contemporary way of building reach and brand awareness. Digital marketing is the new norm. It is hence imperative that all professionals learn its ropes.