Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Flipboard 5 Do you want to grow Instagram as a marketing channel for your brand? To do this effectively you will need to know how to grow your audience and promote your brand effectively on the social network. In this post you’ll learn the seven tactics you need to leverage for successful Instagram marketing. Depending on your experience with visual marketing, you should be able to implement these tactics in under 2 hours. Run an Instagram campaign The first simple yet effective Instagram marketing strategy that you can implement is engaging user-generated content campaigns. What makes these campaigns simple is that you’re tapping your community to increase your content sharing. Creating content to share from your brand’s account can be difficult but with the incredible value of user-generated content, enlisting your community for your content creation can be one of the most effective ways to build your Instagram marketing. UGC is best to showcase your brand in an authentic way by enabling your consumers to tell your brand’s story for you. But there are some details you need to consider when planning an Instagram contest. Whether this is your first time launching a campaign or you’re a seasoned pro on Instagram, thinking through all of the steps that make a campaign successful can be difficult. We’re here to help with our free Instagram campaign planning guide! Analyze your Instagram activations A successful Instagram marketing strategy depends on comprehensive measurement and analytics to understand the effectiveness of the promotion. This means that another necessary Instagram marketing strategy you need to leverage is Instagram analytics. Instagram can be a powerful tool for your marketing and a great way to connect with your fans. But only if you know how to do it right. You need know who the most active members in your community are, what content they’re all sharing, understand what content resonants with them and how this affects your overall marketing strategy. You can use Instagram analytics tools like the SEEN Insights platform to analyze your Instagram marketing strategy and measure what works. Download this free ebook to understand what social media data is available on Instagram and how you can put it to work for you. Leverage Instagram influencers Implementing influencers into your Instagram marketing strategy will help you reach a new targeted audience with your promotions. Today’s influencers are the tastemakers of the social web, defining the experiences that your consumers are living and deciding the products that they will buy. Leverage this authentic form of promotion for effective Instagram marketing. Influencers amplify your reach by sharing about your brand to their followers. The targeted influencers like those found in Snapfluence, are able to aid in your overall content creation and promote your brand’s lifestyle to a wider range of Instagrammers with their highly engaged following. And if you think planning an influencer marketing campaign on Instagram is difficult then you clearly haven’t seen our guide to Influencer campaign planning bliss! Use smart #hashtags Leveraging hashtags for your Instagram marketing may seem obvious to even the most casual social media marketer but using these hashtags in most effective way isn’t so obvious. Hashtags can be an effective way to increase the reach of your content but only when you’re doing it right. With hashtag use, you can apply existing hashtags that your community is using to expand the reach of your content or create new hashtags that benefit your overall social media marketing strategy. When using existing hashtags, research the tags your community is using to understand what you should using with your content sharing. If you’re creating a new hashtag, consider the purpose of the tag you’re creating in order to use it effectively. Often brands will create very specific tags for their Instagram contests that apply only to that specific promotion; alternatively you can create a general hashtag that will be used continuously by your community for additional marketing opportunities. Smart Instagram marketing will use hashtags, but only in ways that supports your content and doesn’t distract your community. Highlight UGC from your community The beauty in visual marketing on Instagram is your ability to showcase your brand in an authentic way through the perspective of your most passionate fans. The best tactic to take advantage of this is by highlighting the user-generated content from your community. It’s the brands that leverage UGC who see the best results from their social media marketing efforts. Whether you’re designing a new site or giving your current site a facelift, consider leveraging UGC to increase your community’s sharing and give your fans that added bonus of engagement. But when you’re learning how to use UGC on your site you need to make sure you’re following Instagram & Twitter’s display guidelines appropriately. Engage your community Engaging your community on Instagram is a tactic that you can certainly get started in less than two hours but the long-term benefits that you’ll see from the interactions will come when you continue this activity. Instagram isn’t a one-way channel for promoting your brand. If you’re goal is for your community to engage and interact with you then you need to be doing the same with them. Interacting with the posts your fans are sharing helps strengthening your relationship with them and also increases your visibility to their network. Reciprocate your fans’ passion for your brand by engaging their posts and the results will pay dividends. For continued success on Instagram regularly interacting with your fans. Get featured on the Instagram Explore Tab The Explore Tab on Instagram is the top destination for marketers to get their content discovered by their target consumers. The Explore Tab works to surface relevant content to each member of the Instagram community. This means that your top priority is to make content relevant to your target consumer. You build the relevancy by posting captivating content that your audience wants to see while driving engagement from them. So your engagement needs to focus on not just gaining a lot of interactions but rather gaining the right interactions. Being featured on the Explore Tab is what happens from following the right practices with your Instagram marketing so we’ve outlined the steps you need to follow to be featured. Each of these Instagram marketing strategies can be implemented in under 2 hours but the try success will be seen from continuously practicing each of these tactics. Twitter Tweet Facebook Share Email This article originally appeared on Capturing Moments and has been republished with permission.Find out how to syndicate your content with B2C Author: Alex Ditty Follow @seenmoment Alex leads Client Operations for SEEN, a visual marketing platform that allows brands to manage, monitor, and measure Twitter and Instagram campaigns.… View full profile ›More by this author:How Influencers Think About FTC Disclosures5 YouTube Marketing Lessons from Top InfluencersTop 5 Influencer Complaints About Marketers