How to Build an Instagram Campaign for Your Brand

With over 200 million Instagram users visiting business profiles every day, building Instagram campaigns for your brand is vital for social media marketing. Understanding how to effectively relay your message to engage your audience is more important now than ever, and it’s especially important as you begin planning out campaigns for your brand. Here are the key elements you need to keep in mind when building an Instagram campaign:

Understand Your Objective

What do you hope to achieve through this campaign? Do you want more interaction between your brand and your followers to boost engagement? Or do you want to expand your reach to new audiences? Perhaps you want to inform people about your new product or just generate more brand awareness. Whatever your end goal is, use that as the foundation to start your campaign.

If you don’t have a goal in mind when creating content, things could go a little off the rails and be all over the place. A centered, goal-driven campaign will almost always play out better in the long run. Creating something with a goal in mind usually makes it more memorable and allows you to see better overall results.

Who Are You Targeting?

Think about your audience before you start building your campaign. Instagram allows you to target specific audiences through their ad builder, a tool you should definitely utilize. If you get through your entire campaign and then decide to think about which audience to target, you have lost the opportunity to create specialized content. The more individualized your campaign feels, the more your target audience will be able to connect with your brand.

Create Content

Now comes the hard part: content creation. Once you’ve nailed down your goal and your audience, you can start creating content with them in mind. There are several ways you can go about this. You can create all your content from photoshoots and graphics made exclusively by your brand, or you can run a user-generated content (UGC) campaign to get authentic content from your loyal followers.

A UGC campaign is an easy way to engage with your current following and to create brand awareness with those followers’ following. A UGC campaign is similar to influencer marketing in a lot of ways - but instead of choosing who represents your brand and sending them product, they choose to represent you. Try setting up a contest and a specific hashtag to make finding your followers’ photos easier. This is a great way to boost already decent engagement and to garner cheap, new content to post on your account featuring them.

Schedule Posts

The next step is to choose a timeline for your posts. Facebook’s Ad Manager makes it easy to schedule out content, but the real test is putting a timeline on your content. Figuring out which post to kick off a campaign with and how long you should wait in between postings can be tricky. Use Instagram’s helpful tools to optimize your content’s capabilities.

If you are using UGC, you need to put a deadline on the campaign and make sure to repost any new content in increments to maintain momentum. If you stop engaging, so will your followers.   

Boost Content Using Influencers and Ads

The last step is to strategically use influencers and ads to boost the reach of your campaign. Using ads to promote your campaign can help increase the overall reach of your brand. To boost effectiveness, get your influencers to follow the theme of your campaign, along with utilizing any unique hashtags. When influencers are on board with the needs and goals of the brand, the campaign will be more effective.