Since the creation of Instagram in 2010, this social media platform has evolved from a simple photo-sharing app for friends and family into an effective marketing channel for businesses of all sizes and niches.
Today, around 2 billion active people use Instagram daily, making it one of the most popular social media platforms among internet users. It also attracts more and more businesses who hope for the attention of the same audience.
According to Instagram, there are 200M+ business accounts on the platform and people upload around 95 million images and photos every day. Competition is intense.
With the growing number of professionally-made business accounts on the platform, Instagram users expect brands to share fresh and unique content, tailored to the latest social media trends.
Even if you have an Instagram presence, but you post the same type of content or your Instagram feed feels drab or dated, there’s a slim chance that you can stand out from the crowd.
Whether you’re just starting out on Instagram or you’re in dire need of a refresh, it is always a good idea to come up with new ideas and spice up your Instagram content strategy.
Why Should You Spice Up Your Instagram Content Strategy?
First things first: Instagram marketing is competitive–just take a look at the numbers below:
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To grab the attention of your audience in-app, it’s important to have a well-prepared playbook of potential actions on what to post on your business profile.
More likely than not, your company has an Instagram content strategy–a detailed plan of posts you’re going to create and post. Instagram content strategy is a proven way to engage customers, spark their interest in your brand, and turn followers into customers later. It is a significant element of your brand’s communication program that also helps to achieve your social media KPIs.
What is more, there are three more reasons to spice up your Instagram content strategy right now:
- Keep your followers engaged. Modern people are spoilt for choice, so it’s no wonder that they might quickly lose interest in your business if you don’t offer something interesting. At the same time, having an up-to-date content strategy allows you to keep up with trends, keep your followers engaged, and even generate inbound leads.
- Attract new followers. Instagram users are in search of interesting and engaging content, and they spend around 53 minutes a day in-app. When you spice up your Instagram content strategy and post something unique and fresh, you get an opportunity to attract new followers.
- Stay ahead of your competitors. Once followers show interest in product posts, most businesses come up with the idea of posting the same content over and over again. Although your audience may like branded content, publishing great and new post ideas means putting your followers first and therefore it helps to beat the competition.
So, who else wants to revamp Instagram? Take a look at seven tips on how to spice up your Instagram content strategy to draw inspiration.
1. Take Care of Your Instagram Visual Identity
As a photo-sharing app, Instagram has a focal point on design. Moreover, 65% of people prefer to learn through reading or seeing images.
Any Instagram content strategy includes visual communications, so the types of visuals, color palettes, and fonts you choose matter. These elements help to visualize your brand’s mission and values, so having a strong visual identity can create a certain association.
With a strong Instagram visual identity, your company not only looks more professional but also grabs the attention of other users who could become lifelong followers. To spice up your Instagram content strategy, start with visuals.
Let’s take a look at Skittles. As a fruit-flavored candy brand, the company chooses bright colors to grab the attention of the target audience and uses eye-catching visuals on its business profile:
Using one color in your Instagram visual identity can be another effective tactic. For example, many people would agree that the color green has strong associations with freshness, so it’s no wonder that Extra Gum chooses green visuals in its Instagram brand identity.
If you’re not a big brand with an in-house team of professional designers, it can be difficult to create similar unique visuals as in the examples above. However, you can always check out ready-to-use Instagram templates and customize them to match your brand identity and keep your feed cohesive.
2. Use the Power of Storytelling in Captions
With an emphasis on visual content, Instagram still offers text content to its users and there’s a big number of text-heavy companies on the platform.
When it comes to Instagram marketing, it’s important to communicate with your followers and create a human and emotional connection with them. There’s no better way to do it than using the power of storytelling, especially when you have to come up with new creative ideas for your business profile.
Stories engage, build trust, and make your message memorable. Whether you want to feature your employee, share your customer’s story, or communicate stories that feature your products, storytelling helps to deliver your message in a fun and interesting way.
Nike often shares stories on its social media profiles and these posts get wonderful results: thousands of likes, dozens of comments, and hundreds of motivated people.
3. Experiment with Different Instagram Video Types
Do you use videos in your Instagram content strategy? If not, now’s the time to get started as the popularity of video content is on the rise.
According to one report, 82% of global traffic comes from videos, 3.5 billion people will consume video content by 2023, and 60% of content marketers plan to spend more on video content creation.
Not only can you engage your target audience with Instagram videos, but you can also build a conversation with live streams or attract followers with Instagram Reels.
Moreover, there are a wide array of Instagram video types with different video length, so every business can find the right video type that matches your brand’s goals and needs.
No matter what type of Instagram videos you decide to create, it’s significant to make them look professional and stunning if you want to catch your audience’s attention.
When it comes to video creation, video editing tools come in handy. By using a tool like Videoleap, you can browse a collection of ready-made templates and customize them to fit your brand identity. Using the app, you can easily repurpose variations on the same creative concepts to experiment with different video dimensions and durations to fit different post types.
Videoleap also allows users to mix images and videos into a single composition, add sound or video effects, and connect with creators to draw inspiration from their videos. Available for iOS or Android, the app can be a time-saver for any user who wants to create amazing videos at scale and on the go.
Any inspiration needed? Here’s how one fashion Instagram influencer customizes video layers with masking to show different ways to wear the same products.
4. Invite Instagram Influencers to Create Posts for You
Have you run out of ideas for your business profile? Give influencer marketing a try!
With 63% of social media users who trust opinion leaders over brands, the popularity of Instagram influencers has exploded in the last few years. Opinion leaders can market your products within their established communities, increase brand trust, and…create posts for you!
From time to time, Lululemon invites influencers with the request of content creation to get new fresh posts for its business profile. Check out its collaboration with one health influencer Adaeze Medani.
And here’s how this post looks like on Adaeze Medani’s profile. The health & wellness influencer posts an image and tags the brand in the caption to let interested followers find out more about the brand.
Working with Instagram influencers on content creation, not only can you get new eye-catching visuals for your brand, but you can also find customers on social media as opinion leaders share the results of the collaboration on their accounts.
5. Draw Inspiration from Your Best-Performing Posts
Your followers know best what content they want to see more on your profile. With Instagram Insights, there’s a free and quick way to track your posts’ performance and see trends among your followers.
This feature allows business profile owners to view insights and analyze actions followers and visitors take when they engage with your content–likes, comments, saves, shares, and replies. It helps to find your best-performing content.
But if you want to get in-depth insights, you can rely on eclincher’s advanced analytics to track performance and share results with your team.
Once you know what content works best within your community, you can focus on creating similar posts for your Instagram content strategy. With the right analysis, you can understand your audience’s needs and therefore put effort into making eye-grabbing visuals or keep a focus on text-heavy captions.
6. Know When Your Audience Consumes Content
Not all of your low-performing posts are bad or boring. They might be posted at the wrong time.
The number of posts people upload on Instagram daily is growing day by day. Instagram’s algorithm prioritizes fresh content from friends and family, so businesses have to do their best to make sure more people see your content. One of the best ideas is to post at the right time.
Once you want to spice up your Instagram content strategy, it’s a good idea to conduct a marketing audit and understand your target audience’s behavior. However, you should also know when your followers are active in-app and when they consume content.
Again, Instagram Insights can hint at this information:
7. Lay a Bet on Interactive Instagram Ad Formats
A well-created Instagram content strategy is not just about organic content; it also includes paid posts. If you advertise on Instagram to reach a wider audience of potential followers and market your products across your target audience, you should also think about experimenting with ad formats.
To spice up your content strategy and stand out from the crowd of 2M advertisers on the platform, give interactive ad formats a try by including Instagram poll questions in your next ad campaign.
Modern social media users show interest in brand communication, so companies see success using the polling sticker in ads.
Let’s take Reserved, for example. To introduce its new season clothing line, Reserved created a video Story ad that showed off several outfits and included a polling sticker to invite viewers to vote for their choice.
The campaign with an interactive polling sticker got a 12X lift in brand awareness, compared to standard ads in Instagram Stories.
And here’s another example of this strategy in action from Little Mistress. To introduce its new collection and raise awareness of its high-impact nature designs, the company included a poll sticker and invited viewers to guess how many recycled plastic bottles were used to create a series of outfits from its collection.
After the polling stickers, an endscreen instructed users to swipe up and visit the Little Mistress website. As a result, the campaign reached 2.8 million people and got a 24% lift in “add to cart” conversions from best-performing ads as well as a 94% increase in Black Friday sales compared to the previous year.
In a Word
Social media platforms, especially Instagram, have an ever-changing nature. This means content trends and consumer behavior change fast.
Even if your posts and Stories perform well now, never stick to one posting style. You should spice up your Instagram content strategy from time to time if you want to keep your content fresh and engaging.
With the above-mentioned tips, you can find both easy-to-implement and advanced tactics on how to spice up your Instagram content strategy and therefore create content your target audience craves. After all, posting exciting and unique content is one of the proven ways to succeed on Instagram.
