Instagram allows you to present your brand through visual story telling, enabling you to bring your story to life and visualize your brand ethos while connecting to your community and beyond.
The key to creating a successful Instagram page for your brand or event is to engage your audience rather than sell a product or plug your business.
Use Instagram to be more playful and show a different side to your business, from your inspiration, to behind the scenes with the people that are part of your company, effectively connecting you with your audience.
There’s no better way to step up your business game than to be active on Instagram. As a social platform Instagram is constantly making improvements for brands and individuals to get the most out of.
Follow our tips to utilizing the power of Instagram for your events –
- Firstly work out your target demographic audience, follow relevant industry professional and insiders as well as your current community to create a large network and develop a presence on Instagram.
- Use your network, interact with your network, comment and like to generate traffic to your own Instagram page via your networks news feeds. Connect with Instagram influencers in your events field to add brand awareness by aligning with the right accounts to direct followers to find your event!
- Always use powerful visuals, professional images taken with a camera rather than always with a smartphone. Show the run up to the event, the event set up and show the event in progress, use videos to break up your images, as a video can generate three times more inbound links. Videos are a great tool to use to engage fans while growing your following and driving traffic to your page and event.
- Pair your images/videos with captions in an effective way. Implement your knowledge into your posts with powerful quotes or statistics disguised by strong visuals.
- Focus on creating engaging content that is sharable. Share your posts across other platforms, use the share tool to reach your audience on other channels, and a wider audience by sharing to Twitter and Facebook.
- Tag other brands and companies you are collaborating with in your images and descriptions, this way you connect with the brands you are collaborating with as well as maximising on their audience reach. Support other local businesses by promoting them through posts and tags. The results are threefold: higher recognition for everyone involved, increased followers and increased traffic and sales for the local businesses. This encourages other companies to tag you in return and connect.
- Plan your Instagram posts in advance, and differentiate your posts so as not to alienate a wider audience. Create a calendar of important and significant dates, your events, releases or updates. Drip feed your audience!
- Track your Instagram traffic by adding a bit.ly link to your Instagram biography to enable you to see exactly how Instagram is benefitting you and increasing your network, and which traffic is coming to you from Instagram directly.
- Widen your events reach by using #HASHTAGS – hashtags allow your imagery and content to be categorized. Every hashtag you apply will group your post into that category, for example the hashtag #LiveMusic will allow your post to be found by anyone searching for that term. You can also find posts related to trending hashtags by using Instagram’s Explore feature i.e. #evvnt #EventProfs. Or try using a hashtag tracking tool. Instagram even allows you to search by emoji now!
- Always encourage your audience to regram your content or use your hashtags and engage them with competitions and prizes e.g. VIP entrance to your event.
- One of Instagram’s newer features is paid advertisement which you can see on your timelines, this gives brands the option to promote there imagery to all users within the brands target audience and not just their network of followers. this increases your events engagement and visibility, but of course it is a paid service.
We recommend that you explore Instagram’s tools and tips, and see which ones work best for your events and your business! There are many more great ways to find unique angles in marketing your events using Instagram, so please share your thoughts with us… Has Instagram benefitted your business or event promotion?
This blog post was written by Natalie Grout evvnt Communications Manager.