If you have quite an artistic business (like if you are involved in fashion or you belong to the food industry), Instagram is the perfect social media site to use because you can easily entice people with beautiful images of your products. But what if your business is a “boring” one — your products are quite neutral and minimally striking, image-wise?
I should say that I consider DigiEnable to be one of those businesses, outside of photos of happy smiley people on one of our training courses, pictures of us sat at computers developing content just doesn’t appeal to that many people. What good will Instagram be as a marketing platform if images of your products aren’t exactly what people would find cute and exciting?
But the good news is that many business who may consider themselves to be “boring” ARE making Instagram work for them, which means that your business can still benefit immensely from using Instagram, because the social media site is no longer just for outfits of the day “OOTDs” and catalogue-worthy snapshots. We’re about to start making much more use of Instagram in our marketing, but here’s the Top 7 tips we’ve taken from watching other companies who are using Instagram for a boring business. It’s only fair that we share them with you.
Use it for your business announcements. Photos of your products may not have people going “Wow!” or “Yippee!”, but creating striking digital posters for sales, special deals, and new arrivals certainly will. Don’t forget that any offline marketing you produce can be captured to duplicate on Social Media sites, giving you a potentially much larger audience at no extra cost.
Instagram is good for short videos as well. If you wish to deliver a personal message to your followers, you can use Instagram for that. Even if you’re not a current Instagram user, you’ll no doubt have seen them popping up on Facebook. Turn on the camera and tell your followers what you’re doing today – customers love the personal touch and hearing directly from the person in charge can help build a connection.
It’s a great place for memes. If there’s nothing humorous about your operations, give it a bit of personality by creating witty memes and jokes about your products. Say you sell bolts, nuts and screws; there are so many puns that you can use for them. If your business is already boring, don’t make it even more so by being so serious all the time. Create Wacky Wednesday posts, for example, and bring a smile to your followers’ faces. It’s a lesson that we reiterate in every training course we run, with likability being such an important factor in business, having fun can be a great way to stand out.
The site is also perfect for widening your exposure to other brands. Always bear in mind that Instagram is a Social Media platform, you can also use it to follow other brands and hashtags that are relevant to your industry. Try a quick Instagram search and see what comes up, if nothing else you’ll find some great inspiration for content you could create for your account.
You can host a giveaway on Instagram. What a great way to offer value to your followers! You can turn it into a contest or a simple raffle. It is something that you can easily do on the site to cultivate customer loyalty and effectively maintain interest in your business. Think about the type of competition that would suit your business, and also justifies the value of the prize you are giving away (if you are giving away a prize at all). You could ask your fans to “like to win”, “comment to win” or “repost to win”, if you’re feeling really adventurous how about asking your fans to take their own photos for your competition.
Posts do not always have to be about your products. You can post images of your operations and the people in your company. It is imperative to share the human side of your business because this will make your operations, no matter how mundane things are most of the time, even more relatable to your followers and target audience. How many times have you the phrase “people buy from people”? This is especially important for us, as our SEO products aren’t even visible (apart from the reports we produce) so most of the posts you’ll see from us will be about how we work, rather than what we do.
Reward your followers on Instagram with shout-outs, discount codes and even coupons; rewards are reliable marketing tools that have long-term effects. This seems to be a major source of audience growth right now. As long as your margins allow you to make offers to your audience online, it’s a great way to invite customers to try your services at a lower cost.
There are still so many other ways you can use Instagram to turn your boring business into something that people eagerly watch out for. We’re going to be experimenting with many of these strategies and will be sharing our results, but we’d also love you to come on the journey with us. Find us on Instagram at @DigiEnable and connect, we’ll follow back and help each other build Instagram as a route to new business.