Using Instagram To Build Your Brand

How effective is Instagram for brand building?

Have you ever received mixed messages from someone? It’s confusing, uncomfortable and, more often than not, a total turnoff. 

It's the same way with brands. 

With over 1.440 Billion global users, Instagram for brand building has become an undisputed power tool for businesses everywhere. As the platform has evolved, what matters today is not whether or not your brand shows up there, but how it shows up. 

That’s where strategy comes in. With Cohley, we help you create the badass, goal-busting social strategy you need, inspired by the core roots of your brand. By sticking to those authentic roots — and your strategy — your message online will ring crystal clear across the algorithm. 

No mixed messages here.

Building an Instagram strategy

Contrary to popular belief, building a brand on Instagram is not about going viral. It’s about knowing yourself and taking a methodical approach. Through Brand Building, you can use Instagram to:

• Generate awareness 
• Establish a business
• Promote a company (or personal brand)

These goals are all worth the effort. With a strategic, steady approach, you can win your audience’s loyalty for life — one double tap at a time.

Define your objectives for Instagram

Your strategy exists to serve your goals. Are you a small company trying to increase brand awareness? Trying to attract top talent? Whatever your goals are, make it personal to you. Here are a few reasons companies use Instagram for business: 

• Increasing product sales.
• Driving traffic to your website.
• Increasing customer satisfaction.
• Attracting top talent.
• Increasing brand awareness.

Research your target audience

Like everything in business, building a brand on Instagram starts with knowing your audience well, and anticipating their wants and needs. If you don’t have one already, developing a customer persona can help you zero in on who you're talking to and what they want to hear. 

You want to get nitty-gritty here. Who are your customers? What do they value? What do they want today, tomorrow, and beyond? Having answers to these questions will guide your brand to hit all the soft, emotional spots that get users to follow, like, and buy. 

Getting to know your audience is an ongoing process, and social media is a great place to learn new things about your audience as you grow your following. Instagram has great Q&A poll features that enable you to get feedback or info from your followers about anything.

Develop your content style

Great content doesn’t feel like you’re talking at your customers; it feels like you’re talking with them. Social media is a lot like a party. Read the room. Listen to what others are saying. And when it’s your turn to speak, be sure that you’re adding value to the conversation. 

Here’s how:

• Bring your humanity: Shared values drive strong brand relationships. Building your brand on Instagram is a great opportunity to show off the human side of your business. 
• Tell a good story: Talk about how and why your business came to be. Good stories have conflict — allies, adversaries, and stakes. Identify what those are for your business, and align them with your audience’s lives.
• Reiterate your offering: On a regular basis, inform and re-inform your audience what it is you can you do for them. 
• Wear something nice:  Instagram is a highly visual platform with design and visual direction often doing the majority of the storytelling. Rank higher by investing in high-quality assets from Cohley. 

Build your content calendar

Once you know what to share, it’s time to make a content calendar. A content calendar is a tool for creating, scheduling, and publishing content, with the perks of live-tracking performance. 

Here’s why teams love planning ahead:

• Collaboration. A content plan keeps everyone on the same page when project outlines, timelines, and deadlines are laid out.
• Measurement. Measure the health of your campaign with analytics tools.
• Convenience. Content planners automatically post for you.
• Relevancy. Content planners allow you to do keyword research to know what’s on your audience’s minds. 
• Consistency. With posts planned ahead of time, you can be sure of consistent messaging and have followers recognize you as soon as they log on.

Invest in high-quality assets with Cohley

What are the perks of high-quality assets? Brands that post visually striking photos tend to rank higher. If you have the strategy, Cohley can eliminate the guesswork.

Leverage strategic partnerships

Instagram collaborations are quickly replacing other strategies to gain exposure. Brand collabs create a shared piece of content, like a post reel or story that lives on both Instagram pages. By pairing up with brands and influencers who are in or adjacent to your niche, you can access a whole new audience: theirs.

Experiment with advertising

Faris Yakob's advertising book "Paid Attention" sums up the average consumer nicely. You must earn their attention. 

How do you capture the human's seven-second attention span?

• Experimentation:  Caption length, posting time, and questions vs. statements  can all affect how well advertisements perform. 
• Metrics: Impressions, engagement, and traffic are all ways to measure how well an ad performs. 
• Patience: Although we help businesses make a killer strategy, we can’t give you this one. But the payoff is worth waiting for.

For more information on creating a successful approach for your advertising, check out our in-depth article here.

Track and analyze your progress

Earlier, we discussed the importance of defining objectives for building your business on Instagram. But having objectives is only useful if you’re measuring your progress toward achieving them. Analytics tools like Cohley, make measurement easy. 

Your customized Cohley tool can measure it all:

• Awareness: Impressions, reach, and follower count
• Engagement: Likes, comments, shares, clicks, and overall engagement rate
• Conversion: Social traffic, link clicks, product button clicks on shopping content
• Customer care: Response time, resolution rate, brand sentiment

Test a variety of platforms

It's always essential to meet your customers where they're at. Many brands are taking advantage of the rapidly growing audience and opportunities to brand on TikTok. 

While Instagram is the holy grail for stunning visuals, Tik Tok has the highest level of engagement among all social platforms. Cha-ching!  

Multiple platforms mean wider reach, and we love converting viewers into new customers.

Rinse, Repeat, Win

Connecting with and getting noticed by your core audience on social media is your goal. But it’s also everyone else’s goal. This is the task your social strategy has at hand: winning in the world’s toughest attention marketplace. Partner with Cohley to measure your performance, get your message in front of the right people, and win.