Integrating Instagram With Your Larger Marketing Strategy

 

The key to success when it comes to Instagram marketing and indeed any social media campaign, is integration. That means that you need to think about how all the difference facets of your business are going to work together. In turn, that means thinking about your blog or website, Facebook account, Twitter and more.

Because on its own, Instagram doesn’t typically make much money. We’ll see some ways it can in a moment, but for the most part, building an audience alone is not enough to run a business.

The true measure of success when it comes to your Instagram account, is how many people you can direct from there to your online store in order to sell to. This requires you to have a large enough audience, but also an engaged audience filled with people who actually like your brand and want to buy your products.

Therefore, you will at least need a website and ideally a checkout in order to sell your products if you’re going to capitalize on the traction you build via Instagram. You should make sure this uses a consistent branding with the same name and logo as your social accounts. This way, you’ll also be able to engage with the same audience between channels and ensure that you are on their radar. The worst thing you can do is to be forgotten for months at a time. Remember: the aim with social media marketing is to be everywhere.

But at the same time, you can also use your website to promote your Instagram, thereby cross-pollinating the two. One great way to do this is by installing a widget on your website which will show your Instagram feed in the sidebar on every page. This way, people who enjoy reading your website regularly will be prompted to check out your Instagram and will be able to see precisely the kind of thing you post there.

Linking your social accounts is a good idea too. You can do this automatically with Facebook, seeing as Facebook actually owns Instagram. But you can also automatically post your Instagram posts to Twitter and other platforms using tools like IFTTT (If This Then That – IFTTT). This allows you to create relationships so that posting with a certain hashtag for example will automatically post your Instagram images and text to other accounts.

Again, this cross-pollination means that anyone who adds you onone account is more likely to see you on others – and therefore more likely to follow you in multiple places and increase their engagement over time. This also maximizes your output on each platform, while minimizing the amount of content you need to create.

You can even try sharing short snippets from YouTube videos on your Instagram if you have an account!