As social media platforms increase in popularity among brands and businesses, it’s difficult for brands to find and use a platform that truly suits their unique needs. Knowing the right or wrong social media platform can make or break your marketing efforts, it’s worth going the extra mile to ensure you’re using a platform that’s effective and engaging.

Consider this statistic: 80% of marketers use visual assets for their social media marketing efforts. What better way to make the most out of these visual assets than by using a social media platform that is best known for curating visually stunning content — Instagram.

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How exactly are businesses helping brands grow? Here are a few examples:

1. Use the Platform to Inform and Promote Their Products or Service

72% of US shoppers look for visual content of a particular item before making their purchase.

Growing your Instagram network helps you leverage this because Instagram is a primarily visual platform. A brand can easily use images and become a reliable source of product information on Instagram by creating visually compelling images.

2. Maximize Instagram’s Business-Friendly Features

Instagram has recently made their app more business-friendly by allowing brands to link easily to websites, create landing pages, and tag products.

3. Makes it Easy to Target Your Audience

Targeting your audience is the secret to successful ads. Instagram makes this whole process easier by allowing you to segment audiences by location, demographics, interests, behaviours, and even create lookalike audiences.

4. Instagram Helps Businesses Understand Their Audience Better

Businesses should always strive to understand their core audience better. Getting to know your primary audience allows brands to tailor their communications and make sure how they’re communicating with them is relevant and engaging. Instagram’s business metrics provide a comprehensive overview of how your audience interacts with your posts, giving you more opportunity to understand them.

5. Reach Audiences Without Having to Resort to Hard Selling

According to statistics, active Instagram users in the US alone are projected to reach 125.5 million by 2023. That’s a lot of people logging in and spending time scrolling through Instagram feeds that can be maximized by brands and businesses who want to reach their audience on platforms where they actually spend time on. So, instead of having to overtly pitch a product or service, or bombard audiences with sales copy or brand announcements, a business can seamlessly inform its followers through carefully curated content.

6. Maximize Opportunities for User-Generated Content

The hallmark of an engaged audience is their willingness to engage and create user-generated content that you can share on your own platform. Instagram makes it so easy and compelling for followers to create visual content that Instagram essentially becomes a gold mine of user-generated content. You can use a hashtag to build content, engage followers, and collect material that can be reposted and shared.

Bottom Line?

Instagram is one of the best social media platforms you can use to target audiences, engage new customers, and connect with your core audience through visual content. If you want to maximize your content marketing efforts, then it’s high time that you include Instagram into your content marketing tool kit. If you have any questions, let me know by leaving a comment below. Or simply head over to our Twitter and LinkedIn to join the conversation.