Making people aware of your brand is the easiest way to overcome your first objection. People are obviously wary of new products, new brands, and new packaging, which often leads to an instant “No” without much consideration from the potential customer. When you introduce your brand to people in a very low-key and surreptitious manner, they more easily warm to your brand when they are exposed to it in a more overt fashion. Here are five ways you can run a few branding exercises using Instagram.
1 – Stories Are a Nice Way to Make a Slow-Burn Impact
One of the biggest reasons why larger companies are always looking to buy Instagram accounts from companies like Fameswap is that only followers can see your stories. You can churn out a bunch of easy and quick videos/photo carousels for your followers, and they disappear in 24 hours, so it doesn’t damage your overall brand/account impact if they are less-than-perfect. You can continually grab the ear of your followers in a very unintrusive, but all-together impactful way, and you can do it over and over again without too much worry of people unfollowing you.
2 – A Brief Exposure To What You Offer
There are many ways you can play this, but perhaps the best examples come from… let’s call them, “Adult” night clubs. These are places where couples meet up to conduct acts of passion without payment taking place. The clubs are very exclusive, and they have a great way of marketing themselves on Instagram. They simply tease the idea of what they are all about. They show people having a nice night in a normal club setting, but most videos and images have a slight tinge of something slightly sexy going on. Unlike a strip club where the sexualization is a lot more blatant, these private clubs gain attention and spread their brand by simply offering a slight taste of what they have to offer. It is subtle but very effective.
3 – Mirror Your Content on Instagram
If you wish, you can use your Instagram account as your dumping ground for paid/created content. If you are building some awesome content for Rumble and YouTube, then a few days after it is released on those platforms, you can drop it on Instagram too. You can do the same when creating content for Twitter (or GETTR, but Twitter has improved a lot since Elon took over). Do a similar thing when you are creating content for Facebook, and perhaps throw in your behind-the-scenes stuff too if you are looking to build a larger following with Instagram. Always try to add something a little different on Facebook and Instagram because they both use the same content databases. If they see you are mirroring what you put on Facebook, then your account will draw less attention via the search engines.
4 – Alienate People Who Are Not Customers
Instagram is a pretty safe place where you can alienate people who were never going to be customers anyway. For example, the people who are too short and weak to pick up a half-ton of motorbike do not need to be pandered to via your Instagram. On a similar note, it is okay to pander to the sort of person who can lift a half-ton of bike, even if it means pushing other non-customers out of the picture in order to do so.
This is sometimes misunderstood, even within the motorcycle industry. The brand manager had put hundreds of images of women on bikes throughout her time managing the Instagram account. However, it was not women she was marketing to. On a whim, she placed topless men on the bikes, and the Instagram profile started to bleed followers. This is due to a poor understanding of the target audience, and the misunderstanding around having women on bikes and actually selling to women.
5 – Staying On Message
This tip may seem a little obvious, and yet it is so easily forgotten by Instagram brand managers. Simply adding your logo or watermark to every post is “Not” branding. You need to concentrate on a single selling point or brand principle, and you need to stay true to it throughout your Instagram posts. The more you go off-message, the less impact your Instagram profile has overall.
