How to create a Strategy for INSTAGRAM in 2019

How to set up your Instagram profile strategy?

Welcome to a new article in Marketing Tips Australia.
I'm Gianluca Belloni and today we're going to see in detail what the steps are to set up a strategy for an Instagram profile.

This is the first article of Instagram followers Australia that I will go completely free of charge for everything related to the world of Instagram and therefore we will see, for example, in this first article, the strategy.

In the next articles, we will see how to create an editorial plan, how to schedule posts, how to best use your profile and stories, but we will also talk about bots and sponsorships.

Why create a strategy on Instagram?

As you know, Instagram is becoming increasingly saturated with content and people and therefore the organic coverage of our posts is also falling.

This is also a choice to cut the organic coverage to push more and more people to sponsor their posts to show them to their audience, so if we want to use Instagram in a professional or business way, we cannot use it without having a plan behind then without having a strategy.

Defining an Instagram strategy means sitting down at the table with pen and paper and going to think about what is behind our profile, even before the mere creation of content.

1. Define the niche of an Instagram profile

The first thing I advise you to do is to identify your reference niche.

As we said, Instagram is increasingly saturated and there are more and more content creators, so to stand out and find an audience that may be interested in our content, it is important to define your niche, then define a specific topic that will characterize our profile.

For example, we cannot create a generic travel profile today, because there are a multitude of profiles that are already created on this topic, which are already followed by people, who are interested in these topics, so if we would like to enter the world of travel and if we are passionate about this topic, the thing I advise you to do is to create a profile that is linked to a much more specific topic within the travel and therefore, for example, it could be a profile intended for a travel-related content low cost.

Once we have created our small community, what we could instead do is to go further and broaden our topics and then go on to treat travel more generically to attract even more people to our profile.

So to choose your niche you find that topic that you are passionate about and that you will never get tired of talking about or creating content, since going to create a very specific niche it is possible that at the beginning there is no feedback like this great.

2. Define the goal of an Instagram profile

The second thing I advise you to do is to go and find out what your why is, so what is the goal you want to achieve with your profile, why you are creating it.

Many people simply want to grow on Instagram, without even having a specific goal and without having a why they do it.

You can grow your profile to get collaborations with brand companies or you want to create a personal brand, and therefore be recognized in that niche, or you simply want to grow to be satisfied with having more followers.

I advise you to go and write and think why you want to grow, what is your goal, not only in numerical terms, so do not think about those goals that can be vanity metrics (such as followers or the average of likes on each post), but what are your biggest goals.

Let's imagine having a restaurant: your goal is to bring more customers.
To do this and to bring more customers and to have more people coming to eat in your restaurant, it will not be important to have more followers, but it will be important to create relationships with the people who follow you; in fact, having a new follower who follows you from 200 kilometers away will not be directly linked to your goal.

So it is preferable also to have only 2000 people who follow your restaurant page, who, however, are from your city and who have already come to eat and with whom you have already created a relationship.

In this way, with your page, you will be able to continue this relationship and also cultivate it on social media to remind them of your restaurant and, for example, make them come back more often, therefore in truly realizing your goal.

Remember that social media is a mirror of the real world and that it is not about numbers, but about people, and what is at the base are always relationships and consequently conversations, in which there are always at least two subjects.

3. Identify the target audience on Instagram

Let's move on to the third point, that is to identify the people you want to contact.

If you have defined your niche of reference, what are the topics that you want to deal with, what is your why that drives you, you will also have more ease in defining who the people you want to reach with your message.

Taking the example of the restaurant, you will know that your niche is made up of people interested in the type of cuisine you treat and who are in your area.

Your why is to create relationships to bring your customers more times to consume more often in your restaurant, knowing this you will also know how to speak and how to contact and how to reach them most effectively and therefore I could also define what is your " tone of voice ”, that is the way of speaking on your page or in your profile, therefore knowing how to create content that is more institutional and more formal or that has a friendlier and more fun language.

This is important for being able to talk to people in the way they would like to receive a message and for being able to create more lasting relationships in this way.

4. Study competitors on Instagram

The last step that I advise you to do before going to create your content is to study your competitors: how they are moving and what content the other pages of your niche or sector are creating.

I'm sure that whatever topic you want to deal with on your page, there will be a page that deals with an equal or similar topic already present on Instagram that is in Italian or English.

So what you can do is simply go and watch what content they create and how the people who follow them respond to this content.

The fact that there is competition on Instagram is not necessarily a bad thing you can get feedback on how many people potentially interested in that topic are on the platform and it will also allow you to study the contents that are already creating these pages, to being able to understand which contents work best for your target audience and which are most appreciated;  you can study the interactions that each type of content receives to understand which ones work best.

If a video works better in your niche, or, going back to the example of the restaurant, if the photos and products work much better or show the behind the scenes of the preparation of a dish; in this way you can save a lot of time, avoiding to test all the various types of content, but already knowing which ones are the most appreciated by your niche and therefore being able to offer this type of content immediately.

It is a matter of looking around and not of shamelessly copying, otherwise, we would no longer have that distinctive character that we identified at the beginning in the first step, so remember to always keep your unique profile and to have a distinctive character that can immediately recognize your type of content.

Take the management of an Instagram profile to the next level

The next step is, over time, to plan what content you will create, having obtained all this information.

For this reason, in the next article we will see how to create an editorial calendar for Instagram, both at the level of conception and content creation, and at the operational level and therefore I will give you my excel template that I use to go to schedule and to go to see what posts we will create.

If this article has been useful to you and if you are interested in this mini-course on Instagram, I also remind you to follow the Instagram page buysocialfollowers.com.au, to have very quick tips every week on Instagram and the various Social Media.