Today, any successful business’s marketing strategy includes social media. Instagram has over 2 billion monthly active users and is one of the important platforms for businesses to increase brand awareness as well as get more customers. Instagram is a huge opportunity for office solutions businesses specifically to showcase products visually, engage potential clients, drive traffic to your website and ultimately get more sales.
That said, creating an Instagram account is not enough. To achieve the most possible impact from your content, you will need follower engagement. Creating a large and important following is work, sticking to it, and knowing strategy. In this complete guide, you’ll discover a few tried and tested ways of organically increasing your followers without engaging Instagram followers service, elevating your brand and utilizing Instagram to grow your customer base.
Optimize Your Instagram Profile
The first step is optimizing your Instagram profile to look professional, on-brand, and attractive to your ideal customers.
- Profile Picture. Use your company logo or product image. Having a consistent and recognizable profile photo means followers will easily recognize your brand when scrolling through Instagram.
- Bio. Include your company name, a few descriptive keywords about what you offer, your website URL, and a call to action inviting visitors to get in touch. You have just 150 characters, so choose words wisely to establish credibility.
- Link in Bio. Tools like Linktree or Milkshake allow you to have multiple clickable links in your bio. Use them to link to popular products, services, blogs, online stores, and other social channels.
- Visual Branding. Ensure your profile has a cohesive visual brand that aligns with your company colors, logo, and other branding assets. This strengthens brand recall.
Follow Competitors and Influencers
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Use the “Who to Follow” section on Instagram to discover and follow office furniture brands, office supply stores, coworking spaces, business influencers, interior designers, architects and other offices to follow for the industry. These likely have audiences similar to your ideal customers.
Following them brings your brand to the attention of their followers. Those who check out will follow your account, and a percentage will follow your account. Moreover, it offers an idea of what keeps audiences in your niche tuned in, popular products to list if you want, and influencers with which to connect.
Optimizing Hashtags
Hashtags help Instagram’s algorithm correctly categorize your content, surface it in related feeds, and expose it to targeted audiences. Research hashtags frequently used in your industry, like #officesolutions, #workspace, #desksolutions, #paperlessoffice, #workspacedesign, etc. and include a mix of popular and niche hashtags in posts. Over time, you will identify the best-performing hashtags to focus on.
Geo-targeting local hashtags like #ChicagoOffices or #MumbaiCoworking also helps you access geographically relevant audiences. Just don’t over-tag posts with too many irrelevant hashtags, as that gets flagged as spam.
Post Engaging Content
Consistently posting creative, valuable and shareable content is key to gaining and retaining followers on Instagram. Post at least once daily, using a social media planning calendar to pre-schedule posts for when your audiences are most active.
As an office solutions business, focus on these types of posts:
● Product Photos/Videos. Showcase new inventory, products in use, product features, and office makeovers using your furniture.
● Office Tours. Give office tours showing real clients’ office setups using your products.
● Design Inspiration. Share images or videos of innovative office designs and workspace ideas.
● Infographics. Create infographics with office furniture buying guides, office design tips, and organization hacks.
● Behind-the-Scenes. Give a sneak peek into daily operations at your store or warehouse.
● Employee Spotlights. Feature your designers, sales team, or product experts.
● Sales/Promotions. Promote sales, deals, contests, giveaways, and other special offers.
Engage With Your Audience
Simply broadcasting content will not get you Instagram followers. You need to interact and engage with other accounts and users in your niche.
- Ask Questions. Pose questions in captions to prompt discussions.
- Reply to Comments. Respond when someone comments on your posts.
- Give Likes/Love. Be active in liking and reacting to content from potential customers.
- Direct Messaging. Direct message followers, especially influencers and prospects.
This engagement signals that there is a real, interested community around your brand on Instagram, which attracts more followers.
Leverage Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is using popular personalities on Instagram to promote your products to their engaged follower base. It cuts through the noise and drives targeted new followers to your account.
Start by identifying office design bloggers, architects with large followings, top interior designers in your city, or even productivity influencers with whom to collaborate. Reach out asking if they would be open to featuring some of your office furniture in an Instagram post or Instagram Story. Most nano or micro-influencers are affordable to work with in exchange for free products, store credit, or a small fee.
In addition, run influencer giveaways where participants must follow you and tag a few friends to be eligible to win free furniture or other office products. Tools like Gleam make it easy to manage such contests.
Advertise On Instagram
Once you’ve built up an audience and are regularly posting branded content, invest in Instagram advertising. Their self-serve Ads Manager platform allows you to create highly targeted campaigns to promote your products and services to relevant audiences.
You can create Carousel ads to showcase products, Drive ads to boost website traffic, Video Views ads to increase video engagement, and more. Geo, age, interests, behaviors and other advanced targeting options ensure your ads reach those most likely to buy from your office solutions business. Start small with $5-10 daily budgets, track performance data, and then scale up campaigns driving the highest ROI.
Drive Instagram Traffic to Your Website
Ultimately, the goal is to drive Instagram traffic to your website or online store to capture leads and sales. Make sure to have clear clickable links in website URLs in bios and posts, along with clickable links in Stories/posts directing to popular landing pages, latest blog content, lead capture offers, etc.
Install the Instagram shopping tag to add a visible “View Shop” tag on your business profile, allowing customers to navigate to your online store easily. Likewise, Instagram checkout can be enabled to allow seamless purchasing of products without leaving the app.
Integrate Instagram with email and SMS marketing platforms using services like ManyChat or Mailchimp. This allows you to capture website visitors’ contact info to continue marketing to them.
Tracking ROI
As with all marketing, you want to track the actual ROI of time and money spent getting Instagram followers. Use UTM tracking parameters on all links from Instagram to track traffic, leads and sales generated within Instagram analytics, track impressions, reach, engagement rate and your follower growth rate week-over-week.
These data points indicate whether your Instagram marketing efforts are paying off. Consistently benchmark performance and make necessary optimizations to content formats, posting cadence, targeting, etc., to boost followers and conversion rates over time.
Key Takeaways
Growing an engaged following on Instagram does not happen overnight. However, for the office solutions business, it presents a lucrative channel to drive brand awareness, website traffic, leads, and sales amongst the platform’s one billion active buyers.
Post value – be consistent and engage with your audience, which will help you gain followers as well as track growth metrics. Time can create compound benefits of nurturing your Instagram community to work in your favor when it comes to your business growth trajectory.
Emphasize creating visual and engaging experiences on Instagram, separating it from the standard run of other platforms. As a business in interior design, furniture and office products, your brand has the opportunity to engage customers in new and interesting ways through the personalized, interactive shopping experience that users came to expect on Instagram.
