With the general consumer base getting younger and younger, today’s businesses need to constantly adapt their marketing strategies to fit the confines of modern communication. The preferred medium in the present just so happens to be the vast expanses of social media platforms, including apps like Instagram, which are becoming increasingly more inhabited by people and brands alike.
As businesses are feeling the pressures of rising competition on social platforms, it’s important to understand what kinds of advertising resonate with audiences that now include consumers as young as Gen Z. Here are 7 bits of advice for reaching Instagram success with Gen Z customers.
1. Define Your Audience
From a marketing standpoint, creating advertisements without a clear idea of the intended audience is a recipe for disaster. Understanding the audience means being familiar with their interests, their preferred modes of communication, their vernacular, and so on. Therefore, businesses trying to be successful on Instagram should focus on understanding Gen Z, who make up the majority of Instagram’s users.
Gen Z’s most defining characteristics are their intimacy with technology, their heightened sense of connectedness with others, and their demand for fresh, entertaining content. All of these traits are products of the rapid advancement of technology during the lifetimes of all Gen Zers. Businesses seeking true Instagram success should recognize Gen Z’s heavy sway in all their audiences and take into account their characteristics when making content.
2. Make Use Of Analytics
Although Instagram comes equipped with likes, comments, hashtags, Stories, the Discovery tool, and several other features, the vanilla form of the app does little to offer meaningful statistics to businesses. Sure, likes and comments may quantify Instagram traffic to some level, but brands are largely unable to detect the individual impact each of their posts has and how their followers react to their content beyond those few built-in features.
However, thanks to a slurry of third-party apps, businesses can get a lot more out of Instagram. Instagram analytics tools allow brands to gather information about optimal posting times, which posts gained them the most followers, and how they stack up against close competitors. Analytics tools are a powerful resource for any business trying to up their Instagram performance.
3. Diversify Content
To attract followers, all a business needs is one intriguing post. However, keeping those followers can prove to be a much greater challenge. One of the keys to Instagram success is being able to consistently deliver different ideas that keep followers engaged and wanting more. One of the biggest traps businesses can fall into is reaching unexpected success with one bit of content, and then attempting to recreate that success with stale copies of the original.
Instagram users can see right through this. Gen Z’s familiarity with the Internet combined with their immense interaction with social media content from various sources means most followers can spot similar themes and reposts quickly. Businesses should strive to continuously post about new ideas and topics to avoid seeming lazy and uninteresting to their followers.
4. Engage and Interact
The word “engage, ” and social media pretty much go hand in hand. So many businesses have used Instagram as a means of connecting with followers at this point that certain advertising strategies stick out as better than the rest. Among these are following sprees, prize giveaways, and other types of Instagram contests. These are the types of interactions Gen Z is used to having with businesses on social media, and there’s no need to change that.
The more businesses interact on social media, the more traffic they receive. The more traffic they receive, the more followers they get, and the more popular their brand becomes. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that businesses continue to engage with followers and connect with other users on Instagram, to increase their overall social media performance.
5. Keep It Fresh
As a result of this generation’s quick innovations, Gen Z is not known for their patience. Therefore, there’s a certain expectation that businesses should always have something new to offer with regards to content. However, this is a tricky task, especially with how much content has already accumulated on the Internet and in the minds of modern consumers.
Businesses who are trying to achieve Instagram greatness need to commit more time to brainstorm new and exciting content that their followers haven’t seen before. Although a tedious and challenging venture, brands can be assured that any extra time spent planning their marketing strategy will contribute positively to their social media performance.
6. Consistency is Key
Businesses who take to Instagram must realize that signing up for the platform is a hefty commitment. Delivering content to consumers may seem insignificant and taking a break may seem warranted every now and then, but many brands have learned the hard way what happens when followers are kept waiting too long.
Inconsistent posting is a serious red flag, especially to consumers who are deciding which brands to endorse on Instagram. Businesses may have historically good ratings, but taking unexpected and unexplained breaks from posting is anything but helpful. If companies want to be popular on Instagram, sticking to a schedule and being transparent with followers is paramount.
7. Work Smart
From juggling a posting schedule, audience preferences, and a million different content ideas, managing an Instagram account may seem impossible or at least suck up lots of precious time. Although it’s true that social media marketing is no easy undertaking, success on Instagram doesn’t come from brute-forcing any of the methods mentioned above.
Working smart and using time wisely to experiment with these different methods is a much more powerful tool than focusing on just one of them. Businesses serious about performing well on Instagram need only manage their time efficiently and utilize all available advice and resources, and success is guaranteed.
