How to Successfully Grow a Business on Instagram?

Are you wondering how to make money on Instagram? Do you have Instagram sponsorship and paid partnerships in mind?

Great news: millions of small businesses, startups, freelancers are successfully using Instagram to sell their products and services. As diverse as handmade embroidered gifts, plant table cards, wedding merchandise, or custom painted stationery, businesses are growing audiences by sharing their stories.

The truth is, there are real and easy ways to crack it big. Check out three broad ways to get started. If you have a working laptop and a stable internet connection, you are ready to go.

But before that, let’s briefly look at why Instagram is an absolute giant force to reckon.

1.	Instagram: World’s Greatest Platform
2.	Create a Business Account
3.	Advertise on Instagram
4.	Engage with Influencers

Instagram: World’s Greatest Platform

No kidding. Not Facebook, not YouTube, not even Twitter or Snapchat. De facto, Instagram is the world’s most powerful social media platform to make money.

On engagement metrics, Instagram is better than Facebook. On influencer marketing, it gets more billing than YouTube. Moreover, compared to YouTube, Instagram supports multiple content formats. Instagram has posts, brand stories, promotional posts, IGTV videos, testimonials, live videos, etc. Even as a news source, Instagram has a leg up over Twitter. What’s more, if you compare Instagram with emerging Snapchat, advertisers and marketers still put their faith in Instagram for its reach and impact.

Let’s also look at some fascinating data points that not many are aware of.

Unlike any other platform, the gender mix on Instagram is 51% female against 49% male. It makes Instagram an ideal, fertile ground to sell the most diverse range of products and services.

What’s more? Unlike any other platform, a massive two in three people interact with brands here. Even more impressive is that a whopping 90% of users follow at least one business account, while two in three visits come from non-followers.

Considering millions of business accounts sit idle, with basic planning and little initiatives, you can grow your reach quickly, in a few months if not weeks.

Let’s get to the three musketeers of the Instagram world that would help you generate more engagement, drive more traffic and stimulate more sales.

Create a Business Account

It seems pretty straightforward, right? Wrong! For not setting up and not optimizing their business account, business owners score low-quality points, can’t get their ads approved or run them as they wish. They neither get access to analytics nor can add links to stories or tag products. What’s worse, they can’t even schedule or boost a post.

Completing a new business account or switching to one from personal is easy. Just visit your account settings, switch to a professional account, select the business account, select your type of business, and you are done. The best part? It’s free. How to advertise and promote.

Quick Takeaways

• Connect Instagram business accounts from Facebook or vice versa for ease of ad management.
• Manage multiple Instagram accounts from one brand. Helpful to serve niche product lines, geographies, etc.

Advertise on Instagram

Now get as many likes, comments, and engagements as you want. Boost any post. Select your audience. Allocate your budget. Add links, clickable buttons, catalogs, photos as required. Then schedule and release. It’s as easy as that. Your ad will now appear across users’ feeds, stories and reels. The advanced advertising tool offers curated ad formats to sail you through design challenges. It also helps you track the performance of the campaigns.

Quick Takeaways

• Got two ads from the designer? Not sure which one will lead to more sales? Test which ads perform better with free tools from Instagram.
• Control your ad, budget, design, text anytime, even after the campaign is launched. Run the ads long if they perform well, or hold on to them if they aren’t.

Engage with Influencers

Instagram and influencers go arm-in-arm. Though celebrity and mega influencers grab the limelight, their cost versus return mostly leaves a lot to be desired. However, due to Instagram’s favorable “creator” policy, nano and micro-influencers generate high engagement and conversions. And, a variety of small businesses love them.

Small businesses cannot afford top influencers like Virat Kohli or Deepika Padukone. Throwing millions at celebrity influencers cannot guarantee results these days, and there might be product-personality conflict or issues with influencers overshadowing the brand. There might be product-personality conflict or issues with influencers overshadowing the brand. Thankfully, top influencers don’t promote everything under the sun.

Instead of traditional ad placements, sponsored placements are organic, trusted, and score well on engagement metrics. Reels, stories, Messenger, or IGTV, a sponsored post can be a great fit across all the content features.

Though influencers’ remuneration varies, here is a ballpark figure for a rough estimate. According to a report on NDTV, an average micro-influencer with 5,000 followers and 25 sponsored posts a year can make Rs. 50,000 a year.

Quick Takeaways

• Should you invest in influencer marketing? Considering content creation consumes time, labor, skill, and production costs, you may begin with nano and micro-influencers. How about Rs. 5000 a post to start with?
• Niche, friendly and relatable voices command a strong level of intimacy with their followers. By engaging with them, small and medium businesses can make the most of their precious budgets.

Conclusion

With over 1 billion users and 200 million businesses, Instagram is the most influential medium of our generation. By getting their business started on Instagram, merchants, freelancers, startups, SMEs can explore a world of opportunities. To make your presence felt and help you make money quickly, make use of the top three strategies for you that we have rounded up.