SEO
Instagram Marketing: An In-Depth Gui
Does your brand have a presence on Instagram? It should.
The social media site has more than 2 billion monthly users.
That’s billion, with a “b.” And 90% of those people are following at least one business on the app.
With this in mind, it should be no surprise that Instagram bills itself as the “#1 media platform for building relationships with brands.”
Instagram is a powerful social media channel with considerable marketing potential to grow an audience and reach your customers.
So, if you don’t have an account for your business, go and create one right now. We’ll wait.
Once you have your business Instagram account all set up and ready to go, it’s time to start using it to elevate your brand.
In this guide, we’re going to take a look at how Instagram marketing works, why it’s effective, and walk you through a strategy that can help you start attracting new followers and making sales – fast.
How Effective Is Instagram For Marketing?
More than a platform for sharing photos and videos with your social circle, Instagram’s visual format makes it a valuable part of any ecommerce strategy.
Whether you’re using organic content, paid ads, or a hybrid strategy, Instagram is a great way to build a visual presence and showcase your offerings.
Even better, as a platform, it generates far more user engagement than Facebook and Twitter.
n fact, over 47% of U.S. social users between the ages of 16 and 34 have purchased products or services on Instagram.
Even without a calculator, it’s easy to recognize that’s millions of people buying things on this one social media platform alone. And you need to claim your share.
That’s all fine and good, you may be saying, but how do I do that?
First, you need to understand how this Meta-owned platform works.
Types Of Instagram Marketing Content
Let’s start by looking at the different types of marketing content you can use.
There are four main types you may choose to employ, either individually or in conjunction with one another: organic marketing, paid content, influencer marketing, and shopping.
Organic Content
There are several different types of organic content you can use on Instagram: photos or static images, videos, Stories, and Reels.
The first one is easily understood, but what’s the difference between videos, Stories, and Reels?
Aren’t they all video content? Yes, they are, but they’re all used in different ways.
Videos are shared on your profile and show up in the feeds of people who follow you. These can be up to 60 minutes long for some accounts.
Stories are short clips also shown on your profile. They appear in the feeds of your followers as small circles at the top. These clips, which disappear after 24 hours, can be up to 60 seconds long.
Reels, on the other hand, is Meta’s answer to TikTok. Used on both Facebook and Instagram, these are videos of up to 90 seconds that can be easily enhanced with music, text, and visual effects.
In addition, you can opt to go live with the aptly named Instagram Live. For marketing, this lets you personally connect with your audience, showcase your personality, and answer questions from followers.
Paid Content
You can also pay to have your content placed in front of Instagram users on their feeds, in their Stories, or under the Explore tab.
Paid content is similar to normal posts, with one exception: it has a “sponsored” label. It can also have features like buttons, links, and catalogs, which are not available in regular content.
There are a number of formats you can choose from, including images, videos, Reels, Collections, and Explore, which allows you to use the best type for your specific goals.
You can boost normal posts to expose them to a targeted audience, for a specific duration, as well as create and run full campaigns.
Like most paid digital ads, the pricing on these paid ads is variable depending on targeting, competition, and scheduling.
Influencer Marketing
Social media has given rise to a new type of celebrity: those who are famous for being famous. In other words, influencers.
With loyal followings in the thousands or even millions, these individuals provide a huge opportunity for businesses that are looking for a way to authentically market their products or services.
Known as paid posts, influencer marketing usually involves some sort of compensation from the brand to the influencer, in return for a feature on their profile, posts, Story, or Reels.
Instagram Shop
Instagram allows you to integrate your product catalog with your profile, allowing you to directly sell to customers via your posts, Reels, etc.
The Shop tab can be found at the top of your profile, underneath bio information, which upon being clicked, will direct visitors to your shop on the platform.
You can also tag your Shop products in posts in the same way you would tag another user.
How To Build An Instagram Marketing Strategy
As a marketer, you know the futility of trying to attract an audience without a strategy.
To get the most from your Instagram marketing, you need to have a well-thought-out plan.
Build your strategy using the following steps:
1. Determine Your Goals
What are you hoping to achieve on this platform? Do you want to increase brand awareness? Are you looking to make sales? Maybe you want to showcase your product line? Or show off user-generated content (UGC)?
There’s no wrong answer and you can have multiple goals, but what you’re trying to achieve will change how you measure your performance.
2. Identify Your Audience
Instagram allows demographic targeting, so you can be very precise about who you want to target. Keep things like age, gender, location, income, and interests in mind when deciding who to target.
If you’re not entirely sure who you should be targeting, see who is engaging with popular posts and hashtags related to your field.
Then, take a look at their profiles to gain some insight into their demographics and the things they’re interested in.
3. Check Out the Competition
Your competition can be one of your best sources of information about what does and doesn’t work on Instagram.
Perform a thorough competitive analysis that includes:
- Identifying top and secondary competitors.
- Collecting information about their followers and the types of posts they’re making.
- Analyzing their activity to determine which kind of posts are getting the most engagement.
4. Create A Content Calendar
By this point, you should have a pretty good idea about what kind of Instagram content you want to make. And that means it’s time to develop an implementation strategy.
Build your editorial calendar using as much detail as possible.
It will save you a lot of time down the road if you clearly outline the date and time you want to release content, the type of post (static images, Reels, Live, etc.), the hashtags you’ll use, and the captions that will accompany them.
This is also a good place to record important holidays and events in your industry, or highlight sales or new product releases.
5. Make Your Content
Okay, you’ve set your goals, identified your audience, examined your competition’s Instagram strategy, and created a thorough content strategy.
There’s only one thing left to do before you start posting: Make the content.
Remember that everything you post on Instagram, or any social media site, is a reflection of your business. As such, you need to make sure it’s fully in line with your brand’s personality.
Be sure to consider color schemes, the type of language you’re using, and your audience’s specific needs.
Make sure every post has a goal that it’s trying to achieve and include calls to action (CTAs) wherever possible.
Types Of Instagram Posts
Not sure what kind of posts you should be making?
The beauty of Instagram is that it allows you to be as creative as you like.
To inspire you, here are some of the more common things posted by businesses:
- Images and videos of products and services.
- Trending topics (a.k.a. newsjacking) to help build brand relevancy.
- User-generated content (reposts, reviews, etc.).
- Behind-the-scenes shots sharing things the public normally wouldn’t see.
- Inspirational posts to boost brand reputation and engagement.
- Educational information (recipes, how-tos, etc.).
- Contests to generate excitement, shares, and data.
Instagram Marketing Best Practices
Hopefully, you now have at least a basic understanding of how you can use Instagram marketing to promote your brand.
Offering incredible flexibility, this social media platform lets you experiment with new approaches and ideas to find what works for your specific situation.
That said, here are some best practices you can employ to maximize your impact:
- Optimize your profile – Find a great image for your profile picture, take some time writing your bio, and be sure to include a CTA.
- Tell visual stories – People love a narrative, even in a single post. Make sure your content is captivating and tells your brand’s story.
- Post when your audience is active – This may take some experimentation, but there is generally a best time to post for every field.
- Use the right hashtags – Your posts should always include relevant hashtags to make them more discoverable. Use niche or industry hashtags instead of generic ones when possible.
- Engage with your followers – Don’t be stingy with comment likes, and look for opportunities to respond to your followers.
- Stick to your schedule – Like any other marketing campaign, your Instagram campaign should have a consistent flow. Spur-of-the-moment posts can be fun, but they should be the exception in your strategy.
Make Instagram Work For You
Instagram is a great platform for building rapport with your targets, educating customers about your brand, and expanding your audience.
And because it provides clear metrics, you can quickly get a feel for what is and isn’t working.
What works for one company is not guaranteed to work for another, especially as Instagram continues to evolve. But that’s the beauty of it.
Don’t be afraid to experiment.
Just make sure you’re always keeping your targets and goals in mind and you’ll be an Instagram superstar in no time.
More resources:
Featured Image: Cristian Dina/Shutterstock
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SEO
Measuring Content Impact Across The Customer Journey
Understanding the impact of your content at every touchpoint of the customer journey is essential – but that’s easier said than done. From attracting potential leads to nurturing them into loyal customers, there are many touchpoints to look into.
So how do you identify and take advantage of these opportunities for growth?
Watch this on-demand webinar and learn a comprehensive approach for measuring the value of your content initiatives, so you can optimize resource allocation for maximum impact.
You’ll learn:
- Fresh methods for measuring your content’s impact.
- Fascinating insights using first-touch attribution, and how it differs from the usual last-touch perspective.
- Ways to persuade decision-makers to invest in more content by showcasing its value convincingly.
With Bill Franklin and Oliver Tani of DAC Group, we unravel the nuances of attribution modeling, emphasizing the significance of layering first-touch and last-touch attribution within your measurement strategy.
Check out these insights to help you craft compelling content tailored to each stage, using an approach rooted in first-hand experience to ensure your content resonates.
Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or new to content measurement, this webinar promises valuable insights and actionable tactics to elevate your SEO game and optimize your content initiatives for success.
View the slides below or check out the full webinar for all the details.
SEO
How to Find and Use Competitor Keywords
Competitor keywords are the keywords your rivals rank for in Google’s search results. They may rank organically or pay for Google Ads to rank in the paid results.
Knowing your competitors’ keywords is the easiest form of keyword research. If your competitors rank for or target particular keywords, it might be worth it for you to target them, too.
There is no way to see your competitors’ keywords without a tool like Ahrefs, which has a database of keywords and the sites that rank for them. As far as we know, Ahrefs has the biggest database of these keywords.
How to find all the keywords your competitor ranks for
- Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Enter your competitor’s domain
- Go to the Organic keywords report
The report is sorted by traffic to show you the keywords sending your competitor the most visits. For example, Mailchimp gets most of its organic traffic from the keyword “mailchimp.”
Since you’re unlikely to rank for your competitor’s brand, you might want to exclude branded keywords from the report. You can do this by adding a Keyword > Doesn’t contain filter. In this example, we’ll filter out keywords containing “mailchimp” or any potential misspellings:
If you’re a new brand competing with one that’s established, you might also want to look for popular low-difficulty keywords. You can do this by setting the Volume filter to a minimum of 500 and the KD filter to a maximum of 10.
How to find keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t
- Go to Competitive Analysis
- Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
- Enter your competitor’s domain in the But these competitors do section
Hit “Show keyword opportunities,” and you’ll see all the keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t.
You can also add a Volume and KD filter to find popular, low-difficulty keywords in this report.
How to find keywords multiple competitors rank for, but you don’t
- Go to Competitive Analysis
- Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
- Enter the domains of multiple competitors in the But these competitors do section
You’ll see all the keywords that at least one of these competitors ranks for, but you don’t.
You can also narrow the list down to keywords that all competitors rank for. Click on the Competitors’ positions filter and choose All 3 competitors:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Enter your competitor’s domain
- Go to the Paid keywords report
This report shows you the keywords your competitors are targeting via Google Ads.
Since your competitor is paying for traffic from these keywords, it may indicate that they’re profitable for them—and could be for you, too.
You know what keywords your competitors are ranking for or bidding on. But what do you do with them? There are basically three options.
1. Create pages to target these keywords
You can only rank for keywords if you have content about them. So, the most straightforward thing you can do for competitors’ keywords you want to rank for is to create pages to target them.
However, before you do this, it’s worth clustering your competitor’s keywords by Parent Topic. This will group keywords that mean the same or similar things so you can target them all with one page.
Here’s how to do that:
- Export your competitor’s keywords, either from the Organic Keywords or Content Gap report
- Paste them into Keywords Explorer
- Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab
For example, MailChimp ranks for keywords like “what is digital marketing” and “digital marketing definition.” These and many others get clustered under the Parent Topic of “digital marketing” because people searching for them are all looking for the same thing: a definition of digital marketing. You only need to create one page to potentially rank for all these keywords.
2. Optimize existing content by filling subtopics
You don’t always need to create new content to rank for competitors’ keywords. Sometimes, you can optimize the content you already have to rank for them.
How do you know which keywords you can do this for? Try this:
- Export your competitor’s keywords
- Paste them into Keywords Explorer
- Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab
- Look for Parent Topics you already have content about
For example, if we analyze our competitor, we can see that seven keywords they rank for fall under the Parent Topic of “press release template.”
If we search our site, we see that we already have a page about this topic.
If we click the caret and check the keywords in the cluster, we see keywords like “press release example” and “press release format.”
To rank for the keywords in the cluster, we can probably optimize the page we already have by adding sections about the subtopics of “press release examples” and “press release format.”
3. Target these keywords with Google Ads
Paid keywords are the simplest—look through the report and see if there are any relevant keywords you might want to target, too.
For example, Mailchimp is bidding for the keyword “how to create a newsletter.”
If you’re ConvertKit, you may also want to target this keyword since it’s relevant.
If you decide to target the same keyword via Google Ads, you can hover over the magnifying glass to see the ads your competitor is using.
You can also see the landing page your competitor directs ad traffic to under the URL column.
Learn more
Check out more tutorials on how to do competitor keyword analysis:
SEO
Google Confirms Links Are Not That Important
Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed at a recent search marketing conference that Google needs very few links, adding to the growing body of evidence that publishers need to focus on other factors. Gary tweeted confirmation that he indeed say those words.
Background Of Links For Ranking
Links were discovered in the late 1990’s to be a good signal for search engines to use for validating how authoritative a website is and then Google discovered soon after that anchor text could be used to provide semantic signals about what a webpage was about.
One of the most important research papers was Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment by Jon M. Kleinberg, published around 1998 (link to research paper at the end of the article). The main discovery of this research paper is that there is too many web pages and there was no objective way to filter search results for quality in order to rank web pages for a subjective idea of relevance.
The author of the research paper discovered that links could be used as an objective filter for authoritativeness.
Kleinberg wrote:
“To provide effective search methods under these conditions, one needs a way to filter, from among a huge collection of relevant pages, a small set of the most “authoritative” or ‘definitive’ ones.”
This is the most influential research paper on links because it kick-started more research on ways to use links beyond as an authority metric but as a subjective metric for relevance.
Objective is something factual. Subjective is something that’s closer to an opinion. The founders of Google discovered how to use the subjective opinions of the Internet as a relevance metric for what to rank in the search results.
What Larry Page and Sergey Brin discovered and shared in their research paper (The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine – link at end of this article) was that it was possible to harness the power of anchor text to determine the subjective opinion of relevance from actual humans. It was essentially crowdsourcing the opinions of millions of website expressed through the link structure between each webpage.
What Did Gary Illyes Say About Links In 2024?
At a recent search conference in Bulgaria, Google’s Gary Illyes made a comment about how Google doesn’t really need that many links and how Google has made links less important.
Patrick Stox tweeted about what he heard at the search conference:
” ‘We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important.’ @methode #serpconf2024″
Google’s Gary Illyes tweeted a confirmation of that statement:
“I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that”
Why Links Matter Less
The initial state of anchor text when Google first used links for ranking purposes was absolutely non-spammy, which is why it was so useful. Hyperlinks were primarily used as a way to send traffic from one website to another website.
But by 2004 or 2005 Google was using statistical analysis to detect manipulated links, then around 2004 “powered-by” links in website footers stopped passing anchor text value, and by 2006 links close to the words “advertising” stopped passing link value, links from directories stopped passing ranking value and by 2012 Google deployed a massive link algorithm called Penguin that destroyed the rankings of likely millions of websites, many of which were using guest posting.
The link signal eventually became so bad that Google decided in 2019 to selectively use nofollow links for ranking purposes. Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed that the change to nofollow was made because of the link signal.
Google Explicitly Confirms That Links Matter Less
In 2023 Google’s Gary Illyes shared at a PubCon Austin that links were not even in the top 3 of ranking factors. Then in March 2024, coinciding with the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update, Google updated their spam policies documentation to downplay the importance of links for ranking purposes.
The documentation previously said:
“Google uses links as an important factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”
The update to the documentation that mentioned links was updated to remove the word important.
Links are not just listed as just another factor:
“Google uses links as a factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”
At the beginning of April Google’s John Mueller advised that there are more useful SEO activities to engage on than links.
Mueller explained:
“There are more important things for websites nowadays, and over-focusing on links will often result in you wasting your time doing things that don’t make your website better overall”
Finally, Gary Illyes explicitly said that Google needs very few links to rank webpages and confirmed it.
I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that
— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) April 19, 2024
Why Google Doesn’t Need Links
The reason why Google doesn’t need many links is likely because of the extent of AI and natural language undertanding that Google uses in their algorithms. Google must be highly confident in its algorithm to be able to explicitly say that they don’t need it.
Way back when Google implemented the nofollow into the algorithm there were many link builders who sold comment spam links who continued to lie that comment spam still worked. As someone who started link building at the very beginning of modern SEO (I was the moderator of the link building forum at the #1 SEO forum of that time), I can say with confidence that links have stopped playing much of a role in rankings beginning several years ago, which is why I stopped about five or six years ago.
Read the research papers
Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment – Jon M. Kleinberg (PDF)
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Featured Image by Shutterstock/RYO Alexandre
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