In 2020, Instagram is turning 10 years old and has amassed over one billion active users. With so many users and so many ways to interact within the platform, knowing how to reach your audience as a business, is more important than ever. Here are five ways you can use this form of social media to reach your target audience:

1. Give Your Audience What It Needs

Instagram is a photo and video-sharing social media platform, with an average view time per photo of under two seconds. Most users fill their feeds with their friends, or influencers “living their best life” at festivals, conferences, parks, concerts, work or university. Being present at these locations can help your brand to appear in their photos or videos, especially with useful promotional products like free water bottles in the summer heat, binders and notebooks at university, or a fun frisbee in a park. Promotional products are an incredibly powerful marketing tool in both the real and virtual worlds since they allow a brand to connect with consumers by engaging their senses.

2. Instagram Paid Advertising 

Much like Facebook and Google, Instagram now has a sophisticated advertising platform used to increase brand awareness, sell products, generate traffic, find new leads, and even generate store visits. Using Facebook Business Manager, you can choose to advertise using Instagram Stories, photos, videos, carousel ads, and collection ads. Depending on your goal, each placement offers a non-disruptive user experience, highly targeted to your audience. Although paid Instagram advertising can be quite costly, if your brand has the right budget, pay-per-click Instagram advertising is a sure-fire way to reach your audience and get the results you need. 

3. Relevant Hashtags 

If you’d like to get seen by Instagram’s huge audience, upping your hashtag volume and quality may be the way to go. As organic reach declines and paid impressions rise, hashtags still prove to be the single best way to organically drive your social marketing campaigns. Whether you decide on 5 or 30 hashtags, researching what your audience is searching for and following is the most important part of the process. Using a good mix of super-popular hashtags, moderately popular hashtags, super niche and branding hashtags are recommended. #getrelevant

4. Get Them On Your Wall!

In theory, user-generated content is the perfect type of social media marketing. It builds trust, helps brands to better understand their online communities and audience, and increases engagement and time spent on your page. Getting your audience to start creating this content, on the other hand, can be a challenge. Reposting user-generated content on a regular basis, in the form of a competition, and rewarding your audience with online support can be the best way to get other members to engage with your content.

5. Live Stories

More than half of Instagram users are under 34 years old, so to stay relevant and up-to-date with the real-time millennials and Gen-Z, you need to use Instagram to go real-time too. Not only are you more likely to get more engagement from live stories, live stories also send a notification to your followers telling them to watch you now. These stories usually get attention because they’re spontaneous and informal, and allow your audience to engage with your brand in real-time. Stories only stay on Instagram for 24 hours, so feel free to make your content as relevant and niche as possible.

It’s not easy but by following through on the above points of advice, you will be able to connect with your customers and reach new business in no time.