Instagram is one of the fastest-growing social networks out there. If you aren’t sure about how to get started on Instagram, here’s a breakdown for you. Instagram is all about the visual aspects of social media marketing which makes it highly popular across brands and consumers. You need to bring out your brand’s visual messaging—photos, graphics, videos, live videos, on a platter, and Instagrammers will take notice. But how to get it right? Here is a guide on how to get started with Instagram marketing.

The Instagram algorithm predicts what posts you might be interested in based on past behavior. The more they think you’ll like that post, the higher it appears in your feed. This could potentially be based on image recognition analyzing the content of the posts you interact with.

This is similar to how the Facebook algorithm and the YouTube algorithm filter and recommend content. So, users who like comics are more likely to see comics at the top of their feed, and users who like cat videos are more likely to see cat videos on theirs.

A social media management tool can be of great help in this regard, as they sometimes come with monitoring features that help you monitor specific hashtags. Some tools will even allow you to repost content from another profile. This is a great way to share user-generated content onto your Instagram profile. All of this can not only get fresh eyes on your brand, but also leave a great impression.

If you’ve been up-swiping, hearting, and trying out filters, you know what it means when we say that Instagram is taking the social internet by the reins. Just this year, we witnessed Instagram bringing out several new features to its mobile app, making room for enhancing its desktop counterpart, and reaching the 1.12 billion monthly user mark.

Oh, and this is besides releasing a new messaging app—Threads—and taking the social internet by storm for a while by creating the highly debated concept of hiding the likes count on posts. It’s been a whirlwind year, and it’s not even over yet. So what does all this mean for you and your business?

Opportunity. If your business has a working social media strategy in place and has Instagram in your sights, you might want to pay attention! Because 2020 is poised to be the year where marketing and ad-spends grow much bigger, and the network will likely make more legroom for brands and businesses to flourish, given its current growth trajectory. Recent stats from the network reveal that in just a matter of months, 130 million accounts are tapping their screens to reveal tags from Instagram Shopping posts. That’s a quick catch-on by any standards, and this will only drive revenue from Instagram marketing even higher.

So with these factors in mind, we isolated three key trends that can add meaning to your overall Instagram marketing strategy:

All you need to know about a business is right here on Instagram – With features like contact details, booking, and maps for outreach, Story highlights and posts for branding, and DMs for those who need customer support or wish to get in touch—Instagram is trying to be a self-contained customer experience platform. If your Instagram strategy is crucial for brand growth, ensure you check all these parameters and not focus on just the branding aspect of things, lest your marketing strategy becomes just an endless circulation of content, with zero optimization.

Instagram is positioning itself not just as a marketing channel, but a dedicated business tool – Seeing as the network is incorporating e-commerce and support, and testing out advanced marketing features like a separate platform for creators—among other things—it’s clear that the network is trying to cater to every business need. So running everything from Instagram is different from having a social media strategy that’s stretched to fit all the networks in your brand basket. It’s time to re-evaluate if your social media strategy is making the most of Instagram marketing features.

Threads is positioned as the “personal” offs-shoot Instagram, giving more impetus for brand marketing on the original app – Earlier this year Instagram launched a separate mobile app called Threads that may have underwhelmed a few—it only incorporated the personal messaging and status features of the main app, with the addition of a little more personal information like battery status and location. But this is crucial. It tells us that the network has divested it’s traditional outlook into this new app, paving way for Instagram to become more brand-centric.

This is evidenced by how the network has ensured that ads are no longer served only on feeds and Stories, but also on your Explore tab now. On their blog, Instagram has made this statement about the move: “Brands are an important part of the Instagram experience for people. Whether it’s shopping, catching up on Stories, or discovering the latest trends, we see people actively looking to connect with brands they like. That’s why, over the next few months, we’ll be introducing ads in the Explore feed.”

So what can you—as a brand owner, or marketer, or social media strategist—make of this scenario to optimize your brand marketing game? Here are some quick practical pointers that’ll help guide your Instagram marketing with a wide-angle view on your brand strategy, as well.

This has been the golden rule since social media became mobile-first. But we cannot emphasize enough the need to optimize your mobile webpages, now that Instagram is poised to increase the slice of traffic social media plays in webpage visits. This is not just your browsing audience, but your prospecting and purchasing audience, that you’re welcoming to your website. With relatively newer features—like Instagram’s shopping tabs and in-app product description pages routing a user to your mobile site—it becomes all the more crucial now.

This one is largely self-explanatory. More and more people are now geared towards hunting new brands and services on social networks, and it’s not a stretch to call social media the new search engine for brands. A whopping 80% of people on Instagram follow business profiles, to give you an exact idea, and this number is only poised to rise with the network initiating more features to help micro-businesses and give them an ease of doing business within the ecosystem.

Sometimes going through all the clutter on social media and finding valuable content becomes a task. If you go through your feed alone, you may end up missing out on content or updates that could’ve been useful. But there is a solution that can help—Twitter lists! While a little underrated, Twitter Lists are a great way to get organized and follow updates from your favorite profiles and industry bigwigs—by creating individual streams of updates from specific groups of people/brands. This way you can optimize your research time, and keep track of what your competitors are doing.

Planning your email sending framework is as essential as churning out quality content. To help you quickly prepare a mental map of how to proceed with your welcome series, here's our tip:

P.S. The Email Limits feature in Zoho Campaigns helps you send the right number of messages to your audience so your engagement turns out to be smooth. 

P.S. From our experience, we can suggest that a height of 40 pixels and above is the apt touch-target size for a CTA button.

Today, marketers are constantly on the lookout for different ways to promote their brand. Conducting webinars is one of the easiest ways to connect and engage with your customers for building better relationships. With umpteen number of webinars conducted by brands in recent times, marketers will have to discover more effective ways to promote these webinars and engage their audience. 

Marketing, especially email marketing, is all about creating engagement. Smart emails help you interact with your recipients, drive them to register for your webinars and increase the count of your attendees. This can drive sales and improve brand recognition. In our recent webinar, we discussed how email as a tool helps in webinar engagement. If you missed it, you can watch it below.

Here’s a quick rundown of the webinar email marketing conversations we had during this webinar:

What makes a perfect webinar?

Webinars, as we all know, has become a great platform to educate leads and contacts about products. The more interactive the webinar turns out to be, the more your contacts gain a better understanding of your product/brand. Here are a few preparation methods that can make your webinar a perfect one:

Decide a topic for your webinar — Your webinar topic is key to deciding your audience count. Choose an interesting topic that would engage your contacts. For this, you’ll have to research previously conducted webinars and different forms of content. 

Form the agenda for the webinar — Agenda is the second major factor that influences how many registrants and attendees attend your webinar. Giving a glimpse of your webinar before conducting it will help the audience decide if they want to attend. 

Confirm the content for the webinar — Once the topic and agenda are fixed for your webinar, you’ll have to prepare content that elaborates on them and ensures your content explains your agenda points. 

Choose a platform on which to conduct the webinar — The tool you use also decides if the webinar be successful. Make sure you choose a tool that’s user-friendly. We’re obviously fans of Zoho Meeting, our in-house online meeting tool that helps you create and conduct webinars for teams/organization. 

Decide the time and date for the webinar — You’ll have contacts from different parts of the world. This should be kept in mind, and the time and date for your webinar should be scheduled accordingly to ensure maximum attendees.

Schedule the webinar — When the points mentioned above are updated, it’s time for you to schedule the webinar. 

Promote the webinar — Once you schedule the webinar, you’ll have to promote the webinar, which will help you get more registrants and thus more attendees. You can promote your webinars via emails, website, blogs, social media, and many more outlets.

Send a thank you— When your webinar is over, don’t forget to thank people who attended. This is a great way to engage your attendees and turn them into your customers. Also, remember to send a “sorry you missed our webinar” emails to registrants with the webinar recording attached so they feel you value them, even though they didn’t attend the live session.

Learn more about how to do webinars using Zoho Meeting

How can we create good follow-up emails for webinars?

Once you schedule a webinar, you’ll be sending out invitation emails to all your contacts. When you get registrants and attendees for your webinars, you can start connecting with them by dividing your email marketing into three stages: 

• Pre-webinar emails
  
• Post-webinar emails
  
• During-webinar emails

Pre-webinar emails are mainly focused on sending webinar invitation emails to your contact list. Once they register and the time is nearing for the webinar, you can send them reminder emails where the goal remains the same — to get more attendees for the webinar.

Post-webinar emails are important because ending your webinar doesn’t mean your relationship with the attendees is done. It is, in fact, a beginning. You now have a reason to engage them in the future. Once the webinar is over, sending thank you emails can cultivate your relationship with the attendees. Sending a “we missed you” email to registrants who missed the live webinar and attaching a recorded version of the webinar will also help keep registrants engaged.

During-webinar emails simply state that the webinar will begin shortly, which — again — will help you get more attendees. 

These are just a few of the follow-up emails that can be used while conducting webinars. 

What are the advantages of sending emails in batches? 

Sending emails in batches helps you avoid straining your email server with continuous emails. Since most email servers will have a restricted amount of email acceptance at a specific time, sending emails in batches will help to safeguard your domain reputation and avoid your emails reaching spam folder. Batch sending can be easily performed in . 

Will it be possible to send thank you emails to webinar attendees through Zoho Campaigns?

Yes, it’s possible. Once you schedule the webinar in your Zoho Meeting account and integrate it with your Zoho Campaigns account, all the registrants and attendees list will be available in your Campaigns account. You can select the list of attendees and send out your thank you emails.

Is it possible to send multiple reminder emails?

As of now, it isn’t possible to send multiple reminders using Zoho Meeting, but it’s in the development phase. You can send multiple reminder emails with the help of automation in Zoho Campaigns. 

How do we add an unsubscribe button?

By default, the unsubscribe link will be added at the bottom of all your email campaigns. If you want to use it inside the content, you can use the unsubscribe merge tag $$

Which is the best day for sending an email? 

The best day for sending out email campaigns are Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. You can schedule your emails for any of these days. Also, when you schedule a campaign in Zoho Campaigns, you’ll have the option to schedule it for the recipients’ optimal open time, allowing your emails to automatically arrive at the time the recipient is most likely to open your email. For example: If a person opens their email regularly between 10 and 11 a.m, the email will be delivered to them during that time. 

If you have any other questions, please share them with us in the comment box below.