A Beginner’s Guide to Instagram Video Marketing (Part I): How Instagram Could Help You Drive Engagement and Gain More Leads
According to my phone, I spend an average of one hour and 20 minutes per day on Instagram, which is shocking, but not far from the average time a person spends on Instagram today. With over 500 million active users and more than 20 billion photos and videos shared monthly, Instagram has taken over the app charts and quite frankly, many people’s lives. Overall, it has the ability to enable effective marketability, while captivating billions of users online, and radically widening your consumer reach.
It serves as the perfect stage for enterprises to nurture brand personality, shape perceptions and ultimately showcase who they are exactly to potential customers. Instagram boasts a highly engaged audience and has become quite the impactful social media marketing tool over time.
So, why does my business video need to be on Instagram?
- Instagram is undeniably the place where consumers are scoping out brands and brands are getting discovered. It offers the opportunity to display your team, values, personality, and stories in a compelling manner, and immersive consumer experiences can never go out of style, right?
- Instagram also happens to be the platform that sees the largest boost in purchases thanks to the latest video trends year over year. The Instagram feed is ripe for videos. It is a great place for marketers to raise brand awareness and video offers a wonderful opportunity to stand out from other kinds of content in the feed.
- Instagram stories are a great way to connect, convert and ultimately drive the most engagement. Why? It has a pretty balanced gender distribution, it has an above-average active user base, videos are quickly becoming the most preferred type of content on the platform and are a huge asset from a marketing standpoint.
- Additionally, using hashtags, tagging people and profiles, leveraging the geolocation features can help you get in front of new customers on Instagram.
Before you jump into making your next Instagram video, here are a few things that you should keep in mind regarding Instagram’s trends and capabilities:
Create a Business Account
One of the best features about Instagram is that it gives you the ability to create a business account for free. Once you’ve set up your Instagram business account it gives you a window into all of the insights that you may need to measure your success, which is the most important part of all. It gives you access to the analytics tool, which helps you track post performance, monitor Instagram trends, and measure audience engagement across multiple profiles. Definitely a tool that you need to be taking advantage of.
Get your dimensions right while shooting
Unlike Facebook, in-feed videos here cannot be enlarged and do not take up the whole phone screen space. For stories, on the other hand, videos are displayed full-screen and demand a vertical orientation. Make sure you understand the ins and outs of Instagram. Because, if you don’t know how the platform functions, your video marketing strategy may be redundant. Read through their policies prior to releasing a video and ensure your video is compatible with the various insights and protocols of the platform. However, the dimensions keep changing from time to time, and it’s best to do thorough research at the time of video production.
Make the first few seconds count
Instagram users quickly scroll through their feed. Your video ads must compel users to stop and watch. Slow openers will not help at all especially when Instagram videos last up to 60 seconds. Introduce something bright, catchy and incorporate movements in the first three seconds. Front loading your video ad with engaging imagery is super important.
Add text
A key thing to keep in mind is that Instagram audio is muted by default. Hence you must lead with visuals or text or both. You can get your message across or grab their attention easily by providing more than just captions. Go for dynamic text effects with engaging color schemes that will highlight the points you wouldn’t want your viewers to miss. This kind of text will help reinforce the message you want to deliver. Ensure your video is not crowded with too much text. Long descriptive captions may be overwhelming for the viewer and make the video seem cluttered.
Ensure your video has an objective and a clear call-to-action
Like any piece of marketing, your Instagram video should have a key objective. First, ensure that you know your target audience well, have an understanding of their demographics, their age, likes and dislikes. Then, you can create a strategy that will be popular with your potential customers. And, whatever the objective may be, think of ways to innovatively, intelligibly and strategically accomplish it.
A crucial aspect of social media is that you need to tell people what to do. That is, what do you, as a brand, want potential clients to do after watching your videos. Even if you don’t include it in the video itself, make sure you provide your customers with a logical next step after the video ad. For instance, use captions to tap into the service you are promoting with, say, ‘Tag someone who needs to see this’ as a CTA.
Now that you’ve learned a little bit about the number one trending platform and the doors it could open for your brand, let’s jump into exactly what you need to do to get the right content on there. Read on to the next blog in this Insta-series to learn what kind of videos you should be putting on the gram!