Digital Marketing - Digital Marketing Agency

Instagram Marketing Guide 2025 for Small Businesses

Posted on April 17, 2025April 17, 2025 by Dave

Do you use Instagram? If so, you are part of a large community of over 2 billion users worldwide. If you run a small business, Instagram can be a powerful marketing tool to promote your products or services. The popular social media platform can introduce your brand to many potential customers. As a result, you can run marketing campaigns over Instagram. Also, you can communicate with potential customers. As you spread your brand awareness over the social media tool, engagement with your target audience will increase. That can instill trust and motivate them to buy from your business. That way, you can sustain long-term growth for your business.

What is Instagram Marketing?

It is a strategy that involves promoting brand, products or services over Instagram. Creating and sharing engaging content, such as pictures, videos, stories, and reels, are the main aspects of Instagram marketing. The principal objectives of the marketing strategy are engaging the target audience and building brand awareness. In addition, Instagram marketing can help generate leads, increase the target audience, and increase sales.

Why Use Instagram?

The reasons are straightforward. Instagram can be a dependable platform for marketing products or services of small businesses because:

It has the highest engagement rate compared to other social media platforms
Ads, stories, and reels allow targeting specific customers
It enables telling the story behind the brand
It facilitates selling products with its eCommerce feature

Creating the Instagram Profile

Your business profile creation is the foremost prerequisite in running marketing campaigns on Instagram. It is an easy process. You need to:

Complete Your Profile

Profile picture: use a high-quality logo that represents your brand.
Bio: Describe your products/services. Also, include a CTA and a link to your website.
Contact details: Mention your address, phone number, and email ID to allow potential customers to contact you.

Switch to Business Account

Go to Settings, then to Account, and switch to a business account, which grants access to analytics, ads, and a contact button.

Use Instagram Highlights

Arrange the curated stories pinned on your profile into categories, such as products, services, reviews, etc.

Crafting an Instagram Marketing Strategy

After creating your Instagram profile, you become ready to run a marketing campaign for your small business. The following steps constitute an impactful marketing strategy:

Define Your Goals

As in almost every marketing strategy, identify the goals you want to attain from the Instagram marketing plan. It is the foremost step. Define clear, measurable, and attainable goals that align with your products or services. Ensure the goals are SMART(Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound). They could be:

Spreading your brand awareness among potential customers
Prompting engagement through likes, comments, shares, Stories, Reels, polls, and direct messages
Generating leads by prompting users to take an action, such as filing a form
Increasing sales by promoting products on Instagram shopping or driving traffic to your website

Identify and Understand Your Target Audience

Next, identify your target audience. Subsequently, understand the audience thoroughly. That is a crucial aspect of the strategy. Without this, you cannot create valuable content for your marketing campaign. You can determine the following metrics to understand your target audience:

Demographics: age, gender, education levels, location, and income levels
Psychographics: hobbies, pain points, interests, online behavior, and interests
Content preferences: educational content or product updates
Platform preferences: do they use Instagram? When are they most active on the social media platform?

The spontaneous question arises: what measures can help identify your target audience? The following steps constitute the answer:

Examine the Instagram behavior of your existing customers by using a tool such as Instagram Insights
Create personas to represent your ideal customers
Ask followers using Instagram Stories about their interests and preferences

Identifying and understanding your target audience can generate the essential inputs to create valuable and engaging content to appeal to them. Due to this, they are likely to consume the content, making your marketing campaign successful.

Create a Content Plan

Structure a thoughtful content strategy for your Instagram marketing campaign. For that, you need to consider the tastes and preferences of your target customers. Ensure publishing engaging and valuable content. That helps to attract users and make them consume the content. As a result, you can educate them about your brand, product/service, and values. That way, your brand awareness will increase, and the probability of selling your offerings becomes higher.

Your content structure can include:

Images
Images are one of the most crucial aspects of creating the first impression of your business. Do not use low-quality images, as they can build a negative impression on the visitors. Ensure high-quality pictures to showcase your products/services.

Videos
Create engaging videos showcasing your product/service usage, customer testimonials, or how you make your products. Remember, videos are a priority for Instagram. Create valuable Reels. They are short-form video formats and can effectively promote your new and upcoming products/services. Remember, the Instagram algorithm prioritizes Reels, which can also be about tutorials, events, fun, etc.

Carousels
Carousel posts consist of multiple images or videos. As such, you can tell stories about your brand or products/services. In addition, you can share a guide on how to use your products or compare your new products with old ones with the help of carousels.

Maintain Consistency

Consistency in everything you post on Instagram is a crucial parameter for your marketing campaign to be successful. Therefore, maintain consistency in your content quality and the frequency of posting. Notably, frequent posting signals on Instagram that your profile is active. In addition, that allows your followers to keep your brand in their minds.

Strike a balance in posting content. If you post less frequently, your followers might forget about your brand. In contrast, over-posting is likely to irritate them. Therefore, 3-5 posts per week can be the best practice. Moreover, 3-5 Stories daily are enough to keep your target audience engaged.

Creating a content schedule to post your postings is a good practice. That way, you can ensure timely promotion of your offerings and maintain consistency in posting content.

Use Hashtags and Keywords

Hashtags allow your content to reach more users. They enable discoverability on the social media platform. Therefore, use the relevant hashtags to increase your reach. You can use them in your posts, captions, bio, Reels, and Stories. Your content will appear when users search or click on your hashtags, which are of three types:

Trending: popular hashtags that enable your posts to be seen by a large audience
Niche-Specific: hashtags that correspond to your industry, specialty, or location. For example, #OrganicVegetablesCalifornia
Brand-Specific: you can create a unique hashtag to represent your business. For example, #24/7OrganicShoppe. Encourage users to mention the hashtag while posting content about your brand.

Notably, keywords have become crucial in allowing users to discover your posts. Keywords can help even users not following you to find your posts. As such, infuse the relevant keywords in your posts to enable users to discover them. That way, you can increase your brand awareness and encourage engagement.

Engage With Your Target Customers

Developing loyalty and trust in your potential customers is a vital aspect of the success of your Instagram marketing campaign. That is why you should actively engage with them.

Reply to messages and respond to comments. Do not argue if you find someone sending you a message informing you of a mistake. Thank the user for pointing out the mistake and promise to take corrective actions. You develop a deep bond with your target audience when you engage with them. That leads to long-lasting relationships with potential customers and prompts them to become regular customers.

Post quizzes and polls to engage your target audience. You can also ask them about their preferences for your upcoming products/services. That way, you can strengthen your bond and trust with them and tactfully market your upcoming offerings.

Run Instagram Ads

Leverage the advantage of targeting specific audiences based on their demographics and interests. Running ad campaigns can help. An ad can help your small business by:

Turning your top-performing posts into sponsored ads to expand your reach
Increasing engagements by displaying Story ads in users’ feeds
Allowing users to make purchases directly from the social media platform due to the Instagram Shopping ads feature

Set Up Instagram Shop

The Instagram Shopping feature can benefit you if you sell physical products. Due to this feature, users can purchase your products from your profile. Therefore, set up a product catalog on Instagram by linking your Facebook product catalog. After that, tag your offerings in your posts, Reels and Stories. That will allow users to click on them to buy the corresponding products.

Run Giveaways and Contests

You can significantly increase engagement in your Instagram account, enlarge your follower base, and increase your brand awareness by hosting giveaways and contests.

Make users aware of the prerequisites for participating in the giveaway. Those could be following your Instagram account, liking the post, and tagging a friend in the comment to participate in the giveaway. That will increase your follower base and engagement.

Partnering with complementary businesses or influencers while running your giveaway can be wise. That can take the giveaway to a broader audience.

In addition, host contests. That will increase engagement. Also, promote the contests and giveaways on your Stories and Reels. That will also increase the awareness of your brand.

Track the Performance of Your Campaign

Monitor the performance of your marketing campaign regularly. That will help to discover what is working and what is not. Based on the performance results, you should adjust your strategy.

You can get valuable data from the Insights tool of the social media platform that will help you to keep track of the progress of your marketing campaign. As a result, you can take corrective action when something goes wrong. The Insights tool will keep you updated on:

Engagement rate
Reach
Impressions
Follower growth
Story interactions
Website clicks

If you find unsatisfactory performance, it could be due to the unavailability of essential in-house expertise. In that case, hire a competent digital marketing agency to run the campaign.

Partner With an Influencer

If your marketing budget permits, hire an influencer. As influencers have a large loyal follower base, they can instill trust in your brand in their followers. As a result, your business reputation will become stronger.

Since your business is small, you can partner with a micro-influencer. Usually, such influencers have around 10,000 followers.

The Final Words

Leverage the power of Instagram to market your business offerings. The popular social media tool can help small businesses promote their products and services to a broad audience efficiently and cost-effectively. However, a strategic marketing campaign can help to reap the full benefits of the social media platform’s capabilities. Do not neglect to monitor the progress of your marketing campaign. Implement corrections when it does not perform well. Also, keep yourself updated with the latest Instagram trends.

Why should your business invest in online paid advertising?

Posted on January 13, 2023October 5, 2023 by Dave

Online paid advertisement is faster way to tap Google traffic and increase the visibility of your website and convert leads faster. There are umpteen benefits of paid advertisements like

1. Faster Reach on Social Media

With more than 2 billion users on social media and most of your targeted customers there, you would off course want to reach the maximum of your target customers. Organically, with efforts you can be visible to a greater section of your target customers in a long time. Compare it with paid advertisement, wherein you just set the target audience filters and reach 40-50% or even more of your prospects in a small time.

2. Much more cost effective than traditional forms of marketing

Online paid advertisements, specifically PPC ads works on a Cost Per Click metric. These are much less expensive than traditional forms of advertising as you are required to pay only when someone clicks on the ad

3. Reaching the right prospects and customers ( precise targeting of prospects)

Online paid advertisements can be precisely targeted to reach the right audience who are probable prospects of your services or products at the right time. Moreover with proper placement of ads, you can ensure that you get the brand visibility you require in a very short time. Owing to the huge prospect of reaching desired audience easily and in their desired time, online paid advertisements has seen a boom in the last few years. Around 84% of B2B marketers use online paid advertisements on Facebook, 41% of them use Google Ads and 18% of them use LinkedIn ads

4. Accurate estimation of the success of the ads

Social Media platforms offer great analytic tools which can help you accurately determine the success of any ad (clicks, impressions, click through rate, conversions and others). You can clearly analyze your ROI, modify the investment in campaigns, set new filters of geo and demographic targeting, based on conclusions of the campaign and even acquire the customer data to set further retargeting campaigns for brand recall and positioning.

Campaign tools like Google Adwords and Facebook Ad manager help you monitor the success of each campaigns with precision and help you close the loopholes in your campaigns to yield better ROI with every following advertisements

5. Allows you the opportunity to reach maximum users across different platforms

Paid advertisements provides you the opportunity to reach out to a huge number of users by simultaneously running ads on multiple channels like

- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Twitter
- Youtube
- Quora and many more

This allows you to tap into the huge reserve of online traffic and get bulk of leads any time.
- Increases Conversion Rates

Paid advertisements has many benefits like
- Increasing visibility of start-ups in a very small time
- Generate new leads
- Increase conversion of customers etc.

Hire Dukami for generating maximum buzz of your brand and for increasing your customer list through paid advertisements.

Managing expectations in influencer marketing

Posted on March 23, 2021 by Dave

Managing Expectations in Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is when organisations rope in influencers who may be a celebrity or an authority in the domain to promote the brand among its target customers.
Influencer marketing is the new mantra for business to carve a 'rags to riches' perception of their brands. But, influencer marketing as it seems is not a simple task because one needs to manage expectations at various levels.

Expectations of a business

The business expects the influencer to add their celebrity and influencer value to their products so that a greater customer base is attained. Not only that, in most cases, the aim is to brand a product as something trustworthy or eligible to be readily accepted by customers. Alongside, the business would like to tap into the large social following of the influencer.

The expectation of the influencer

The influencer on the other hand aside from the money he is making is conscious that the product/service doesn't downsize his stature or influencing value. Moreover, he/ she aims to increase his /her worth by association with the brand. Not only that, influencers may not always agree on a rigid script and may want more collaboration and agreement on what they want to get induced in the script. Not only that, influencers may also have different terms and timelines that would require management.

The Marketer's Expectation

As said before, any marketer with good rapport in the market would want somebody of the niche to influence for the company's products. Rather than a film celebrity marketing for educational products, they would expect some bigwigs from the educational field itself. So, that the brand's worth is not deflected or diluted or turned vague.

Expectations of the audience or prospects

The audience or prospects expect the product to hold good value if a top influencer promotes the product. So, an average product/service would be kind of betraying their expectations.

Cost Expectations

The influencer would try to demand as much as he perceives his influencing value to be. The organization would try to manage the influencer cost so that budgets for further promotions and advertising is present. The marketer would expect the influencer value induced in marketing to substantially increase demand for the product/service. The customer would expect the cost to be optimal, not very high, but the product/service quality to be great.

Advertiser's Expectations

The advertiser would expect more costs from the company to reserve top slots for advertisement and creative inputs as doing otherwise would negate the influencing value that can be created. Hence, with every influencer, even the advertising costs go up. They would expect maximum visibility of their ads or video or posts.

Social Media Expert's Expectations

For influencer posts or videos for Generation Z, Social Media Experts would prefer more of Instagram than Facebook or Twitter. Hence, channels of distribution would be restricted and focussed by them. Their expectation would be that the influencer truly caters to the audience segment.

So, influencer marketing is more like managing a lot of expectations, having clarity of what to expect from which section, and then moving forward. The influencer must be provided brand guidelines and the business should clarify the expectation they are having from the influencer. The Creative Unit, Advertisement agency, and social media agency should be clear as to how to position the influencer, and through what slots and social media channels, and at what costs. Proper sales and marketing metrics for analysis must be there in place to assess whether the desired business expectation is being achieved or not. The investment should be in a manner that returns are good for all the parties involved.

How Digital Marketing can help your business grow quickly?

Posted on September 16, 2020May 17, 2025 by Dave

Have you ever thought what was wrong with the days when only brick and mortar shop was the only way of selling?
Let me explain.
Your target customer had to physically visit your store for knowing about your services suffering the vagaries of rain, storm, weather and so on .

Customers in other areas where you were not known seldom reached your product/services
You had to invest huge on advertising billboards, media and others to create brand awareness.
You could reach out to only specific few areas or specific groups of people at a time
Brand recall was tough as you could not reach out to customers consistently owing to distance and cost involved.

Well, these are just a few of the numerous hurdles with brick and mortar shop.
Digital Marketing came as a boon for marketers , customers as it deftly solved the problem of time, reach and investment in marketing. Now , your brand could be visible to anyone, anytime in half the cost of other forms of marketing.

Lets analyse in details how digital marketing helps businesses grow rapidly in a short span of time.

Wider Reach attained without much effort

Lets know how many people make searches for buying a product or service. According to Datareportal
(a) More than half of the world uses Social Media
(b) Approximately 4.57 billion use internet globally

Almost half of the world population is logged into internet one time or other. So, the reach of internet is massive. The best part is that you can reach to any number of people you want within fraction of seconds and with few clicks. The widest reach and maximum visibility for your brand can be assured only and only through digital marketing.

Turning Strangers into Customers more quickly

You have created a damn new website, displayed your products in grandeur and have employed seo strategies to secure a top slot on the search engine. Over a small period of time your website gets indexed, you get promoted on social media platforms and then a magic happens!!. Anyone searching for a product of your portfolio lands on your website with a few clicks, knows more about you and in few online interactions finally agrees with your price and becomes your customer. So, you reach out and interact with your audience, wherever they be around the world in a few minutes and with few clicks. This would have taken many days in the nostalgic brick and mortar days.

Brand Awareness and Brand Recall Made Damn Easy

Remember the old days when for brand recall or making people remember about your brand, you had to hire an expensive advertising agency , pay for media slots on TVs and films or in Newspapers and then your brand was visible. If you had to reach out multiple times , you had to multiply your investment. Even after that, you didn't have an accurate estimate of how many of your customers viewed your show. Digital Marketing has made brand recall so easy that even a novice in the field can appear infront of their customers multiple times with specific messages of their brand. You need not invest millions, just a little amount on creating a good video, newsletter or ad campaigns and then spread through various social media platforms, online video platforms and through various portals and forums. At half of the investment cost and in half the time, you are able to reach out to twice the audience. And the best part, you are able to accurately estimate how much brand awareness and recall has happened through analytics data.

Helps in Educating Prospects and in Quicker Lead Generation

With content marketing, an essential part of digital marketing you can guide customers through the buying funnel. This helps in better lead qualification and quality leads generation in a short time. The only thing that you need to know is map out at which stage of the marketing funnel the customer is in and serve him/her content accordingly.

Can be done through multiple devices from multiple locations

Digital Marketing assures you the complete freedom to market your brand and grow your business by removing location and device constraints. Whether you have a Smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop, you can immediately promote your product/services with a simple tweet, post, blog or ads. Now, you need not think how your brand would be visible to the customers in Bay Area, Santa Monica or Pasadena. You can customize your brand messages for multiple locations at the same time.

Various Options of Marketing

Digital Marketing is not a unitary marketing method. It helps businesses register growth through multiple ways like

(a) Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine Optimisation refers to strategies and corresponding techniques to appear in top searches of Search Engines. So, if you are an application development company and someone types in search " application development", you would have a chance to appear on the top of that search through proper SEO strategy.
What are you gaining?
Clicks and visitors to your website who would see your service and hire you.

(b) Social media Marketing
It involves using social media platforms for promoting and marketing your products/services.
You must be thinking how you do it?
Well, create beautiful appealing posts of videos, news, information and others and regularly share it on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, twitter and others. You get chance to have brand awareness, brand recall, invite engagement with your products and services, invite discussion thereby driving personalization of your brand and a lot more.

(c) Pay- Per Click
Through pay per click, you are able to run multiple ad campaigns and have your website appear in various search results of multiple search engines like Google, Bing etc. You can register sudden surge in traffic or conversions or increase brand awareness within the shortest time with PPC.