Shine On Marketing and Communications

Social Media Marketing is one of the most efficient ways to grow and promote businesses. This marketing strategy is particularly important for small businesses, as marketing budgets are usually smaller! Social media is essentially free, and when used effectively, can reach a wide audience.

For starters there are many different platforms, each appealing to a slightly different audience. Let’s dive into one of the most popular platforms that consumers use, Instagram! Instagram’s demographics consist of about 49.4% female and 50.6% male as of 2023, according to datareportal.com, age is another demographic to look at when deciding if this platform is the best for your target market. 

image via Hubspot.com

Once you have established that Instagram is the right platform to use to capture the attention of your target market, the next step is setting up your business profile. Then you get to create a profile that shows off your brand purpose and values! Within your ‘bio’ you want to add information that is relevant to your consumers.

This could be a description of your products and services, location, store hours etc. Another important think to add within your bio is a link to a website, and if you have multiple links, creating a Linktree account to have all of your businesses relevant links in one spot!

Now let’s talk about creating some content. Creating content will be the most important part of your marketing strategy. You want to create engaging, exciting, and interactive content. All businesses content will look different. A real-estate agent’s content, of course, will look different from a clothing boutiques content.

On Instagram there is a variety of ‘post’ you can make. There are grid posts, that stay up on your profile and show up in your followers feed, the grid posts can incorporate more than one photo and carousel up to 10 images. The grid posts will also hold the reel that you post. Reels have become very popular and are a great way to gain more attention!

Instagram stories play a big role in posting consistently as well, they last on the user’s profile for 24 hours and can be easily shared by other users! These are usually more informal posts, and ones that update consumers on current information about your small business.

Overall, Instagram is a very valuable tool to promote your small business. And can be a great tool to market your business. I challenge you to make Instagram account for your business, or fine tune it you’re existing by using the information in this post! Within the next week, post a reel or Instagram story and track the added engagement that your profile receives.

I would love to help your business get started with social media marketing. Please reach out will any questions you might have!

I’m wishing you, and your business, nothing but success!