Brand Marketing on Instagram | 4 Tips to Level Up Your Brand

Are you a marketer who wants to build their brand on Instagram? Do you find it difficult to increase the performance of your brand marketing? Look no further and dive into the fascination of brand marketing on Instagram. Read on to discover ways to improve and elevate your brand marketing on Instagram in just four easy tips.

What is Brand Marketing?

First, we need to identify what exactly is brand marketing. Brand marketing, according to Adobe Express, is “the strategic process of creating a unique and compelling identity for a business to build strong connections and loyalty with its target audience.” Essentially, a brand marketer’s goal is to market their brand and raise awareness with consistency. It is important to give your brand a unique personality that will catch the viewer’s eye and create a loyal customer base. The brand marketer wants to connect to their viewers and communicate a value that they cannot stay away from.

Now that we know what brand marketing is, let’s learn how to improve yours to benefit your brand awareness and loyalty.

Tip #1:  Consistency is Key

As you are marketing your brand on Instagram, you must stay consistent in your voice and make sure your brand is uniform and recognizable. Having your brand be distinguishable for viewers leads to more brand awareness and customer loyalty. Here are some best practices and tips to maintaining a consistent brand image:

• Create a brand style guide, including your logo, color palette, fonts, and icons. Clearly defining these design elements will make it easier to keep a consistent brand image when creating content. Additionally, you may want to develop content guidelines so that each piece of content is unique yet uniform.

• Develop a brand graphics library that contains all visuals that are approved for repeated use. This allows for brand marketers to have access to graphics to repurpose for a consistent image across the Instagram page. Not only that, but it also comes with the advantage of reducing the time spent creating content, enabling more time to focus on other brand marketing areas.

• Determine your brand’s voice and specify a tone that will be used throughout your content. Having one tone of voice for your brand will create consistency because it is like the user is hearing one “person” as the voice of the brand.

An example of a company with a very consistent and well-crafted brand is Crumbl Cookies, a cookie shop whose claim to fame is their unique weekly spread of cookie flavors. They are very consistent in their pink color palette and the quality of their posts. Every week when they present the cookie lineup, the captions are consistent in formatting and the use of emojis always correctly corresponds with the specific cookie. Additionally, the way they edit their videos is the same in each lineup post, meaning that the user can guess the brand by only looking at the video and disregarding the caption and profile handle.

Tip #2: Tell a Story

When creating content, it’s important to communicate your brand’s value and continuously tell a story. Brand storytelling helps connect the viewer to the brand and adds meaning to their engagement. Every piece of content that is posted contributes to an overall narrative and impression of your brand to your audience, so it is important to establish who you are as a brand. Additionally, your brand story allows you to connect to the user and become more personable, leading to an increase in trust for future engagement and loyalty. Various methods of storytelling may include showing a behind the scenes, informing about the history of the company, or communicating the brand’s mission statement. Essentially, give the viewer something that will get them to connect and resonate with your brand.

Tip #3: Strive for Engagement

Engaging with your audience is another big factor in connection and loyalty. Being actively engaged creates a community and investment in your following. An easy way to demonstrate this is by responding to comments in a timely manner and being thoughtful in your wording, which shows that you care about their opinions. Additionally, you can make loyal customers feel valued and appreciated by featuring their content and sharing behind-the-scenes videos. It adds a deeper level of connection by giving your attention to their contributions and efforts to the brand’s following. Another way to accomplish that is by creating polls, Reels, and Stories as a question-and-answer style of content that offers another type of communication and further shows your investment to their opinions.

Not only is Crumbl Cookies always consistent in their posts, but they are also creating a ton of engagement with their audience. In every Instagram post, the brand includes a prompt for the user to follow, whether it be a giveaway entry, asking if they have tried the featured cookie, or telling the viewer to tag a friend. They are constantly trying to get their viewers engaged and interacting with the posts. Not only are they generating engagement in the captions, but they are also responding to many comments left by users. All of this shows that they want to be involved with their customers and they value their opinions, leading to customer trust and loyalty.

Tip #4: Influencers & User-Generated Content

While marketing the brand on your end is very important, it is also beneficial to work with influencers and partnerships to increase your brand awareness. Even though you have your own target audience, an influencer can create a broader targeting zone and reach a larger audience with their fan base. By working with influencers, they are creating user-generated content for viewers that may have not found your brand yet. User-generated content, also known as consumer-generated content, is content created by a user to promote a specific brand. We see this all the time in our social media feeds, and all of the following are examples of user-generated content posted on non-affiliated accounts.

Partnering with influencers that create user-generated content builds a level of trust with their viewers because it is like an online review. Did you know that, according to a study, 87% of participants bought products after seeing an influencer’s content. When users are fed thoughts and opinions from a familiar and trusted influencer, they tend to believe what the influencer is communicating and that leads to increased conversions.

To find the right influencer, choose one that fits with the niche of your brand. If your brand sells snowboards, for example, try to stay away from an influencer whose main content is surfing in the ocean.

One great example of a brand that gets a lot of user-generated content is Halara. Halara is a clothing brand that primarily sells activewear, and they have grown in popularity within the past two years. They post a large amount of content from customers and influencers to strengthen their brand’s reliability and reputation. You may have seen quite a few posts in your feed of users posting try-on hauls or outfit-of-the-day’s, especially with the viral Halara workout dress. You can find an example of a Halara post with user-generated content by following this link.

Key Takeaways

Well, there you have it. Those are four tips to improve your brand marketing on Instagram, including consistency, storytelling, active engagement, and influencers and user-generated content. Overall, you want to create and maintain an identity for your brand with the goal of connecting with your target audience. If you practice and demonstrate all these concepts as a brand marketer, then you are guaranteed to level up your brand game.

Want to learn more about this author? Browse more blogs to learn Alix's voice.