How to sponsor a brand on Instagram

If you own a clothing, gift or other brand, you may want to consider using Instagram and Instagram Ads to promote it. Here's how to proceed with some practical tips

Constantly growing and updated, always in step with user needs, but very close to the needs of companies wishing to sponsor themselves through social media marketing: we are talking about Instagram, the visual platform par excellence, historically linked to the world of images but today open to dynamic experiments on video content of various kinds.

If you have entered the world of online promotion, you will certainly have wondered if it is worthwhile for your business to include Instagram in the marketing mix and start using it in a professional and targeted manner for your growth and visibility purposes. Some particular commercial sectors, such as those related to the fashion or design universe, are certainly perfect for being promoted on a social network such as IG, but with a well-planned strategy this tool can prove to be an excellent ally for a wide range of businesses.

Capable of arousing immediate reactions and high emotional impact, images, Stories, IGTV and Reels are certainly interesting channels to effectively promote your brand on Instagram and combined with the paid advertising opportunities offered by the Zuckerberg platform, they transform a "simple" social in a real showcase open to the target audience you want to intercept.

How to make the most of the social network? Here are some basic tips for setting up your Instagram marketing.

·         Is it worth promoting your brand on Instagram?

·         Create and curate your corporate Instagram profile

·         Define your content strategy

·         Take care of the aesthetics and tone of voice of your profile

·         Instagram Ads

·         Collaborate with influencers

Is it worth promoting your brand on Instagram?

Before thinking about how to sponsor your business on Instagram, there is a preliminary strategic phase that you should face: a careful evaluation of aspects such as if, how and why you should use IG to promote your brand. Why would you want to integrate Instagram into your marketing plan and what do you expect to be able to achieve from the platform? The most wrong step you can take in your communication choices is investing time and resources in companies whose aims and possible returns you do not know exactly.

So stop and study in detail what your corporate macro objectives are and assign specific sub-goals to be achieved to each communication channel you would like to activate. Also, engage in an in-depth analysis of your target audience : this is essential to understand which of the many social media available exactly reflects the audience you would like to intercept.

 

Try to identify the specific characteristics of the IG audience, to understand if the buyer personas you want to contact really frequent the platform : in what age group are IG users, what profession they do, what buying and browsing habits they have, what are their hobbies and interests and what type of content do they want to enjoy?

To make these fundamental considerations, you can based on the numerous reports that periodically analyze the targets of individual social networks, but you can also spy on the movements of your competitors , who will have done the same research before you: what they do, on which social networks they move and how do they operate? Get inspiration and ideas, to build your plan of attack.

Create and curate your corporate Instagram profile

To hit your typical consumer in the heart and capture their attention, you have a few seconds , whatever the means of communication you use. The first elements that IG users come across when they happen on your profile are your profile picture, your name and your bio: it therefore follows that they must be organized in detail and maniacally treated.

Choose a profile image that expresses the personality of your brand in a few strokes : an excellent idea is to use your company logo, but you could also make a careful selection to find an image that tells about you and the feelings you you want to convey to the public. The same goes for the choice of the username : to create a strong brand image, it focuses on coherence, harmony and recognizability.

The Instagram Bio in its few characters holds extraordinary importance. In fact, this is where you should make a short but incisive narration of your business, your brand and your offer. Your bio should in fact clarify in a few characters who you are, what you do and how you do it and make your visitors feel immediately involved and pampered by your profile.

Two very useful tricks are to use relevant hashtags to make your profile even more SEO friendly for the IG algorithm, and also insert in the bio a link that guides your users to the pages of your website , your blog or the your store or accompany them to visit landing pages specifically designed to welcome them.

Instagram also allows you to insert a button that leads to a contact email, but if you want you can enter the main references to reach you directly in the Bio .

Define your content strategy

Once you have clearly and foresighted your goals, opened your Instagram account and created an engaging Bio, it is time to define precisely what to publish in practice , to achieve your business goals.

First of all, ask yourself which messages you would like to express through social media and which elements of your brand you would like to promote through Instagram. Do you want to use the platform to talk about your corporate culture or behind the scenes of your company? Or to get an overview of your products and services and lead customers to action? Or, do you just want to use IG as a showcase to increase your brand awareness and create a community of passionate followers?

 

Once you have decided what to communicate, you will have to decide in what format to communicate it: in your Instagram feed you can insert photographs, but also graphics, short videos or, nowadays, even your IG TV content or your Reels . Identify with specific field experiments which are the most engaging formats for your audience and create a content strategy that offers posts that are always fresh and with high engagement.

When planning your content, remember that you will be able to draw not only from your archive of images and graphics, but also from other valuable sources. For example, you can schedule quotes, repost or third-party content (obviously always mentioning the source clearly and tagging the author of the content).

But you can also count on the interactivity of the social network to convince users to produce so-called User Generated Contents , i.e. content created by the followers of the profile and / or loyal to the brand, both spontaneously and when stimulated through specially designed contests, quizzes and games. This strategy allows both to have always new content for the feed but also and above all to make users feel part of the company and its philosophy, as well as an important element of a lively and dynamic community of people sharing the same values. In short, you can transform every single follower into a brand ambassador of the highest value.

However, the essential advice is to draw up a precise editorial calendar to follow, which explains the publications in the short, medium and long term, their frequency over time and their role in the overall strategy, so that the way to go is clear and that there is a very specific logical thread that accompanies each proposed content.

Take care of the aesthetics and tone of voice of your profile

Instagram is social visual par excellence, so the aesthetics of your feed are crucial to say the least . To effectively promote your brand on Instagram, you will need to decide in advance what your profile will look like, in terms of images, graphic layouts, colors, etc. Each of these points will have to reflect your brand and your tone of voice and will communicate your every message even before captions, promotional claims and calls to actions.

Choose them carefully so that they are consistent with your corporate image and with the tone of voice that you also use on other channels, such as website, newsletter or other social media. You could have fun developing mood boards that contain the main elements of your communication such as the color palettes to use, the atmosphere that your profile must have and the emotions that your copy must convey.

Having them available will allow the entire team that deals with social media to maintain constant communication consistency : the quality of every single post will always act as a beacon in the IG universe, which must meet high standards, whether it is a photography or video content. The public now expects excellence from the material proposed on Instagram.

Instagram Ads

If you want to increase the visibility of your profile and reach a large number of users on the platform, you can also decide to sponsor your brand on Instagram using IG's sophisticated advertising platform . Promotions on Instagram can be managed directly from the social network, but to have full control over the ongoing campaigns and the KPIs to be monitored, it is advisable to use the Facebook promotion tools, which allow you to activate promotions both on FB and on Instagram, at the same time or separately.

The degree of segmentation possible today achieved by these social networks is extremely sophisticated and allows you to launch promotional campaigns aimed at targeting specific, well-selected audiences, maximizing budgets, resources and results . It is also possible to decide precisely what the purpose of each campaign is and then aim for the achievement of new likes or followers, clicks on links and CTAs , traffic to the landing website and many other conversion strategies.

Collaborate with influencers

An equally performing alternative today to promote a brand on Instagram is to establish collaborations with the influencers of your market niche: users who have achieved good success on the platform and who can count on a large community of followers who listen and they trust their opinions. The trust element is precisely the key factor of an influencer marketing campaign, since conveying a promotional message to users who are already segments and inclined to assimilate what their favorite influencer has to say leads to a net increase in the chances of success of each campaign. .

However, it is necessary to choose the most suitable influencer to be the spokesperson for your brand and who has engagement rates appropriate to your spending possibilities on the budget you decide to channel into this activity: do not forget that in addition to the mega influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers of followers, there is an interesting panorama of micro and nano influencers who, in the face of a lower number of followers, have a very strong impact on the fan base that follows them with passion and dedication.

So try to integrate all the elements seen so far into your communication tactics, dynamically combining each point, from the creation of a specifically designed bio, to the application of paid promotion strategies and you will immediately notice how Instagram can transform itself into a an indispensable resource for your business .