Benefits of Instagram for Small Businesses
Instagram is a social media platform that primarily uses the sharing of photographs for its medium among users. So, aside from being a collective photo album, the resource then raises the question as to how it can be useful for a business in terms of brand or product marketing. The answer is, quite a bit.
Remember, most of marketing and advertising is primarily visual. While there is plenty of written by-lines and content involved, the primary attractant that catches a consumer towards a business is generally a visual cue, especially given that consumer usually only spend 15 seconds maximum on any kind of marketing material.
Because Instagram’s natural format involves photographs and commentary on them, it can be natural environment among social media users and readers for small business marketing via images. Fundamentally, people have to share photographs within the Instagram universe on the natural to expand their network and become aware of other users’ material.
Second, as ecommerce websites have more than proven themselves, consumers shop with their eyes. So, when presented with a pleasing image that can be attractive, people begin to investigate the concept which can then lead to sales leads and revenue.
Additionally, among the social media platforms available, Instagram has been rated by independent studies as a far more engaged environment in terms of user activity. That means data, information and images are being looked at and transferred far faster than competing platforms like Facebook business pages or Twitter for business, for example. For a business that wants to market virally, the communities that share information faster and wider are far better targets to go after, especially when time and resources are invested in the task.
Next, a small business doesn’t have to worry about a user’s interpretation of marketing material. Because the information transferred is essentially photographs, people immediately see what a company’s brand is as well as what the product is. That speeds up the consumer understanding of the marketing message as well as potential conversion to wanting more information from a small business website. Sales leads and sales tend to increase accordingly. It’s the same reason television commercials and photo ads are far more successful in advertising than print descriptions or article content describing the same offering.
Finally, the photograph medium in electronic format is so easy to share and distribute, a company’s brand awareness among consumers begins to increase on the natural exponentially. While not every consumer that sees a company’s marketing photograph will immediately want to buy that product or service, the brand information and image will become familiar. When that same consumer is shopping later on, he will see the same brand logo where available and know what the company sells. Familiarity also increases sales in the long run as well as consumers tend to go with what they know versus the unknown.