Instagram was first introduced in 2010. Back then, it was just another app to share your photos with friends and family, but IG sure was something special. Bought by Facebook in 2012, Instagram started to grow exponentially, constantly introducing new and great features for greater engagement. Today, it is home to the most engaged audiences, and its evolution has made it become the most powerful platform to use for promotion.
When it comes to a beauty business, IG promotion is highly recommended. Using Instagram, you can engage with users in a way that truly matters, which will help you achieve your marketing and sales goals. For this to happen, of course, you need followers.
The best part about running a beauty industry business for your brand in today’s internet-savvy age is the fact that you can have an engaged audience with social media marketing.
It doesn’t matter the type of business someone owns…it must have a social platform to reach a target audience. This social network allows for reaching a wider audience and turn followers into customers with user-generated content.
Many content creators have used instagram marketing to reach a larger audience for their brand because this content strategy is essential when educating audiences with relevant content. This is especially popular for businesses in the beauty industry.
A social media network can make or break your brand, so use instagram to post amazing visual content to get more followers, and turn fans into customers, for your beauty brand.
So, let’s cut to the chase: there is no shortcut that will help you get more Instagram followers overnight. You can succeed in gaining a great deal of followers on a daily basis by putting a lot of smart and honest work into it. To help you out with that, here is an extensive guide on how to gain more followers on Instagram for your beauty business.
Familiarize Yourself With All Instagram Features
Instagram is a highly functional app with an easy-to-navigate user interface. It is packed with many automation features that you can use to your advantage as a business owner for your marketing strategy.
To make the most of it, you need to be familiar with all the features and how to use them when it comes to the types of content you create for your marketing campaign.
You can use advanced editing options to make your photos and videos more appealing such as text, special effects, and even digital drawings to help you attract attention. Another feature you can take full advantage of is stories.
An instagram story is temporarily available (and can be later saved to be viewed just like images) to your followers, can be used as teasers.
Stories can also be sent to a small group of people and curated groups, and there is also the option to broadcast an Instagram live video that is available only for the duration that you’re live.
As this is just a short overview of the plethora of options available on Instagram, you should start exploring the platform yourself and learn skills.
Being extremely IG-savvy will help you utilize all the features available in order to come up with a smart strategy that will get your users’ attention and keep them engaged.
Design an Appealing Profile
Later on in this article, we will talk about tactics that will help you get users to your profile. Once they are there, they will make a quick judgment resulting in them either clicking follow or leaving your page. To make them want to follow you, you need to design an engaging account that is appealing at first glance.
The main aspects here includes your username, profile picture, and brand bio. The blank space reserved for your brand description is your first opportunity to grab a person’s attention. Use it to write something unique and catchy, potentially a summary of what your brand offers decorated with emojis.
To make your page visually appealing and recognizable, stick to specific colors and aesthetics that represent your brand. Use the color palette from your logo and customize your posts similar to those featured on your website. Use brand elements to achieve familiarity, but be careful not to get repetitive and generic.
The grid view on Instagram provides a great opportunity to play with photo positioning and patterns, especially when it comes to a product photo. Unique layouts in symmetrical shapes and patterns can be very satisfying to the eye.
Try to come up with something original, so that when a person sees your profile for the first time they become truly interested.
Create a Content and Posting Strategy
Here, content refers to all posts that you’ll be publishing on the platform, including videos, stories, photos, and text. The thoughtfulness you put into creating quality content will generate the right followers for you.
If you post generic, boring, or mediocre content, the followers that you might end up attracting will mirror the same lack of interest.
Therefore, you need to put in the effort to create a good instagram marketing strategy for content with relevant user context that will keep an average potential engaging with your business. You should strive to create content that delivers valuable information to the right person and at the right time. Such content will get users to interact with you and care about your business and purpose.
Instagram is a visual medium, so most attention goes towards visual representation – photos and videos. However, you should also be mindful of adding a good description below your posts with a hashtag strategy (more on that later). As a beauty business, you would ultimately want to focus on people-centric and product-centric posts as well as user-generated content.
Depending on the beauty niche you are in, faces are something that you could want to feature in your photos. For example, photos of models, groups of people, real customers, etc. Surveys have shown that photos that include faces get 38% more engagement than photos without them, so it’s the best way to gain attention.
On the other hand, chances are you are selling products, so you would also post photos that include them. Product-centric content, even a product review, is especially good for increasing sales, but you should always try to showcase a narrative along with the image of your product shot.
Give your audience a behind-the-scenes instagram story of what happens in the beauty industry. Add photos of the manufacturing process together with the final product, photos of your product and a customer using it, etc.
Always make sure to post original and relevant photos. A crucial mistake can lead to losing followers since people you are targeting are actively engaged and will surely spot irrelevant content.
Create a Posting Schedule
With Instagram, you can’t just post content and disappear for some time. You must be present all the time to show your brand is an “active user.” It’s advisable to post at least once a day, add several stories within a 24-hour time frame, and schedule an Instagram Live video several times a week.
Meanwhile, you should interact with your followers and customers and engage with the communities that form around your brand to turn those followers into customers. In time, you should learn when and how to interact with your loyal followers just keep in mind that you can’t disappear for days at a time, leaving your social media network wondering if your brand is still around.
Using #Hashtags
Hashtags are to IG what keywords are to Google. Using hashtags allows users to navigate the platform faster and more easily. Therefore, you should utilize hashtags, regardless if it’s a popular hashtag or branded hashtag for each of your posts in order for it to appear to the right people that will eventually become interested in following you.
Once you get traction with your influencer marketing, you can eventually start using a branded hashtag, or a niche hashtag, for your posts. However, until you improve your brand awareness, you should use relevant hashtags that will help the right audience navigate to your profile.
Adding simple and popular hashtags like #beautiful, #makeup, or something similar can potentially give your beauty brand exposure but your post may be eventually hidden by all the other hundreds of thousands of posts with those hashtags.
To get the right people to come to your profile, you should use contextual hashtags. For example, if you are posting a product photo, say organic face cream, you should use a hashtag that will show this photo to a person searching for such posts/products. In this case, you should use beauty and cosmetics-related hashtags like #organicskincare, #naturalfacecream, etc.
Another thing to keep in mind is that hashtags are tags with the sole purpose of helping people find certain content. They don’t have to be and are better off not being included in the caption. Write a nice and tidy caption and add your hashtags in a comment.
Regarding the number of hashtags per post to use, try to use no less than 5 and no more than 30. If you can’t come up with 30 niche-specific hashtags, combine them with popular ones that will extend its exposure.
Find and Follow Your Target Audience
Once you understand how hashtags work, you can use them to navigate through profiles to find your desired audience. Here are the steps to attracting followers using hashtags.
- Use the IG search bar and type in a hashtag that relates closely to your business. For example, #organicskincareline again.
- Once you click enter, you can see the number of posts there are on the platform with the same hashtag added.
- Click to see all those posts and open some of the photos on the top. It’s possible that the profile you visit has an immense following. If it is in the same niche as you, or even if it is a competitor, you will definitely want to browse through their list of followers.
Instagram has a policy that prevents a user from following more than 50 people in an hour or so. You can spend several minutes each hour or at some points of the day following people that are already interested in the industry. Most of them will follow you back…if you took our advice and created an appealing profile with engaging content.
Partner Up With Beauty Influencers
Whether you sell products or provide services in the beauty industry, influencer marketing is the way to exposure. Instagram is home to beauty influencers, so there is no better way to gain a following than connecting with influencers. Partnering up with an influencer does not necessarily mean you will have to pay them money it can be more of a mutually beneficial collaboration.
To sell products, you can find an influencer that has the right audience to promote the products to. You should provide the person with samples of your products so they can test it and review it in a video or post. Presenting it to their following, they direct them straight to your profile and can possibly convert them into customers of yours.
If you offer services, you can also use influencer marketing to promote your business and gain a larger following. You can even partner up with influencers to organize giveaways.
Giveaways are an excellent trick to gather the attention of people that otherwise would not be interested in following you. This might bring about some short-term followers that will eventually unfollow your profile, but there might be some benefits there as well.
How to Get More Followers on Instagram From Outside the Platform
Once you have your profile ready, you can also use several simple but effective tips to promote your Instagram profile outside of the platform. It’s possibly the easiest way to gather followers since you are targeting people that are already interested in your business.
- Place a link to your Instagram profile in your email footer – Everyone using a company email should add a link to the IG profile in their email signature, i.e. email footer. You can also include the link in the closing of your email newsletters.
- Place an Instagram badge on your website – Customers visiting your website will surely be interested in checking your IG profile, so it’s important to redirect them there.
- Place your account name on stickers, business cards, and branded packaging.
- Whenever you communicate with customers, brand followers, or post on any other social media platform, always include a closing sentence saying: “Don’t forget to check our IG account” and add a hyperlink.
The Results
If you follow the steps outlined in this article and implement the tactics mentioned, you can expect to get roughly around a dozen followers a day. Although the beginning can be difficult, you will need to patiently work on your profile and content until followers start rolling in.
Within several weeks, your business should pick up and you’ll get your first big batch of followers. In the end, keep in mind that this is a never-ending project. You can’t achieve a great following and just leave it at that.
As your business accumulates more and more followers, you should put in a lot of work into keeping them satisfied. It’s possible to lose them in half the time it took you to gain them. So, make sure you keep up the good work!