Images can be powerful communicators. They have the capacity to evoke emotion, convey a message, and tell an emotional story… which is why images are integral to your digital marketing strategies.

More than just prettying-up your posts and emails, images elicit emotions. You can use them to strategically put your followers, readers, and visitors in certain states of mind, to push them toward certain actions, whether it’s downloading a content offer or purchasing one of your newest products. You can even use images to tell your brand’s story.

While it’s true that images can be a driving force in digital marketing, you have to know how to use them if you want to maximize their power.

In this post, we’re going to run down a list of ways to put your images to work for you ESPECIALLY if you’re paying for stock photos or partnering with an influencer to create UGC for your social feeds.

A Few Expert Tips for Using Images in Emails and Across Social

#1 Correctly Format Images for Social Media

Social networks like Facebook and Instagram are awesome platforms for showcasing your brand with visual content. To get the most mileage with your visual content, it’s important to upload that are formatted correctly for the platform you’re using.

Here are the recommended upload sizes of the different images seen on Facebook.

FACEBOOK

• Cover photos – 800 x 312 pixels

• Profile photos – 180 x 180 pixels (although the maximum display area is 160 x 160 pixels)

• Shared images – 1200 x 630 pixels

• Shared links – 1200 x 628 pixels

• Event photos – 1920 x 1080 pixels (with a (16:9 aspect ratio)

Meanwhile, Instagram recommends these image sizes.

INSTAGRAM

• Profile photos (1:1 aspect ratio) – 180 x 180 pixels

• Feed photos – 1080 x 1080 pixels

• Thumbnails (1:1 aspect ratio) – 1080 x 1080 pixels (Instagram automatically crops photos with higher aspect ratios)

Now, when it comes to choosing the right image size for email, things get a little trickier. A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t always make for great formatting.

Take a look at this above-the-fold screenshot of KeVita’s home page (with my screen zoomed to 90%) compared with the way KeVita’s home page shows up on an LG with a 6.2-inch screen.

Source: KeVita.com

To get the best results for using images in emails, just keep in mind that most desktop devices today have a resolution higher than 1024 x 768 pixels.

But more than half of email opens occur on mobile…

So, you also have to consider how your images scale for mobile devices.

#2 Make Your Images Contextually Relevant

Regardless of the kind of campaign you’re running – whether it’s asking your audience to help you support a worthy cause, informing customers of updates in your business, or promoting a new product – it’s important to choose images that fit the overall context of your message. In essence, the image you use has to be related to your specific campaign.

Let’s say you want to promote your restaurant’s new menu. If your goal is to entice customers in to take a look at this menu, a good way to do that is to include in any emails you send to subscribers a grid of high-resolution pictures that best represent the appeal of your new menu items.

If you’re announcing the new menu lineup on social media, you could run an influencer campaign that features pictures of a handful of local micro influencers enjoying some of those new menu items at your restaurant, OR just post great-looking pictures of the new menu options. #foodporn

Uhh… is that fancy ramen or is that fancy ramen? Source: The Flatiron on Instagram

Of course, you dont’ want to use pictures of food that aren’t on your menu. You probably know what it’s like to go into a store to buy something the store advertised only to find out the product is sold out. Or worse, that the store never actually had it.

Don’t be that guy.

The takeaway here is a time-tested marketing tactic is to show a product in action. A great picture can help you do that.

#3 Use High-Quality Images That Support Your Brand Story

For your audience to fully appreciate the beauty of your images, you have to get great-looking photos. Not only should they be high-quality images, but it’s also a good idea to let your images tell your story.

We included Kate and Jade’s Instagram feed (@panaceas_pantry) in a recent roundup of health food influencers, and one of the things that was pretty cool about that feed (other than the high-quality food photography) is that their overall feed had purple threaded all through it.

What comes to mind when you see purple food? Probably sweets? Rich, indulgent, decadent flavors.  A really smart idea for a feed that’s full of healthy vegan desserts and treats.

Source: on Instagram @panaceas_pantry

People spend way too much time looking at screens to want to see anything blurry. Trust us when you say, you’re going to IMMEDIATELY lose your audience if they’re having to fight to make sense of your picture.

Low-quality images are just going to turn your customers off, causing them to unfollow you on social media or unsubscribe from your newsletters.

#4 Use Pictures of Faces. We Just LOVE Pictures of Faces!

If you’re trying to drum up engagement, nothing trumps featuring people – and specifically faces – in your post. We love looking at one another.  According to a study of more than one million photos on Instagram, images containing human faces received 38 percent more “Likes” than those without. Furthermore, the images with faces were 32 percent more likely to get comments from viewers.

If you use Instagram and have liked or followed an style-related accounts, the chances are pretty good that you have seen the Shapermint ads. Most of the ads are content from Shapermint users. They video quality isn’t always great, but they are always high-impact, in large part because they feature videos of regular women.

The data gathered in the study may have been isolated to just Instagram, but the logic applies to other social media platforms and even email as well. This is because email and social media share a common goal: to drive engagement with audiences.

So if you want to engage with your followers or subscribers, make it a point to use images with human faces.

#5 Personalize Your Images So They Resonate with Your Audience

Stock photos are everywhere in the marketing world. But you don’t really HAVE to use stock images just for the sake of having an image, especially if your stock image options suck or are outdated.

Hey, folks… stock images can get outdated! Images communicate messages, and the conversations going on in the business world 10 years ago are very different from the ones going on in the business world right now. SO stock images have an expiration date.

Remember these kinds of stock business photos? This one has been optimized for the search terms “Men employees suit work greeting” …

: /

Stock photos are only as effective as their ability to “speak” to your audience. And the only message I’m getting from that picture above is “stock photo”. But, if you just search a little longer…

…. Work pictures like this one from the LinkedIn Sales Navigator look a little different, a little more interesting, a little more relatable, a little more current.

Personalizing images like these can make them more relevant to your audience. Doing so not only helps humanize your content, but it also makes your customers feel like you’re talking directly to them.

By “personalizing”, we mean basing your image choice on the type of subscriber data you have.

For instance, if you run a travel and hospitality website, you can survey your most frequent customers and ask them which places they’d like to visit next. You can then send them images of those places the next time you send them offers.

#6 Add Alt text to Your Images to Support Your SEO Efforts

Images can and should be optimized. Google image searches account for one-third of all Google searches. That’s 1.1 billion image searches a day. Just on Google.

So, using alt tags to optimize your images can go a long way toward helping your content, brand, and products get found online.  Not only that, but it’s important in email marketing as well. Images in your email can be blocked by certain email clients. Including alt text in your images solves this problem, because it provides context for the image.

You’ve seen these little gray boxes in your email, I’m sure.

If a subscriber’s email client blocks images, using alt text to describe what your images are will encourage the subscriber to turn off image blocking. This enables them to see your images and have a more positive experience reading your emails.

(Source)

Regardless of what email service provider (ESP) or content management system (CMS) you use, adding alt text to images is pretty straightforward. Just look for the “Alt text” or “Add alt text” on the platform you’re using, and type in the appropriate alt text. Simple, isn’t it?

Wrap Up

No matter what digital marketing campaign you’re running, images are an important part of it. By using high-quality, relevant, and well-positioned images, you can improve engagement with your audience, encourage social sharing, and even boost your revenue.

Follow these tips, and leverage the power of your images.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kaitlin Westbrook is a Content Specialist at Campaign Monitor. She is also a film aficionado and has written several screenplays.

SEO plays a major role in how often people are able to find your blog and especially your online store or boutique in search. As a main driver of traffic, and therefore potential followers and customers, it’s critical that you don’t get lost among your competition. So, when it’s time to update your site (and that times rolls around more frequently than you probably think it does), there are some important search optimization things you need to consider… like page speed, image optimizations, and blog content, ALONG WITH the technical updates to page and site structure.

The good news is every one of these small updates can help get your blog or store in front of the people who want to buy your products and keep you on their radars. So updating is CRUCIAL to the success of your business.

5 Ways Bloggers and Fashion Affiliates Can Optimize Their Blogs and Online Stores to Get Better Search Rankings on Google

Update #1: Site Speed

People aren’t super patient when it comes to waiting for web pages to load. So, a slow site often results in potential customers clicking away from the page – even when they’ve already clicked a link – before they can even make a purchase.

In fact, on Mobile, Google found that at 3 seconds, the probability of a bounce is 32 percent, and at six seconds, that increases to 110 percent.

While page speed has been a critical ranking factor for e-commerce sites on desktop, it’s now being given even more weight from Google when indexing sites for mobile search. Your goal should be for the site to load in less than 2.5 seconds on Mobile—see the screenshot below for the load time and score from Google’s Test My Site tool.

To test the speed of your site’s pages, start with a speed test tool. Google’s pagespeed tool is the go-to for marketing professionals and provides clear and actionable tips for speeding up your site for both mobile and desktop.

Instead of aiming for a load time, in this case, you can aim for getting as high of a score as possible. The report will give you a score out of 100 and tell you what changes you need to make, like improving caching, reducing the load of time-intensive features, or eliminating render blocking resources.

Once you’ve made changes, you may expect to get a 100/100 instead of an 80/100, for example, but this isn’t always possible—or necessary. In their Google PageSpeed Insights guide, experts at Kinsta explain not to obsess over getting this perfect score, especially as an e-commerce site:

“This might not even be possible in all scenarios, depending upon how your WordPress site is set up. With a lot of multipurpose themes, e-commerce, and memberships sites, you simply will have an almost impossible time trying to achieve a perfect score. Which is perfectly okay.”

Update #2: Product Description Optimization

Okay, so you’ve probably been in enough online stores to know that product descriptions are much more than just a list what a product does or its many features. First and foremost, descriptions need to be written for the user. This means you need to start by writing them in-house; don’t take them from the manufacturer website.

Next, optimize all your product descriptions with some basic SEO updates:

• Use long-tail keywords in descriptions (instead of “cute blouse”, you want “pink keyhole puff sleeve floral blouse”).

• Include internal links to other products or pages.

• Use headers to separate sections and include supplemental keywords.

Finally, and most importantly, avoid duplicate content. This may feel next to impossible, but with some technical help, you can tackle the issue. Outside of simply writing the same content on each page, which needs to be avoided, it often comes down to details like tracking users, setting up a no-index for certain pages, and creating different URL paths. Use this technical guide from InFlow to tackle this potential issue.

Update #3: Image Optimization

Image search is an especially important opportunity for e-commerce companies. Google images search accounts for more than 26 percent of all search traffic—you already have the images, you just have to make sure they show up when a potential customer is ready to buy. Luckily, there are a few simple ways to optimize yo ur product images for search.

• Reduce image size—this goes back to page load speed. Large images will slow down page load time. If you use WordPress, you can use a tool like WP Smush It to compress all images.

• Title the image with the name of the product.

• Update the alt tag to reflect the product name; use keywords naturally—don’t stuff. If it doesn’t make sense to inc1lude one, then don’t; in many cases, however, the product name will include the keyword in some way. I.E. “adidas pink sneakers 2019.”

• Update alt tag for each image angle. I.E. “adidas pink sneakers top,” “adidas pink sneakers left,” etc.

Update #4: Mobile Optimization

As of 2018, Google’s Mobile First index started prioritizing mobile versions of a website over desktop. With 79 percent of consumers using their smartphone to make a purchase, you want to make sure you show up in search when they’re looking for products that you sell. Luckily, getting your site mobile optimized likely won’t be a large project. In addition to site speed, you may also need to make the following changes and updates, according to Moz:

Optimize titles and descriptions:

• Use schema.org structured data

• Optimize for local search: “Standardizing your name, address, and phone number and including your city and state name in your site’s metadata.”

• Use responsive web design

Update #5: Compelling Content

While direct, on-page optimizations are crucial for driving traffic to your online store and product pages, blog content is another important traffic-driver and SEO-booster. Writing blog posts allow you to target a wide range of keywords that are related to your brand, without cluttering your critical product pages. Not to mention, it’s a sales-driving tool, allowing you to direct potential customers to the pages you care about most—even if they didn’t come to your site to buy.

First, however, you need to get the SEO right and there are a few steps to do exactly that in Blog SEO: A Foundational Guide.

• Submit your XML sitemap (if you haven’t already)

• Keyword optimize your blog topics, choosing high search, low competition keywords

• Optimize each post with the help of tools like Yoast

• Update title tag and meta description for your blog and all blog posts

• Add image alt tags with the keyword

• Create high-quality content (think: long, thorough, and using images and internal and external links)

You may have noticed that much of the work to do for your blog is similar to that which you need to do for your product pages. Learn it once and apply sitewide to improve SEO across the board.

Conclusion

You have great products, but if you can’t be found when potential customers are looking for them, you miss out on traffic and sales. Use these SEO updates, from page speed to product page optimization, to capture as many potential sales as possible.

The New Year is a time to start afresh, put your best foot forward. In the digital world, one of the most important ways to start afresh is to update your website so it better reflects your brand AND compels customers to take action. This is especially true for brands running online stores.

It’s critical your site administrator stays on top of changes in the digital landscape to make sure they keep up with app changes, have the latest security and encryption, and continue to provide a safe, positive experience for users. When your site flows, is optimized, and wows with crisp product images, you’ll feel ready to take on the new year. As you prepare to make the necessary updates, keep the following ideas in mind.

6 Quick & Easy Tips for Updating Your E-commerce Site to Make More Sales

[Finally!] Start Blogging

Okay. Okay. This may seem very 2001, but most business owners – especially small business owners – intend to start and maintain a blog but…

Blogging may seem time-consuming, and it usually is. BUT your blog is a powerful way of driving leads and generating sales. If you’re thinking, “Well, I post on social media, and that’s enough” think again.

In the guide, How to Promote a Product, e-commerce experts Selz make an important point: “Social platforms can limit your access to customers if you don’t pay for boosted content and ads, so moving leads and existing customers to a blog post with a call-to-action is a smart way to reach your audience without spending money for their attention.”

The key is providing value to your readers in the form of actionable solutions to real problems. If you make it a habit to deliver (and over-deliver) on value, site visitors won’t mind you working your products into the content in natural and helpful ways. Selz continues, “This can be as simple as a post exploring the benefits of the new product and the needs that it can meet, then including a button or widget that allows your customers to easily to buy it.”

I’ll give you an example. If you’re releasing a new morning face cream, you could write a blog post titled, “5 Ways to Boost Your Morning Routine in 2019” and introduce your product as a solution to specific challenges your readers actually face addressed in your post.

Test Discount Opt-Ins

You need to catch the attention of a potential buyer right away. In our highly competitive online shopping world, consumers have so many options. Your product is probably going to be one of many, or if you’re lucky, one of several. A good way to get eyes on your brand is to incentivize your offers with opt-in discounts.

It’s a simple idea: A visitor lands on your website and within 3, 5, or 10 seconds—or as they’re exiting your site (called exit-intent), a pop-up flies in with a discount or offer. To get that offer, the user only needs to enter and verify his or her email address and become a valued subscriber to get the offer.

See an example from Alex and Ani below:

Opt-in discounts work because, in exchange for the opportunity to build a subscriber base that you can stay in contact with all year long, the user gets to save money in your store. Who hasn’t spent money (or more money) to save money?

Update Your Site’s SEO

This is a big one. SEO may feel very technical—and it can be—but you can make small SEO updates on your own, with little to no SEO knowledge. To update your store in the new year, keep these simple optimizations, from Search Engine Watch, in mind:

• Update your site to HTTPS. You can do this with your hosting provider; they can likely even do it for you. This update is ensuring your site’s security; in today’s digital world, you want to provide customers with a secure experience.

• Optimize category and product pages. If you have a WordPress site, Yoast SEO is a plugin that can help you in this area by making recommendations on how to better optimize every page on your site.

• Remove any duplicate content between product and category pages. Google will penalize your site for that. Search Engine Watch has another great guide specifically fixing duplicate content on your e-commerce site.

• Don’t remove product pages if the product is out of stock—you’ll miss out on important traffic. Instead, just add “Out of Stock” to the product headline or somewhere on the page. You can make this happen dynamically via your e-commerce platform or plugin.

Align Your Social Media Posts and Site Content

Keep your website content and your social media conversations aligned and complementary. Typically, social media posts are included as part of the overall content strategy to ensure what goes up on social is on-brand for your company. Keeping both your social media posts and website content aligned also ensures that when you share your site’s content to social, it’s still topical and relevant for your audience and network.

For brands, this area can be a minefield because the impulse is to post nonstop about their products and services. But people don’t respond to constant pitches – at least not in a positive manner.

Think of social media as more of a long-term branding tool than a transactional / sales tool. You go there to build relationships, grow your community, and let your audience get to know what you’re about. It’s the place you go to get eyes on your brand, and you do this by publishing interesting, relevant content that’s native to (or appropriate for) the platform to which you’re posting.

There are creative ways to include your product in your posts without every post looking like a product pitch. This post from Compartes Chocolatier (on Instagram @compartes) is a great example of this. Compartes has found a way to make product placements of its gourmet chocolate bars look like art instead of a product shot. Notice that Compartes included a link to their Avocado Toast Chocolate Bar in its Instagram bio, so the opportunity to make a sale is still there.

FYI, this post achieved more than four percent engagement, which is about the engagement typically generated by branded content.

Another thing many brands don’t always recognize is the connection between social media and your SEO strategy. Influencer marketing is actually a great way to support and even fortify your SEO efforts because inevitably, the goal of influencer campaigns is to drive traffic back to your site from social media, YouTube, or the influencer’s own blog.

Use ONLY High-Quality Images

Keep your image game strong. Low-quality photos don’t cut it anymore. If your site has them, get rid of your low-quality images and replace them with great-looking pictures.

You can bet a substantial number of your customers will be accessing your site from their phones, not a 19-inch LCD monitor. Customers expect high-quality imagery, and grainy, dark or poorly taken product images can totally kill your credibility. Think about it: the customer can’t touch or feel the product when shopping online, so you need to emulate that experience as much as possible.

Not to mention, when your images are crisp and high-quality, your business benefits. Sheila Dahlgren, SVP of marketing at Scene7 explains: “Customers are three times more likely to buy online when retailers offer rich imagery with the ability to zoom, pan, and see color options and alternative views of the merchandise, along with the products presented in context or on a model.”

That means now is the time to find a photographer and update your product photos. Another option is to hire a photo editor from a site like Upwork who can make your current images look brighter, more crisp—whatever is needed.

Don’t forget about Dahlgren’s suggestion to add the ability to zoom, pan and see color options. Add those features through your e-commerce software if they’re not available to your customers yet.

Update Old Stock Images

(even if you already paid for and still own that old license)

Stock images go out of style. No kidding. Since we essentially use the images we post on social media to communicate with one another, you sort of have to stay up on th lingo. If you happened to post a generic-looking office photo a few years ago, you did the right thing. Then. If it’s still up today, you can bet your bottom dollar it’s making your site look like it was created by a web designosaur.

You can refresh your stock images by subscribing to low-cost stock image sites, or hiring your own photographer + designer to get fresh images that can be put on your site.

The Wrap-Up

If you want to capture as many sales as possible in 2019, your website may need a refresh. Use these ideas to prep your online store and make it your most profitable year yet.

Jessica Thiefels is founder and CEO of Jessica Thiefels Consulting, a content marketing agency. She’s been writing for more than 10 years and has been featured in top publications like Forbes and FastCompany. She also regularly contributes to Virgin, Business Insider, Glassdoor, Score.org and more. Follow her on Twitter @JThiefels and connect on LinkedIn.

By now, we all know just how powerful a tool Instagram can be to help boost a brand online. But one thing that still often manages to elude many of us is how to achieve consistent engagement. After all, the proof of real influence is being able to move people to actually take an action in response to your posts.

There are influencers who are absolutely crushing it with engagement, and we know our clients and other brands use the quality of an influencer’s engagement as criteria during the influencer selection process.

11 Powerful Strategies Anyone Can Use to Boost Engagement on Instagram

Truth bomb: It takes hard work to drum up that kind of engagement consistently. Both brands and emerging influencers are always on the hunt for strategies that will help boost their own visibility and influence on Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat. But it’s not impossible. Work? Yes. Rocket science? No.

There are a handful of simple strategies that anyone can apply to their own account to help boost engagement, and we’re here to show you just how to do that. With these strategies, you’ll be able to improve your engagement rate, boost customer interaction, and see your brand grow on Instagram.

Why is Your Engagement Ratio Important?

Remember back in the day (like, two years ago), follower count was everything. The more followers a social media user had, the better he or she looked to brands, and the more they could charge for sponsored posts. So, it makes sense that people were doing whatever was necessary to achieve the status of influencer… even if that meant paying to artificially boost follower numbers.

Whereas brands formerly mistook high follower numbers for influence, they quickly learned through failed influencer campaign after failed influencer campaign that follower count is not a primary predictor of influence. Instead, since influence is the ability to have an effect on another person’s thinking and/or behavior, it made more sense that the ability to create content that consistently moves people to Like, comment, share or save is a better indicator of influence than just having the numbers.

Engagement ratios gauge how effective a person is at reaching and communicating with an audience. By tracking the percentage of audience members who engage with posts, how often they engage, and the types of content with which they engage, brands and marketers can see how influential someone really is on social media.

Take these two example accounts as a comparison:

If you notice, the first account actually reaches more people with every post. But the lower engagement ratio will drive up the cost a brand pays per engagement to use this influencer in a campaign. their cost per engagement is much higher than the smaller influencer. So, really, you’re getting less for your money, instead of more. And, if we’re being honest here, we all like anything that helps to keep these costs down.

“But, Account 1 reached more people, that has to be better for our campaign!” That’s true. But social reach is just one part of the puzzle, and how big or small that piece is depends entirely on the campaign you have planned.

The reach of your post tells you how many unique users have seen your content – not be to confused with impressions, which tells how many times your content has been seen… by ANY user. For example, one user might keep coming back for more, leaving you with a higher number of impressions than reach.

So, the bottom line? Even if awareness is your primary goal and your goal is to get your brand in front of as many people as possible, without engagement – the ability to influence their behavior – converting that audience will be difficult.

Now that we know how important engagement rates are, it’s time to get to the good stuff. Some actual implementable strategies that you can use to boost engagement on your own account – whether you’re a business, a blogger, or both.

11 Ways to Maximize Your Engagement on Instagram

All of these strategies are fairly easy to implement, and should all help you to see a boost in your engagement rates. While all of these strategies apply to any account on Instagram, some will help businesses more, and some will help influencers more. That doesn’t mean that should just scroll past them though, every strategy on here is useful, and will boost your performance. Pinky swear.

1. Develop Your Instagram Brand Look

We recently published a post (this one) on developing a cohesive Instagram brand look. Instagram is, first and foremost, a visual platform. So, for brands and bloggers, it’s important to create a visual Instagram identity that mirrors your actual brand identity.

One of our all-time favorite influencers is Amy Roiland (on Instagram @afashionnerd) – one of the coolest IG feeds you’ll ever see. Amy is a Los Angeles blogger and designer of fresh, feminine, fun custom eyewear.

A couple of things you will notice about Amy’s feed…

She’s often photographed or filmed sporting different pairs of glasses or sunglasses with her colorful outfits of the day. And whether she’s doing a close-up headshot or a full body shot, her pics are playful, pink, and just a bit offbeat.

By looking at Amy’s pictures, you can tell a lot about Amy. More, the consistent use of natural light (and lighting that makes it look like she’s in natural light) and shades of pink thread the pics in her Instagram profile together in a way that makes her feed interesting and aesthetically pleasing.

2. Use the Right Hashtags

This seems basic enough. Use the right hashtags. Posts with at least one hashtag generally see 12.6 percent more engagements than those without hashtags.

We’re not just talking about sticking a hashtag in front of a witty phrase. Here, we mean use the right hashtags for your audience and peers to find you, and for your content to get catalogued under the most relevant categories.

Choosing which hashtags to use… and how many hashtags to use on each of your posts has a bit of a learning curve at first. You’ll often find macro-influencers stop using them or only use a few of them while smaller accounts use the maximum amount of 30. When you’re just starting out, it can be tempting to cover all your bases and flood your posts with every hashtag imaginable. But, 10 to 12 targeted hashtags.

A popular hashtag like #sorrynotsorry (currently showing up in 12.5 million posts) is relatable, and helps your audience to get a better idea of what you’re about… but it’s not topical.

By that I mean #sorrynotsorry is a hashtag that Instagrammers use to punctuate posts about everything from binge watching Game of Thrones to landing the biggest client your firm has ever had. Using a hashtag like that to express a sentiment that many people can relate to is smart, but it’s only part of a good strategy AS LONG AS you couple it with topical hashtags that will help your target audience find you.

Also, avoid hashtags like #followme or #f4f (follow for follow). These will NEVER attract the kind of valuable accounts you’re looking for. Also, if you’re an influencer hoping to work with brands in the future, that kind of behavior will raise red flags all over the place. It’s just not good practice. FYI.

And unless you already have millions of followers, using the big hashtags out there like #selfie or #travel won’t actually bring you the benefits you imagine. Take #selfie for instance, there are 370 million posts using this hashtag as I’m writing this. Even if you’re putting out the best content the platform has ever seen, it’s highly unlikely that your posts will even be visible just a few seconds later.

You need to know how to target your hashtags. The screenshot below is a result listed under #foodstagram, a popular hashtag foodies, chefs and food bloggers use to help people find their content online.

Source: On Instagram @rainbowplantlife #foodstagram

If you notice, @rainbowplantlife added 30 hashtags to this post as a comment. Smart. Because many of the hashtags used in this post like #veganbombs, #veganfoodie, and  #foodblogger are targeted hashtags that will help people who are interested in things like vegan food, fat bombs, recipes, and food photographs find one another on Instagram.

Spend time searching for hashtags that have a smaller number of posts so that yours have a better chance of being seen. To this end, you’ll also want to try some more targeted hashtags – instead of #travelblog (which has 32.9 million posts), go for #femaletravelbloggers (with 206k posts).

If you’re a business user, you should also consider creating and using a branded hashtag. Brand-focused hashtags account for 7 out of every 10 on the platform. They’re not always super obvious either. It doesn’t have to simply be your brand name on its own, use a bit of imagination, and you might even see your branded hashtag spreading further than your own campaign, helping to spread your name even further.

3. Be on at the Right Times

While Instagram switched things up and did away with a chronological feed, the time and day that you post your content is still vitally important. Getting your content out so it’s around for peak activity times is your best chance for grabbing those engagements.

The optimal time to post will differ from social platform to social platform depending on when users are most active. Studies on the best times to post demonstrate there are overlaps in the best times to post across different platforms.  For Instagram in particular, global engagement peaks Thursday afternoons. Users are most engaged Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays.

Source: Sprout Social

It’s worth investigating the times when your account experiences the most engagement. If you have a business account on Instagram, then this is easy to do. In your own analytics tab, there will be simple graphs to show you the best days and times for your account. Depending on your audience’s age, jobs, and location these times could be very different from the average statistic.

And, this doesn’t just go for your in feed posts, the timing for your stories is also paramount.

4. Show Your Face and/ or Product

This one can be tricky for products. While trying to be creative and share something new and exciting is a great goal to strive towards on Instagram, many of us forget that sometimes the simplest content is the most relatable and interesting.

People like an element of transparency on social media, especially now that they’re much more clued up when it comes to filters, influencers, and “doing it for the ‘gram”.

One of the easiest ways to do this is just showing up in the posts. This simple act can help your engagement soar. Don’t believe us? Check out this stat. Sixty-eight percent of the top performing posts on Instagram prominently feature a product, and images that contain faces achieve around 38 percent more likes than those without.

But remember the 80/20 rule when it comes to self-promotion. If every single one of your photos is pushing your products directly, then people will quickly get bored. Instead, you should make sure that 80 percent of your content is working to entertain, educate or inspire your audience. The other 20 percent you can use to advertise the product or service you’re offering.

This is the same strategy social media marketer Gary Vaynerchuk even champions his book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook.

Showing faces doesn’t have to mean your face. It can mean:

• Models using/ interacting with your product

• Real customers and their reactions to your posts

• Video reviews of your products

5. Create Multimedia Content

While Instagram has always been a great place to share photos, the capacity for sharing videos has grown in recent years. In fact, a quarter of all ads on the platform are now single videos. Having some video content allows you to more easily show off what your product can do in ways a static image just can’t do.

Thanks to Instagram’s Stories feature, you’re not confined to the traditional in feed posts any more. So, let’s take a look at how you can use video to your advantage.

In-feed videos

One of the fastest growing types of Instagram ad is the In-feed videos. These 60 second maximum movies can help you to grab the attention of those perpetual scrollers and show off what you have to offer. Want to really grab them though? Studies have shown that attention drops off incredibly quickly on this platform, so even though you have those 60 seconds, you don’t need to use them all. Grab them in the first 30 seconds, and you have a much better chance of conversion.

Another thing to consider is how many people will actually listen to your videos. We listed this stat in our step-by-step holiday social media strategy (you can download it here): 60 percent of Stories video ads were viewed with the sound on in 2017, compared with 7 percent of Facebook video ads.

That said, including subtitles on your videos is paramount if you’re going include any kind of sound. Or, make it easier on yourself and keep it entirely a visual affair. That is what the platform is best known for after all.

Video Stories

If you’re not using Stories yet, as an individual or a business, you are sorely missing out on the best features of the platform. These ephemeral images only stick around for 24 hours and they can be a great way to showcase less polished content and behind the scenes images. You also have the chance to go live, which is perfect for big announcements, unveiling new products, or interviewing guests.

Stories can also include hashtags, mentions, and location tags like any ordinary post, so make sure you’re really utilising all of these features when you post. Of course, you don’t want your stories to be littered with hashtags, but one simple trick to get away with this is to make the text so small that you can hide all of your chosen hashtags behind a single emoji or GIF.

If you simply can’t let your stories disappear after their 24 hours is up, then you now have the option to create a “highlight” with them. These highlights live on your profile, and allow your followers to see stories months after you first posted them. By organizing these into groups, they can be a great additional tool for your account. They give easy access to categorised content right there on your profile. The categories you choose to use would depend on your account. For example, if you’re a travel blogger, you can use a highlight for each country you visit, one for travel tips, one for a Q&A, and one for airport selfies. Get creative and use what your followers will love.

6. DM People

The weird thing about social networks? They seem to be getting less about being social every single day. A lot of the social interaction we experience on Instagram is in the form of comments from people we don’t know saying in-depth message like “Nice shot” or a single red heart emoji. So many of us overlook the power of the direct messages, especially when trying to grow our accounts.

A common method used by “growth hackers” is to connect with other influencers in the space through direct messaging in ways that will benefit them. Want to try this for yourself? Here’s how you can do it too.

Find influencers in your niche

Whatever area your business or personal account is in, you won’t be the only one there. Find the other influencers in your niche and start reaching out to them. Ideally, you’ll want people with more followers and better engagement than yourself, but shoot too high and you might be lost in the noise.

If you have a smaller account, then it’s a good idea to seek out influencers of a similar size, but with a following that is just to one side of your own. Check out their follower list and compare it to your own, or find someone who has a slightly different style to your own. The point of this exercise is to find new people to follow and interact with your own content.

Reach out, but personalize it

Once you’ve found some influencers to reach out to – no maximum here, make as many connections as you can – it’s time to bite the bullet and reach out to them. As you’ll be sending out multiple messages, it’s a good idea to work with some kind of template in order to save time and avoid mistakes. But, be careful not to sound too much like an automaton.

Every message you send out should feel personal to every influencer you reach. Nobody wants to feel like the recipient of spam mail. Use their name, include a specific detail, and tailor each template as well as possible. For example, you could say; “Hey Bri! First, I just have to say how much I LOVE your adorable dogs! So jealous that you get to travel the world with them – it sounds like a dream. I’m reaching out to you because…”. Having an opening like this makes the recipient feel valued.

Get to the point

Now it’s time to get down to the details. The reason why you’re reaching out. You want them to check out your profile, tag you in their story, comment on your posts, regram your content – whichever would be most effective from this particular influencer. Of course, you’re more than happy to do the same for them. Quid pro quo, as it were.

Not everyone will be interested in this kind of deal of course, but when you partner up with influencers like this, you can see some amazing results. Make sure you hold up you end of the deal though, and don’t overpromise. Once you get a reputation like that, it’s almost impossible to shake it.

Every time you partner up with another influencer like this, you’ll be harnessing the power of their own individual followings. It’s like influencer marketing inception.

7. Grab Some UGC

While this tip is primarily for businesses and brands on Instagram, it can work with individual influencers as well, so no scrolling past!

We actually wrote a post on the five BIG benefits of UGC within an influencer marketing campaign before, but here’s a quick refresher. When someone who loves your product creates any kind of content about your product, they’ve created the perfect piece of UGC that you can repurpose for your own feed. Of course, you will need permission first, but once you have that, you’re good to go.

User-generated content is great because it saves you time and resources you would otherwise spend creating the content yourself, but more important than that, word-of-mouth endorsements like the types provided in influencer marketing and UGC typically convert at five times the rate of regular branded content. Ninety percent of consumers trust recommendations from friends, family and even influencers more than they trust branded content like websites and commercials.

creating the content yourself kind of content is great as it not only saves you time and uses a fresh eye, it’s also really great for your engagement rate. In fact, this kind of user-generated content has a 4.5 percent higher conversion rate than regular, brand-produced content. Consumers prefer seeing posts from a person over a brand, that much is clear. If they are convinced to interact with that UGC post, you’ll see that conversion rate rise to 9.6 percent.

8. Edit

While strategic posting, analytics, and hashtag choices are important, the actual content you put out there has to be an important factor as well. Making sure that your images and videos look clear, bright, and high quality will always be a key factor in attracting attention on Instagram.

And, you don’t have to be a pro to make your images look great anymore. Even the in-built editing tools on Instagram can turn most every day snaps into something more intriguing. While the pre-built filters on the platform might not be the best solution.

Source: Canva.com

Clarendon has proven to be the most popular by a long shot. Clarendon is a filter that instantly brightens your image and intensifies both the highlights and the shadows. It’s also the first choice after Default. So, artistic or lazy, people seem to like it.

Whatever style works for your brand, keep it consistent. The best business accounts out there are almost instantly recognizable when they post something new, as they’ve established a consistent brand image. The same advice holds true for your account. Choose a simple color palette, create your own preset, or simply use the same filter every time. Soon, your brand image will start to form, and people will know it’s you, making them more likely to stop scrolling and start a conversation.

9. Know Your Audience

More than a third of all US adults are now on Instagram, so there’s a good chance your audience will be there. But understanding who your user base is will help you tailor your campaign strategies.

Seventy-one percent of businesses use Instagram, so you’re not the only one trying to get a slice of the social pie. Thanks to the array of features available to business accounts, this number has been growing year over year, and small businesses make up most of this number.

Eighty percent of Instagram users are located outside of the US. This is incredibly important to bear in mind if you’re not offering a product that can be shipped internationally, or even if you’re only targeting a US market. Offering some form of international option, or using influencers from outside the US can be a great way to tackle this.

Fifty-nine percent of 18-29 year olds use Instagram – when I first saw this statistic, I’ll admit I was a little surprised. Like many others, I assumed that all of this age group were on the social media site, turns out, I was wrong. Still, this age group does make up the largest percentage of users on Instagram, so you’ll want to make sure that your content appeals to this demographic. We’re talking Millennials and Gen Z.

10. Use ALL of Instagram’s Features

Instagram is more than just a platform to post selfies and cute pictures of dogs. There are a wealth of features on the site that allow users to create engaging content, many of which go unused by the average user. And, while nobody is totally sure what their algorithm gets up to behind our screens, it is widely believed that the more of the platforms features you use, the more your content gets seen by your followers.

Take location tagging for instance, posts that use this feature receive 79 percent more engagement than those that don’t. Such a simple step to add into each image, with such impressive results. Aside from location tagging, you can use hashtags, tag people in your post, share to other platforms, use stories, or go live from your account. All of these features help to make your account more interesting, and attract more engagement to your account.

11. Skip the So-Called Growth Hacks

There are so many tactics floating around out there that claim to help you grow your account by thousands of followers in a matter of days. And, while they may well deliver on that promise, it’s doubtful that those followers will be the kind you really want. And, they most likely won’t want to engage with your content.

Also, steer clear of so called “engagement pods” where a group of influencers team up and comment on each other’s posts. While you will see your engagement rate rise with all these new commenters, they’re not REALLY interested in your content. They won’t convert in sales, they won’t recommend you to anyone else, and if you’re an influencer hoping to work with brands, they can spot this kind of behaviour a mile away.

And please, promise us, right here and now, that you will never – I repeat NEVER – buy likes from anywhere. No matter how the site tries to sell them to you, they are fake likes, they look fake, and they won’t provide any real value to your brand. Avoid them like the plague.

So, there you have it. Our 10 powerful strategies to help boost your Instagram engagement. Let us know if you apply any (or all) of these, and how they work for you on your account!