Refresh your ig approach

With a new financial year upon us, you might be thinking about a fresh perspective and how you can give your marketing game a little bit of a refresh, or a kick up the butt.
 
This is the first in our series of new financial year marketing tips for you to up your marketing game for the next six months.
 
Today we are going to focus on building your business on Instagram, so here are our top tips. With a platform of one billion monthly active Instagram users in 2019, it's a platform that should be part of your digital marketing strategy.

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Engagement
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Content still matters in 2019 and having great content is always king, but the queen to content is always going to be engagement. Building your community doesn’t just come from putting out great content and hoping for the best, you need to engage with other people who are in your target audience, who buy your products and who love your brand.
 
Why? Because no one wants a one-sided relationship, if people engage with you, engage back with them just like you would in person. Put community engagement at the top of your list for the rest of 2019.
 
So where do you start? You can start with setting aside 15mins a day to respond to comments with thoughtful responses, go and engage with other people’s pages, listen to their podcast and give feedback and give them some love. If you want love, the number one way to get love back is to give.
 
Make sure your hashtags are still relevant

With the IG algorithm in play you do need to ensure that your hashtags are relevant to your industry and try and be as niche as possible, with the platform having over a billion users, this is even more reason to get focused about what hashtags work and what don’t. You also need to change them up regularly, so they don't get flagged as spam.
 
You can also follow hashtags that are relevant to your area, your industry or your product. Find 4 – 5 hashtags you use regularly and follow these, so you see fresh content in your feed relevant to your business.

Remember who you are

With so much noise on social, it’s easy to get carried away looking at what other people or your competitors are doing, but you do need to remember who you are and ensure that your tone of voice and content is on brand.
 
Have you lost your way a little bit trying to be like someone you admire or follow? That's ok, but now is the time to re-focus, have a look at your business mission, and your values and decide if you are portraying precisely who you are.
 
If not, put steps in place to try and get your content and brand tone of voice back to where it needs to be. And if you are completely lost, work with a marketing consultant, coach or friend to get you back there.
 
Have fun

With so much emphasis on businesses trying to sell but not sound too 'salesy' in the process you might be over analysing every last detail, this is great but don't forget to have fun with your content and be a little light-hearted. After all, social media is about the connection with other people, so have a little fun with it.