How to grow and promote your local business on Instagram

Instagram is not limited to influencers, creators or big brands. If you’re a local business, Instagram is for you too! Yes, you! Why? Because it helps you showcase your work, your products, your expertise and more. You can use it as social proof and it can help your business big time!

Here are some actionable tips to help you grow and promote your local business on Instagram

1. Let your customers know about your Instagram account

This might sound like a small thing but just letting your customers know that you have an instagram account will help them tag you to their posts about your products for the starters. They’ll follow you and you know what, it’ll be easier for them to talk about your with their friends because they can now simply share your profile, your posts and your stories with them.

2. Give them an incentive

Give them something a little more than just a reshare when they post about you in their Instagram posts or stories. If you think any incentive is small, think again. A tiny incentive makes it worth for the customers to post about you on their Instagram. Give away, be seen!

Every customer is a potential influencer.

3. Follow them too!

Don’t just expect them to follow. Follow them, check their posts out, give some love and understand them better. Instagram will help you build deeper connections. These connections will help you retain your customer base.

4. Use user-generated content

Not just that, create a proper system for user-generated content. Create a branded hashtags that your customers can use. Like the posts that use these hashtags and use repost app to repost them on your account. This will not only help you keep your content calendar full, it will also showcase how your customers use your products, how happy they are and it’ll give them an incentive to tag you more often. This entire cycle is to help you reach a higher audience and potential customers.

70beans on Instagram

5. Find local influencers

You don’t need big names and you definitely don’t need to shell out a lot of $$. Find micro-influencers who would work with you for a fair price. Please note, don’t ask for a barter deal unless the micro-influencer asks for it. That will work in your favour, just trust me on this.

6. Have a content strategy in place

Having the right content strategy is the basic need when it comes to any sort of marketing.
Make sure you have a bank of images, some killer captions with a good mix of captions with CTA and some fun ones, list of branded and non-branded hashtags, a posting schedule and a dedicated timeslot to like, comment, reply and engage with your followers. Also, do not forget to geotag your posts. All of this is going to take time so make sure you take out enough time to work on this.

@thebloomerie.mumbai on Instagram

7. Work on your Stories

@NativeTongue on Instagram

Have a strategy in place for the stories. Make sure your stories are fun, informational and align with your brand. You can take the full advantage of all the different Stories features that Instagram provides. Use different stickers, GIFs and filters to make your stories attractive.

8. Measure and adjust

Measuring your results will help you understand what’s working for you and what needs your attention. You’ll be able to understand what hashtags are working for you, what you should do more of, what kind of stories you need to create and almost everything else you need to know about your account. You can use insights by Instagram or you can use a tool like Crowdfire that gives you detailed advanced analytics (downloadable in PPT and PDF format).

If you can organise events, you can use Instagram to promote your events as well!

How to promote your next event on Instagram

Final thoughts

As a local business, you need all the possible help to promote and grow your business and Instagram offers you simple ways to do just that! If you’ve more tips, drop them in the comment section, I’m all ears 🙂

Schedule your posts to stay consistent, engage with your audience, see what your competitors are doing and track your analytics using Crowdfire. You can try it for free