Unlike websites and blog posts, you can’t really measure your Instagram marketing efforts with the number of views. The reason we place so much emphasis on growing your followers is because they determine the success of your Instagram marketing.
The surefire way to grow your Instagram profile is to measure your Instagram reach, engagement and community actions. Even if you don’t like looking at data, nothing helps you make a sounder decision than looking at the analysis of cold, hard, facts.
That’s right, it can’t be considered as a milestone if it can’t be measured.
So how can we do this for your Instagram account?
#1 No of Followers and Engagement
Having a huge database of followers is not enough. The success of your Instagram marketing should be measured by the engagement rate which you have with those followers.
Say, if you have 10K followers but only 100 to 200 likes and only 10 to 20 comments. Are there any possible action you could take to boost your engagement with your large base of followers? What could be the possible action to boost the engagement by at least 100%?
Unless you are already an expert in Instagram marketing of your brand, the initial phase of growing your profile involves a lot of experimentation. Jazz up your posts every once in a while and monitor which kind of posts create more engagements with your followers.
Do also remember to comment and like the posts of targeted influencers and followers so that they would reciprocate by engaging with your account.
#2 Shares, Reposts and Hashtags
‘Reposting’ is another KPI which you should monitor. The more people repost your content on Instagram or share it on other social networks (like Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr), the greater the “virality” of your content and hence its effectiveness in triggering consumer action.
If your content is not being circulated or reaching out to as many people as you hope, you may need to find ways to spice it up. While it may be tempting to stick to content that you are familiar with and will certainly adhere to the organisation’s brand guidelines (if any), don’t be afraid to be bold and creative with it.
Apart from third-party apps such as Repost that automatically mentions you when a user shares or repost a content, hashtags come in second in helping you track your followers’ engagement.
You will be amazed at how much feedback and understanding you can gain just from tracking these two elements.
#3 Conversion Rate into Sales
The main goal of marketing is to drive sales conversion rate. Turning follower engagement into sales should be the ultimate result you want to achieve in your Instagram marketing campaigns.
After all that effort that is being put into crafting, planning and executing your campaigns, the conversion rate of engagement into sales from your pool of followers speaks volume and provide you with insights for the next campaign.
As Instagram is still relatively new in the world of marketing compared to other platforms, there aren’t as many tools to facilitate in the measurement of Instagram marketing. However, you can use marketing automation tools to track and measure the effort.
Before settling on the right tool(s), you can always fall back on the trustworthiness of getting feedback from your customers when you close a sale. Ask questions like where they get the contact details, discount codes, product information, etc from?
While it may take a longer time to establish a stable system to measure your Instagram marketing efforts, it is always worth it to go the extra mile. By doing so, you can define your key measurements/performance indexes apart from those mentioned above to really gain a sound understanding of your target audience.
Are there other ways we can use to measure the impact of our Instagram marketing?
To measure your Instagram marketing efforts, consider signing up for an account on StarNgage. As Asia’s first Instagram marketing platform, we help to make Instagram marketing easy and convenient for brands, connecting you to influencers, and helping you to measure the outcomes of your Instagram marketing efforts.
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