Win Big with Instagram Marketing as a Multi-Location Business

With 2 billion monthly active Instagram users, led by India, the US, and Brazil, Instagram persists as a more influential venue for social media marketing than LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and TikTok.

Like many of Meta’s platforms, though, Instagram can feel like it never stands still, incorporating features that make other platforms click: Snapchat led to Stories that disappear after 24 hours, while TikTok led to Reels, the ultimate successors to IGTV, Instagram’s earlier answer to YouTube. It’s even got shopping tools front and center now, keeping users on the platform to complete their journey.

This constant evolution complicates Instagram marketing strategy. How do you keep your brand relevant, much less compare growth year over year? Let’s dive into some specifics of effective social media marketing for Instagram.

Instagram as a Marketing Channel

Although Instagram began life as a fun photo-sharing platform mostly for private usage mostly in 2010, the platform’s sustained growth led marketers to treat it as an established staple for connecting with their target audiences. In fact, 80% of global marketers use Instagram advertising for their daily business, treating it as a top priority especially when targeting audiences between the ages of 18 and 34.

As a highly visual social media platform, it is ideal for brands to engage audiences through photos, videos, and stories. Through organic content schedules and paid social ads, they can increase brand awareness, and boost sales—all from within the same platform.

Active business users say their top reasons include increasing brand awareness and reaching new audiences—both metrics where establishing ROI can prove difficult. With that said, the platform offers easy access to solid metrics for increases in sales, fostered relationships with customers, as well as improvements in customer service and retention.

But the good news is: Instagram recognizes the importance of advertising and marketing to its own revenue, and built many tools to help marketers drill into their data. Their native creator tools can help your content gain influence across communities, and Instagram Shopping takes potential customers from discovery to purchase without clicking out.

Instagram Marketing Tips: Gramming at Your Full Potential

Instagram’s own data says 70% of shoppers look to the platform for their next purchase, so your Instagram marketing strategy should build on strong priors. Multiple factors compete in determining which posts users see; so it pays to stay on top of Instagram marketing nuances above and beyond universal social media marketing tips.

Create a Business Account

To maximize the potential of your Instagram marketing strategy, the first step is to create a Business Account on the platform. Generic free accounts, like your personal one, miss out on the loads of features and tools offered by a Instagram Business Account. But these make all the difference in realizing the full potential of your multi-location business’s presence.

Creating an official business account boosts your credibility, while additional buttons on your profile page allow users to contact you in various ways, order directly from you, or head straight for your shop. All this helps to build trust with users, many rightly concerned about phishing and fake business links on social platforms.

Not to mention, an official Instagram business account grants you access to powerful analytics. These enable you to obtain more information on how your profile and content performs by tracking reach and engagement at the level of individual posts. You can also make use of detailed breakdowns, including audience demographics.

Optimize your Instagram Profile

Ensure your Instagram business profile truly represents your business with all of the options available to you.

An Instagram business account lets you populate multiple profile fields, including:

• Profile photo: Use your company’s logo to make it easy for people to identify you. Profile name: Use your company’s name (instead of overly clever, fun names).

• Profile bio: Consider either a straightforward description of what your business does, or something more creative to match a more conversational tone of voice.

• Clickable URL: Add up to five links to your profile, and use a link in bio tool if you want to add more.

• Category: Select a category that best describes you—whether industry, products or services: accuracy will aid in discoverability.

• Context info: Add your email address, phone number, and physical address as well as action buttons, allowing users to order or buy directly through your profile.

• Link to Facebook: Link to your official Facebook business page to capitalize on cross-posting opportunities.

• Story Highlights: Save your best stories as highlights to draw attention to the most important or timely updates—whether a behind-the-scenes look at your store or staff, a collection of the best things your customers say about you, be creative.

Go Hyperlocal

Alongside creating local content and partnering with local influencers, multi-location marketers can use Instagram’s geotagging attributes to enhance visibility for potential local customers. You can create your own Instagram geolocation by connecting your Facebook business page to your Instagram business account, editing the physical address on Facebook, then awaiting approval by Meta.

Geotagging enables location marking on your images, simplifying discovery for local users.

But the platform’s developers are even experimenting with a location-based “friend map”, allowing a user’s connections to see where they are and where they’ve been, with all their posts and Stories tagged with a location added to the map’s display.

Getting this hyperlocal with your social media marketing can pay dividends: consider the potential in encouraging customers to post from your business, adding a location tag, raving about their experience, and encouraging their friends to meet them there!

Utilize Instagram Ads

You can precisely target your Instagram advertising based on location-based attributes with a business account. Instagram advertising reaches 96.6% of active users each month, with 62% of users more interested in a brand after seeing one of their Instagram stories.

Handily, you can use the Meta Ads Manager to create and run ads for Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. First, though, you need to connect the ad manager to your Instagram business account in order to unlock the option to run ads in a variety of formats, and create highly targeted campaigns. Make sure to use the A/B testing tool to fine-tune different aspects of your social ads and learn what makes your audience click.

Experiment with Different Types of Content

Brands investing in more unique content creation tend to stand out, especially with shares in DMs holding as the most powerful factor boosting reach. At the same time, building your social media marketing strategy around gaming the algorithm invites complications down the road. Best vary your content to see which formats your followers respond to most.

Video content does come with a premium though. A HubSpot survey found 62% of marketers on Instagram post video content as their most-used content format. They also found content showcasing a brand’s product or services, such as demos and teasers, brought in the highest ROI of any content type.

Consider going live to instantly connect with your followers; going live alerts all of your followers through a notification, and your account will appear first along their Stories bar until you end the stream. Think about going live from store openings, local festivals, or special events, all the way down to the product level, such as premiering new menu items.

Be Engaging & Stay Alert

Whatever your chosen content format, be sure to write engaging captions, keeping it short and sweet while staying consistent on the preferred tone for your Instagram target audience.

Regular posting helps your content appear in user feeds, and that in turn helps get you in front of customers. The average Instagram business account posts once per day, according to Hootsuite—but that doesn’t have to reflect a full creative video campaign every day.

A HubSpot survey found that 53% of brand account engagement arrives via likes and comments, with only 27% from shares and 16% from tags. But also, listen carefully to what your target audience discusses themselves. Monitor all brand and campaign hashtags, photos with location tags, comments, and so on, to better understand your audience. Along the way, take the time to like and comment on users’ own posts, too, showing them you listen to their feedback.

Don’t forget UGC

Remember the power of user-generated content (UGC), too. UGC held sway in digital marketing for some time, and after laying dormant, reemerged as a popular or even must-have option for social media marketing today. In fact, Instagram posts featuring UGC net 70% more engagement.

In other words, get into the regramming habit. Make sure to follow established Instagram etiquette when you do: always ask for permission before you share, give credit to the original poster, and don’t try to change the original post’s meaning.

And by the way, Instagram also allows “remixing” for regrams, taking another cue from TikTok, so your brand can blend UGC into fresh branded content while thanking users for their feedback.

Tracking Your Social Media Marketing and Management

Social media management involves time-consuming and resource-intensive work, but Instagram’s best ROI comes from careful engagement with individual users through likes and comments. Multiply that across several different social media platforms, and your multi-location marketing team could easily spend all day, every day on social media management alone.

To create a winning social media strategy for your multi-location business, it pays to engage a platform that streamlines your social media marketing, keeping you up to date on what’s working through access to robust insights, while optimizing content delivery.

Uberall’s AI-powered multi-location marketing platform can help your brand show up and stand out when nearby customers search. Manage all your stores’ social presence—as well as their listings and reviews—from a single location, while gaining insights and analytics to inform your next steps at every level. Get in touch and request a demo to discover more about how Uberall supports seamless customer experiences.