With tens of millions of photos being shared daily on Instagram, the photo- and video-sharing platform offers you a great opportunity to reach a vast audience of your current and prospective customers. However, to capture their attention and convert that attention into sales, you need to post the right content. So, what do you post?

It is essential that you think carefully about the type of content you’re going to be posting on your feed before you decide on a visual style. One way to go – the one most common – is making your products or services the focal point of your content. Alternatively, you can choose to focus on your culture and community.

As an online business owner or brand marketer, your marketing strategy on Instagram should be to consistently post great-quality content for the purpose of building a strong brand identity as well as developing a deep connection with members of your online community. A lot of value can be drawn from one-on-one connections and interactions.

In light of the above, you can come up with a catchy hashtag that makes it possible for members of your community to share stories about ideas that they are personally and professionally passionate about. Instagram serves as a very effective platform for short-form content. There is, however, some room for long-form content that is highly relevant.

You might be surprised how well your audience responds to such a call and how deeply they might connect with the passionate content of others.

Seven aspects of content that affect your Instagram marketing results

Great content is the foundation of successful Instagram marketing. Therefore, you need to have a solid content plan to help you in developing an aesthetic feel and overall style for your Instagram posts as well as the appropriate frequency for posting on Instagram. In other words, you need to create your own unique style guide for your brand’s Instagram account.

Style guide

This is among the most critical elements of your social media strategy. It is important because it ensures that you are consistent across various marketing channels as well as through all the content that you generate and share.

Your brand’s style will include all the important information regarding the content you generate and the way you share it. It guides the design of content, its layout and even the hashtags with which it will be posted. Some of the items you should take into account when creating content for Instagram include color palette, composition, filters, fonts, hashtags and captions.

Composition

Not to be confused with the subject, the arrangement or positioning of various visual elements in a work of art is what is referred to as composition. Admittedly, as an online business owner or brand marketer, you’re probably not a professional photographer. Nonetheless, it is important that you learn the basic rules of composition:

• Primary focus of the photograph taking into account the rule of thirds

• Appropriate background

• Additional space at the top or bottom for text

Having a clear visual composition and well-defined style in which your posts feature an appropriate background (e.g. solid color or texture) allows the primary object in the photograph to stand out.

Color palette

To ensure focus and consistency in your feed, you need to choose a color palette. That is not to say that these are the only colors you’re going to use. Rather, they are meant to give your content a nice feeling of familiarity and consistency, which attracts real Instagram likes. You want to maintain a color palette that is in line with your overall branding strategy.

Fonts

If you choose to use text overlays and post quotes on your Instagram feed, it’s best to stick to a consistent font or set of fonts. A strategy that has worked for many brands is going with the same fonts that feature on your other marketing materials and on your website. This way, your followers are able to easily recognize content from your brand within their feed.

Filters

With the right filter, a photo taken by an average amateur photographer can seem as though it was taken by an expert photographer. Additionally, if you lack resources such as premium editing software and high-end photography equipment, Instagram makes it possible for you to enhance normal photos with a few tweaks.

Selecting the appropriate filter can significantly change the way a video or photo looks and feels, so it’s important to select the few filters that work best with your brand and stick to those ones. Using widely varying filters for every post has the effect of making your brand’s feed feel somewhat disjointed.

Captions

Instagram allows for up to 2,200 characters in the caption section and displays a maximum of three lines, with the rest being truncated and replaced with expandable ellipses. Captions give you the opportunity to further enhance your content, with numerous options for how you can do this.

You can opt to use the caption as a platform for microblogging and sharing your brand’s story. Alternatively, you can use captions to append brief, catchy headlines to a post or ask questions to spark engagement. The options are numerous. The most important thing is to make sure that the caption and the post are related and attention-grabbing.

Hashtags

Hashtags are a standardized way of categorizing content and they are used on the top social media platforms, including Instagram. Using hashtags,Instagramusersare able to find content to interact with and other users to follow.

Research has shown that posts that have more than 11 hashtags receive the most engagement on the platform. A trick used by pro users is adding hashtags as comments rather than in the captions.

When deciding which hashtags to use with your posts on Instagram, start by conducting research and determining which ones your target audience tends to interact with the most. There are a number of tools, such as Spout Social and Iconosquare, which can assist you in choosing the best hashtags and tracking their performance.