Instagram for Brands: How To Build A Creative, Engaging, High-Impact Strategy

Picture this: You’re taking a midday scroll through the Reels tab when you come across a video of a man in glasses sitting in front of a tastefully minimal office setup. It’s Head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, and he’s here to tell you about a new platform update.

As an Instagram user, you may be excited about upcoming feature announcements. However, as a social media manager, they can feel like a double-edged sword. According to a Q2 2023 Sprout Social pulse survey, Instagram is a top priority for social media pros, second only to TIkTok.

With each new update comes questions on how it might impact your strategy. Will what’s working today work tomorrow? And if not, what needs to change?

The truth is, your Instagram strategy won’t need to evolve alongside every release if it’s grounded in data-driven decisions that reflect your unique business goals. To help you get there, we’ve put together this comprehensive guide that will walk you through:

• Setting goals
• Identifying your audience
• Creating a content plan
• Engaging with your Instagram community
• Analyzing and applying data to refine your strategy

Let’s dive in.

Your Instagram goals should be two things: well-defined and aligned to overarching business objectives.

Combining these two criteria limits distractions, so you can stay on track to achieving desired outcomes. Think about it: It’s way easier to turn down a well-meant but ill-informed post suggestion from management if you have a documented explanation on why the idea doesn’t support your overall strategy.

Defining your goals starts with understanding Instagram’s role in your broader social media strategy. If you haven’t thought about the purpose of your Instagram presence in a while, here are some questions to help you think about the bigger picture:

• Who is your Instagram audience? Do you have any demographic data to support your claim?
• Is Instagram a vehicle for generating brand awareness or engagement? Why?
• Which posts consistently over- and under-perform on Instagram? What similarities do you notice within both groups?

Use your answers to these questions, along with annual or quarterly business objectives, to create two or three concrete goals for the platform.

For example, if Instagram works best as an engagement channel for your brand and your top business priority is customer retention, you can:

• Focus on engagement KPIs like “likes,” shares, comments and mentions.
• Power your approach through a mix of user-generated content, customer spotlights and posts that incentivize interaction.
• Use social listening to uncover brand health insights that push your strategy forward.

Pro tip: Use this social media metrics map to identify the strategies and tactics that align to specific stages in your buyer’s journey.

Business objectives inform your Instagram goals. Audience preferences should inform the tactics you use to achieve those goals.

The interests, hobbies and motivations of a 20-year-old woman in San Francisco are going to differ from that of a 60-year-old man in Dublin. The same goes for the brands and content they would engage with on Instagram.

Fortunately, there’s an abundance of Instagram demographic data available to inform your audience profile. Pair that with social analytics and listening tools like Sprout Social, and you’ve taken the guesswork out of social.

In general, the Instagram audience looks something like this:

• Number of monthly active users: 2 billion (self-reported), other reports cite 1.35 billion
• Largest age group: 18-24 (30.8%)
• Gender: 48.2% female, 51.8% male (no data on other genders)
• Time spent on the platform per day: 30.1 minutes

These numbers are averages, so your audience might be different. Use the Instagram Insights tool for a more accurate look at who they are and what they’re up to. Just remember, demographic data is only a small part of a bigger picture.

To get a better perspective on what works (and what doesn’t), use a tool like Sprout Social. Our platform offers a suite of competitive analysis reports and listening tools so you can discover new areas of opportunity in real time.

Use this competitive intel to enhance your customer knowledge, validate long-held beliefs or challenge past assumptions—any insight you can glean gets you closer to truly understanding your target audience.

Content is the foundation of your Instagram presence. The highly visual nature of Instagram gives you a unique opportunity to creatively showcase your brand’s culture, products and services, events, and people.

As you brainstorm the direction of your content, ask yourself:

• How do we want our business profile to look, sound and feel?
• What stories do we want to tell through Instagram?
• What kinds of content formats will best support our goals?
• What can we share that’s visually interesting?
• What will Instagram allow us to communicate that other platforms don’t?

As you answer that last question, keep in mind everything Instagram has to offer. As the platform expands, so do available content opportunities. Between regular posts, Reels, Live, Stories and shoppable content, there are a lot of ways to power your strategy.

When developing your content strategy, it may be tempting to check every single content box. However, that can make it difficult to pinpoint what exactly your audience is responding to. Avoid this confusion by starting with a focused content mix.

Once you figure out which types of content generate engagement, you can scale up production to experiment with new formats. The best brands on Instagram have a healthy mix of static images, video, graphic design and Stories in their content strategy.

Static image posts

You know the phrase, “everything old is new again”? It may explain why static image posts are having their main character moment.

According to a Q2 2023 Sprout pulse survey, 60% of marketers rely on images more or significantly more in 2023 compared to 2022. The format is how Instagram got its start, and now it’s breathing new life into the platform.

The static images that drive growth today look nothing like what drove growth in 2013. A new generation of consumers places value in brand authenticity over perfectly curated, professional photography. Think memes, screenshots and lo-fi smartphone shots.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cr_4xkmrBxV/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Probiotic soda brand, Poppi, even repurposes some glowing reviews left on other platforms to create Instagram content.

This lends their online presence valuable social proof—not just from the content itself, but also from the type of engagement it drives. If you look at the comments, you’ll see tons of happy customers bragging about selling out their favorite flavor, too.

Video

Reels, Instagram’s take on short-form video, offer brands a casual and highly discoverable way to meet their target audience.

The videos are short, ranging from 15 to 90 seconds, and ultra-digestible. You can include background audio and also add your own audio, such as a voiceover, music or other popular sound effects.

If you’re still learning how to weave short-form video production into the rest of your responsibilities, we recommend following Webflow’s approach.

Their Reels strategy uses a mix of traditional bite-sized videos alongside repurposed content from longer customer courses. Together, the two formats help the brand maintain a consistent presence in the Reels tab, allowing them to expand their reach on the platform.

Many people consider Reels to be Instagram’s version of TikTok. Both brands and creators often reuse video content on both platforms, but this should be done carefully. Although Instagram and TikTok have similarities, their users’ preferences are nuanced. Each audience needs its own unique content.

Carousel posts

Another format ripe for storytelling is the carousel post. Swiping to the next slide in a carousel is essentially like turning the page in a magazine or a book.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CtwuqiVuetZ/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Text-based carousels, like the example above, encourage readers to swipe to get the full scoop. It’s a great format to test if you want to repurpose long-form written content for social.

Brands that are working with a surplus of visual content can use the carousel feature to jump on the photo dump trend. These vibe-focused posts don’t call for a perfectly consistent motif, giving your Instagram an effortlessly cool in-feed presence.

Stories

Although Stories are limited to 15 seconds at a time, the in-app experience is almost like a combination of all the formats we already covered. You can post images, videos or simply text. Then, jazz them up with stickers, polls, music, quizzes, filters—the list goes on.

Stories typically disappear within 24 hours, but you have the option to immortalize them in the form of Highlights on your business profile.

If you’re already thinking about the Instagram algorithm and how to make it work to your advantage, there’s one tried-and-true answer—create consistently high quality content designed for your audience. Your publishing plan, however, can make a big difference as well.

If you need help with brainstorming what to publish, check out our guide on Instagram post ideas.

Once you decide on the types of content you’ll publish on Instagram, it’s time to plan out your content calendar.

Where and how you develop a publishing schedule can make or break your strategy. Your content is informed by countless moving parts, including upcoming product launches, cross-functional requests, campaign assets and more. In a perfect world, all your content would be ready before the start of the month, so you can set it and forget.

Unfortunately, the world is not perfect.

That’s why it’s so important to use a flexible tool that allows you to navigate this ambiguity with no additional effort. Sprout’s Publishing Calendar, for example, is designed to help you visualize and manage social media campaigns whether assets are created or still in flux so you can always see the big picture at a glance.

Building up a pipeline of content

Anyone who’s ever spent way too much time moving the same block of text around in Canva knows that visually appealing content doesn’t just happen.

Creating graphics, maintaining variety and posting consistently is incredibly time-consuming. Even the most well-staffed teams shouldn’t be expected to create everything from the ground up by themselves.

That’s why it’s so important to collaborate with your colleagues and fans to build out your content pipeline. That might look like:

• Taking user-generated content and giving it a spot on the grid or in your Instagram Stories.
• Partnering with content creators who share your brand values and align with your target audience.
• Repurposing aspects of visual assets made for other departments, like sales, product or recruitment.
• Identifying memes that are trending with your fans and making them work for your brand.

Finding the right publishing cadence

The best social media managers know that scheduling is both an art and a science. For the best possible results, you need data-driven insights alongside a deep understanding of timely trends.

At Sprout, we’re always working on tools and research to help you master both sides of the equation. We even partner with our Data Science team to identify publishing recommendations based on usage data from over 200,000 social profiles. Our most recent study found that the best times to post on Instagram are:

• Mondays from 10 a.m. to noon
• Tuesdays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
• Wednesdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
• Fridays from 9 to 11 a.m.

If you’re already using Sprout, simply turn to the ViralPost® recommendations located directly within the Compose window. The patented tool will give you tailored publishing times based on your audiences’ unique engagement patterns and content preferences.

Use it to make sure in-feed posts, along with Reels and Stories, are always primed for maximum audience interaction.

On Instagram, what happens in the comments section is just as important as what happens on the grid.

Maintaining an engaged Instagram community can create a positive feedback loop that powers your content strategy. The more you engage with your fans, the more likely they are to share user-generated content. You can use that user-generated content to build out your publishing calendar, giving your fans more to engage with.

Instagram is filled with features designed to boost engagement. For example, you could use interactive Instagram Stories tools like pools and quizzes to solicit audience opinions and feedback. If you work with partners or creators, you can use Instagram Collab posts to cross-pollinate audiences in the same comment section. You could even jump into comment sections of other popular accounts to give your brand an extra dose of personality.

Just make sure your brand’s Instagram profile is optimized to give audiences an experience worth staying for. Beyond curating an aesthetically pleasing feed, that means making it easy for users to find what they’re looking for.

Use Instagram shopping tools to provide fans with a frictionless path to purchase items featured in your content. If something isn’t available in your Instagram Shop, use a link in bio tool like SproutLink or Linktree to guide users in the right direction.

Instagram DMs are a powerful customer service channel, but native management is tough to scale. It’s impossible to triage and assign issues within the app itself. What you’re left with is confusing processes and unsatisfied customers.

Social customer care tools allow businesses to weave customer service processes into social media management practices, creating clarity for both teams.

Take MeUndies, for example. When they managed Instagram DMs natively, agents had to manually log responses and calculate response times in a Google Sheet. This cumbersome process impacted their ability to meet their goal of responding to all customer inquiries within one hour.

Switching to Sprout allowed the MeUndies social media support team to manage Instagram DMs alongside customer inquiries on other social networks in a single, unified stream. Now, their average time to first reply is just 19 minutes, blowing previous expectations out of the water.

If you want to elevate your Instagram game, you need to keep a close eye on content performance and audience growth. By doing so, you can fine-tune your approach and stay on target for future campaigns.

That doesn’t mean you need to sacrifice hours of your workday to spreadsheets and calculators. Sprout’s Instagram analytics reports can keep you up-to-date and in-the-know on your IG performance, tracking metrics across profile, post, paid, Tag, competitor and team data. So, no matter what your goals are, you’ll find the metrics and KPIs you need to measure success.

Sprout’s Post Performance Report in particular can help you discern if your content is on point, falling flat or just needs a boost. You can also select your other networks from within the report, so you can compare content performance and apply insights across your social networks.

These tools are crucial when trying to understand the effectiveness of a post, campaign or creative decision. For example, say your business is evolving its visual content strategy. Instagram analytics can provide vital insights on how your audience is responding to the changes.

As you share content that applies the updated visual style, you can use post-level performance metrics to better understand what’s landing with your audience. As you identify trends in high-performing content, you can create a valuable feedback loop between your audience and creative team.

This is just one of many ways you can use your Instagram performance metrics. Customer-centric brands use social data to inform everything from sales strategy to product development and beyond.

Your social media dashboards hold the keys to transforming every part of your organization—whether they’re informing changes to customer care processes, hiring strategies or product lines. If Instagram insights are siloed within your marketing team, you’re missing out.

Instagram changes constantly. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to maintain a proactive presence on the platform. A strategy grounded in business goals and audience insights can help you take every new release in stride, so you can spend more time harnessing your creativity for strategic initiatives.

If you want to free up even more hours, switch to an intuitive social media management platform that empowers teams to drive results quickly. Try Sprout Social free for 30 days, and see how our comprehensive suite of tools can help you make better, faster business decisions with social.