Instagram is still one of the hottest and most engaging social media platforms. That’s not going to change in 2025, and brands will still be competing for user attention and screen time.

As every Instagram marketing strategy needs updating every now and then, the beginning of the year is usually the best time to do so.

So how do you create a powerful Instagram strategy and beat your competitors?

Let’s find out!

Why Use Instagram for Marketing?

Instagram is a powerhouse in the realm of social media, boasting over 2 billion monthly active users. This vast user base makes it an ideal platform for businesses aiming to reach their target audience effectively. Instagram’s visual-centric approach allows brands to showcase their products, services, and personality through high-quality visuals and engaging content. By leveraging Instagram’s diverse features, businesses can significantly increase brand awareness, drive traffic to their websites, generate leads, and ultimately boost sales.

Moreover, Instagram’s robust advertising capabilities enable businesses to target specific demographics, ensuring that their marketing efforts reach the right audience. Whether through organic posts or paid ads, Instagram offers a unique opportunity to connect with potential customers in a visually appealing and interactive way.

In essence, Instagram is not just a social media platform; it’s a dynamic tool for achieving your marketing objectives.

Set Up Your Instagram Business Account

To kickstart your Instagram marketing journey, setting up an Instagram business account is a crucial first step. This can be done by converting an existing personal account or creating a new one from scratch.

Here’s how you can set up your Instagram business account:

1. Open the Instagram app and tap the profile icon.
2. Navigate to “Settings” and select “Account.”
3. Tap “Switch to Business Profile” and follow the prompts to complete the setup process.
4. Fill in your business information, including your business name, email address, and phone number.
5. Connect your Facebook page to your Instagram business account for seamless integration.

Having a business account unlocks a plethora of features, such as access to Instagram Insights, which provides valuable analytics about your Instagram followers and how they interact with your content. Additionally, it allows you to run Instagram ads, promoting your posts to a broader Instagram audience and driving more engagement.

Understand Your Audience

Understanding your target audience is the cornerstone of any effective social media marketing strategy. To create content that resonates, you need to know who your audience is, what they care about, and how they behave online. Start by researching their demographics, interests, behaviors, and pain points. Utilize Instagram Insights and third-party Instagram analytics tools to track key metrics such as engagement, reach, impressions, follower growth, and website clicks.

By analyzing this data, you can identify trends and understand what types of content perform best. This insight allows you to refine your Instagram marketing strategy over time, ensuring that your posts are always relevant and engaging. Remember, the more you know about your audience, the better you can tailor your content to meet their needs and preferences.

Pay More Attention to Instagram Ads

Nowadays, Instagram ads are an immensely important part of Instagram marketing strategies for the majority of brands.

However, the process of optimizing them can be time-consuming.

Marketers aiming at reaching their Instagram target audience effectively and improving their Instagram presence need to have reliable tools that’ll support their efforts and help them achieve their goals.

Optimizing Instagram advertising strategies is troublesome also because Ads Manager is a complex, and constantly changing, ecosystem.

With help comes external tools, such as Sotrender and its Ads Optimization.

It’s an AI-driven solution recommending new, better, ad settings based on the current ad settings. It enables optimizing dimensions such as:

• Ad placements
• Detailed targeting
• Age
• Devices
• Platforms

Get new ad recommendations by using Sotrender

Thanks to that, marketers can achieve better campaign results (e.g. more reach or clicks, decreased CPC or CPM) without increasing the budget.

Monitor your Instagram business account status

There is one Instagram function that you should check out right after reading this article. It’s called Account status.

What is it for? You’ll be able to see whether or not you’ve violated Instagram’s rules or community guidelines (for example, by posting nude content), resulting in your content not being recommended to users, e.g., in the Explore feed.

It’s important to monitor your account status for a few reasons:

• You’ll know if you’ve posted something prohibited (which immediately tells you what you shouldn’t post in the future and should be removed from your strategy).
• You’ll see if your content is reaching new social media users (if you’ve violated Instagram’s rules, your organic reach may be impacted).
• You’ll learn what actions you can take to prevent similar situations from happening in the future, including stopping your Instagram account from being completely taken down.

Posting content that Instagram doesn’t approve of and ignoring such warnings may have a significant and negative impact on your overall profile performance.

How to check your account status

It’s easy. Go to your profile -> Settings -> Account -> and Account status.

Ideally, you should see a screen like the one below:

Checking your account status on Instagram

Even though it’s not the newest Instagram function, still not every brand owner knows about it. But you should definitely take advantage of it. 😉 You’ll be a step ahead of your competitors and you’ll know more about what kind of content should and shouldn’t be posted on Instagram.

Also, optimizing your Instagram profile is crucial to effectively communicate your brand’s identity and engage users. A well-structured profile with a compelling bio, professionally looking feed, and relevant keywords can enhance discoverability and user engagement.

Track competitors’ organic activities

Once you conduct a health check of your profile, next up when creating your Instagram marketing strategy is spying on your competitors a bit.

It’s not only about learning what they’re posting and how often, but also figuring out how your brand can stand out from others.

Here is a great example of what we mean.

Take a look at what Mentos Poland, Tic Tac Poland, and Maoam Poland – which are direct competitors – posted on their Instagram profiles in May 2022.

Instagram competitors analyzed in Sotrender

While these are three completely different brands, the average Instagram user, just by taking a look at these profiles, may think it’s all one brand…

Don’t make the same mistake. 😉

With Sotrender, a social media analytics tool, you can easily monitor your competitors’ top-performing content, user engagement on each profile (including the engagement rate), follower growth, and more.

Also, you can track and analyze a few competitors at a time or take a closer look at one specific brand.

After all, spying on your competitors is essential to outwitting them.

Reveal competitors’ Instagram ads strategy

If you always considered it impossible to discover your competitors’ ad results, this will be quite a surprise!

With Sotrender, you can compare your monthly results (CPC, CPM, impressions) to competitive brands, but also…

Analyze Instagram competitors’ ad results

…you can see how much they spend on ads and which campaign types they choose.

Analyze Instagram competitors’ ad spend in Sotrender

Even though it’s not possible to see how much a specific company spent on Instagram ads (this info is only available to account owners), getting access to such aggregated insights is already invaluable.

Secondly, we suggest you head to the free Facebook tool Ad Library.

Even though most marketers think they’ll only find their competitors’ ad visuals and copy in Facebook Ad Library, you can also learn so much more about their ad strategy. You’ll be able to discover, for example:

• How many ads do they have active.
• How many ads did they start running this month.
• On which products they’re focusing ads.
• Which ads are running on Instagram only, and which are live on Facebook, too.
• Which ads are running for the longest period of time (which means they’re extremely effective or they promote key products – either way, these are worth investigating).

Analyzing competitors’ ads in Facebook Ad Library

You couldn’t find any of this out simply by scrolling your competitors’ Instagram feeds. That’s why a third-party analytics app and Ad Library are a great combo for learning as much as you can about your competitors’ ad activities.

Invest in Content Creation

A well-thought-out content strategy is essential for Instagram marketing success. Your content should be a mix of photos, videos, carousels, Stories, and Reels that align with your brand identity and resonate with your audience. Here are some content types to consider:

• Photos: Share high-quality visuals that showcase your products, services, or brand personality.
• Videos: Create engaging videos that tell a story, showcase a product, or provide educational content.
• Carousels: Use a series of photos or videos to highlight a product, service, or brand story.
• Stories: Share behind-the-scenes content, sneak peeks, or exclusive deals to engage with your audience.
• Reels: Post short, engaging videos that highlight a product, service, or brand personality.

Using an Instagram content calendar can help you plan and schedule your posts in advance, ensuring a consistent and strategic approach to your Instagram marketing. This not only keeps your audience engaged but also helps you stay organized and on track with your marketing and business goals.

Additionally, curating a visually appealing Instagram feed is crucial for attracting and retaining followers.

Take advantage of the latest content formats

If you’re not utilizing the latest content format, which is now Instagram Reels, let’s be honest – it’s a missed opportunity.

No matter what Instagram users say, they’re watching Reels, and the Instagram algorithm promotes this content format in user feeds.

Reels are a little demanding, but fun! Getting into it can be tough, but you can start by utilizing some ready templates just to play around with this content format.

If you’re not really into TikTok-style funny videos, Reels can offer so much more than that. For example, educational Reels may even be more interesting to your Instagram followers, and as a business owner, you definitely have a lot of knowledge to share with your community.

Almost any content idea can be presented as a Reel, whether it’s a promotion, a how-to or behind-the-scenes content, interviews, contests… you name it. 😉

Crafting compelling Instagram captions is also crucial to enhance engagement and discoverability. Well-crafted captions can significantly affect a post’s reach and incorporating strategic elements like relevant hashtags and keywords can amplify visibility.

Instagram Reels examples, Ouai

This is how the Ouai hair brand is utilizing Reels – they post various types of Reels, from funny videos that their audience can easily identify with to how-to/guide videos and direct product presentations.

The sooner you start utilizing this content format, the better! You won’t know if it works until you give it a try and analyze the results thoroughly. And to help there’s Sotrender, with which you can also monitor your Reels performance.

Reels analysis in Sotrender

Don’t Underestimate Community Building

Engagement and community building are critical components of a successful Instagram marketing strategy. Responding to comments and messages promptly shows your audience that you value their interaction and feedback. Use Instagram’s interactive features such as polls, quizzes, and question stickers to encourage engagement and make your followers feel involved.

Additionally, using Instagram Live, Instagram Stories, and Reels can help you build a community around your brand, fostering a sense of connection and loyalty among your followers.

Collaborating with influencers or micro-influencers can also help you reach a larger audience and gain credibility. Influencers can introduce your brand to their followers, providing a trusted recommendation that can drive engagement and sales.

By focusing on engagement and community building, you can create a loyal and active audience that supports your brand and helps spread your message.

Test, test, and… test

Often what we think is a bad idea turns out to bring the most unexpected results. We’ve all been there.

A/B testing is not only reserved for email campaigns and web content – everything you do on social media can be tested, too.

Testing various post formats, posting times, different hashtags, CTAs, or copy length is crucial for optimizing your Instagram marketing strategy.

Incorporating user generated content as part of your testing strategy can also be highly beneficial. UGC not only refreshes your content but also serves as social proof, showcasing real customer testimonials and images that build trust and appreciation amongst audiences.

Your next tests can also be inspired by what you’ve observed on your competitors’ profiles. Unless you’re copy-pasting their work, there’s nothing wrong with getting some inspiration from them.

But remember – one test at a time! 😉

The Body Shop Instagram ads

Take a look, for example, at The Body Shop ads – they use up to 4 or 5 various creatives for the same ad copy, and this is how they optimize their paid campaigns.

Since you’ll immediately see the results of your tests, why wait? There is likely nothing worse than doing the exact same thing every time.

Monitor your overall Instagram performance along the way 

This may sound boring, and you’ve probably heard it before a dozen times, but analyzing your current and past performance is the best way to make your profile stand out and appear higher in user feeds.

By analyzing your content performance, you’ll see what your audience actually likes most. Even if in comments or DMs your followers are telling you that, e.g., they aren’t really watching videos, it’s all self-reported data and the full picture can only be seen with behavioral data. And that’s why you should thoroughly analyze how they consume your content and interact with your profile in general. Analyzing the performance of various social media posts helps you understand what resonates with your audience.

• Do they engage with videos rather than standard posts?
• Does caption length matter? 
• Does posting in the evening bring better results (e.g., higher engagement)? 
• What were your top-performing posts over the past few months?
• Does it pay off to invest in Reels? Is your audience enjoying this content format?

You can do all this with Sotrender, too. All the data are pulled automatically and are accessible as soon as you log in, so analyzing your metrics is as seamless as you can imagine. Enhance your Instagram analytics and take advantage of the interactive colored charts and unique metrics and reports that are generated in less than a minute.

Analyzing share of impressions in Sotrender

About A/B tests again – these are great, but they won’t be of any value unless you analyze the results. 😉

Create the winning Instagram marketing strategy

The truth is, there is no secret formula to being successful on Instagram. However, by cleverly utilizing all the tips and tools, you’ll be able to craft the most effective Instagram marketing strategy for your business.

Integrating Instagram into your overall social media strategy is crucial to achieving your marketing goals. This includes considering customer service aspects and using analytics to shape your Instagram marketing strategy, ensuring your content is effective across all social channels.

Measure success by utilizing marketing tools like Sotrender and make sure your Instagram engagement and other KPIs are constantly increasing.

If you’re hungry for more or you’d like to refresh what you know about Instagram marketing, grab our ebook and start running a successful Instagram business profile!