Instagram has proved to a major weapon in the hands of businesses looking to increase brand awareness, boost their engagement with their target audiences, and drive traffic to their websites for conversion. The sheer number of users on Instagram, now more than one billion every month, and their very attractive demographics make for a marketing opportunity that is simply too lucrative to lose out on by businesses of all kinds.
Car dealerships, already a very intensely competitive sector, have also not lost time in getting aboard the Instagram bandwagon for promoting themselves and connecting with their target audiences to create a loyal community. However, even if you have a car dealerships that has not yet started marketing on Instagram, it is not too late. All you need to do is to implement the following tips:
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Optimize the Instagram Profile
The Instagram profile plays a vital part in creating a favorable first impression among your target audience that your car dealership requires. Since the profile represents the first opportunity that a potential customer has of interacting with you, you need to ensure that not only do you compellingly describe your business but also ensure that all the information including your address and contacts are correct.
Ensure that you set up a Business Profile, not an individual page for your car dealerships. Pay attention to the selection of the profile picture; ideally, you should use your storefront so that people can readily identify your business while getting to know your company logo at the same time.
Craft a Powerful Instagram Content Strategy
Even if you have an amazing lineup of vehicles, randomly posting their photos on your Instagram account is not going to be effective for meeting your marketing objectives. What you need to do before you publish the first post is to spend time figuring out a content strategy that is designed to address the issues that car owners or potential new car owners will find relevant, interesting, and valuable.
Your posts will not only announce the new arrivals in your dealership but feature each of the cars to show off their best attributes, discuss the pros and cons of new technologies in cars, offer tips on car maintenance and servicing, post details of interesting road trips, highlight vintage cars, and more. The target audience will particularly love tips on how to do various things by themselves; you can use informative videos and likes on Instagram to boost engagement.
Highlight the Customer and Buy Likes on Instagram to Boost Engagement
Buying a car is very exciting for most customers. You can create very interesting content by capturing the special moments of customers coming into your car dealerships to purchase and take delivery of a spanking new car. In addition to still photos of the occasion, you can post short videos of an interview with the customer regarding his feelings and of his experience at the dealership.
According to research, video posts receive 38% more engagement than those just containing images. Customers, very naturally, tend to be pleased with all this attention and when they find themselves featured on your Instagram posts, they are inclined to give you better reviews and recommendations to other potential customers.
Use Hashtags to Drive Content Visibility
With more than 95 million posts being uploaded on Instagram per day, it can be very difficult for your posts to be seen by your target audience. Since Instagram content can only be searched using hashtags, you also need to research the most relevant hashtags that your target audience is likely to use to search for your content.
A good way of getting inspiration is to study the hashtags of your main competition, however, keep in mind that using the most popular ones are not necessarily the best as your posts are likely to be snowed under a lot of other content. The other thing to keep in mind is not to use too many hashtags. Using seven to nine hashtags has been proven to be most effective even though Instagram allows you to use a maximum of 30. It is a good policy to check very carefully the meaning of the hashtags, especially if the content is targeted at audiences belonging to different cultures. Consider creating and using branded hashtags as they are better for content discovery by users, however, since they can take time for them to become popular, you should promote them on all your digital marketing channels.
Conclusion
To make your Instagram marketing campaign more effective, you need to use third-party tools to not only schedule your posts but also to carry out an analysis of the performance of your car dealerships Instagram account. There are also tools available for researching the best hashtags for your business as also the best times to post. By using these tools, you can take out the manual drudgery and guesswork from your Instagram marketing campaigns and make them more effective.
Read next: How Can You Create A Killer Instagram Bio In 2020
Eric Dalius is a true marketing genius and a successful entrepreneur and he likes to spend time with his wife Kimberly Dalius.