If you’re new to Instagram, you may be struggling to get the level of engagement you’re looking for. In the early days, it may have been because brands were flying blind. Without analytics tools to find out exactly how their content was performing, they couldn’t optimize and connect with their audience.

Instagram realized this, and that’s why they introduced their business feature. If you’re running an Instagram account for a brand but haven’t yet established a business profile, you’re missing out on tools specifically designed to help businesses get more insight about their content’s performance as well as understand their target audience better.

So let’s take a look at these Instagram business tools and how you can go about utilizing them to your advantage.

Business Profiles

Business profiles are a feature that allows a business to identify itself as such on Instagram. It also allows you to put contact details on you profile, as well as choose how you wish to be contacted. Your potential customers have the option to contact you with just a tap of a button, and even get directions to your location right in the app.

While there isn’t much to discuss with this feature, as it’s simply about switching to a business account from a general one, you may still want to see how it looks using your personal account. This may help you figure out whether you need to make certain changes or remove some information that’s not needed.

Insights

This is probably the most important tool that you would want as a business. Insights give you a very detailed overview of who your followers are, including information such as their gender, location, age, and other demographics. Similarly, you get access to a lot more information about your content that was previously challenging, if not impossible, to find.

Metrics such as your top posts, the level of engagement with your followers, reach and impressions are now easily accessible from right within the app. This information goes a long way in helping you come up with a more effective content marketing strategy focused on your followers and target audience. Simply keep track of posts that consistently generate more engagement, and start giving your followers more of what they want based on that.

Similarly, some other types of posts may fail to connect much with your followers. These posts will have low reach and impressions, as well as poor overall engagement. So you can simply work on making them more appealing to your target audience, or simply replacing them with what’s working well for you.

Also, don’t forget that you can create laser-targeted marketing campaigns as you would have access to so much information about your followers, including the city they live in.

In fact, you can go as deep as finding out what time zone (based on your followers’ demographics) they live in and post at the most popular times when most of your followers are active on the site. This is sure to take the engagement with your followers to a whole new level.

Promote

This is another great feature that is useful for businesses with an advertising budget. Simply put, you will be able to turn your best-performing posts into ads, again all from within the app.

What this means is that you won’t have to go through much trial and error, which is a common issue with running advertising campaigns. You can simply use what’s already working for you and hence improve your chances of generating a great ROI.

You’re also able to add a customized call to action button, which helps drive conversions, that are tailored specifically to those prospects and where they are on the customer journey.

In order to make the most out of this feature, you would ideally want to pick posts that have not only been generating a good amount of engagement but also very likely to get more sales. Purely informational posts, even though very engaging, may not help generate a very good ROI.

As far as targeting is concerned, you have the option to select your target audience or let Instagram do it for you. Again, you may get the best results if you select pretty much the same type of audience that has been connecting well with the post you’re looking to promote.

If you liked this post, check out our Small Business Guide to Social Media.

Brandon Leibowitz, owner of SEO Optimizers, been involved with digital marketing since 2007 and am well versed in marketing techniques to help both small and large businesses grow exposure online.