4 Ways to Create Amazing Social Media Content for Your Brand
The most important thing about Instagram is that it’s an aesthetic-based platform where images and videos are the main focus. This means your content needs to LOOK GOOD! That’s why you must know how to create amazing Instagram content if you want to succeed on the platform.
It is highly recommended that you create original content, stock images won’t work on Instagram. You need to find creative ways to showcase your brand (and products) to your audience using images and video!
If you are struggling to find inspiration about what type of content to create you can do some research on the popular Instagram pages in your niche. Figure out what’s doing well on Instagram and what direction you want to take your brand’s Instagram feed. You can always take screenshots or create some sort of vision board so you can reference back to it when creating your own content.
As you create more content try to develop your unique style and start to build on a certain theme so that people can start to recognize your brand. This may take a while to develop, so don’t worry about it right away. At first you should be testing out lots of different content in order to figure out your content production process and what type of content your audience likes best.
NOTE: If for some reason you’re a visual creative such as a photographer, artist, filmmaker, graphic designer, etc., you’re in luck! Just focus on your art form and showcase your work. Make sure you still have a very specific niche and then put your energy towards connecting with your audience and growing your social reach.
For all other brands that are NOT visual creatives, here’s a brief list of niches and what type of content you should consider creating for Instagram:
Trendy Products — Quality lifestyle photos of your products being used in real life. Photos with and without people.
Fashion — Lifestyle shots of people wearing your clothes. Avoid posting pictures of just clothes without anyone in them.
Beauty — Selfies and close up shots of people wearing your beauty products. Other lifestyle shots and product shots will work as well.
Software & Apps — This one may be tricky but focusing on quote and information images might work best here. Make sure they are valuable and look good. Lifestyle shots of people using apps will work also.
Personal Brands / Coaches / Authors — Quote images from you. Use quality images of you and place your unique quotes over them. Also non-quote pictures of you in real life in order to create a personal connection with your followers!
Restaurant — Food, food, food! Food images do very well on Instagram, just make sure they are high quality. Also lifestyle shots of people enjoying your restaurant.
Hotels / Other Accommodations — Quality photos of your hotel and accommodations. Lifestyle shots of people enjoying your hotel. Travel photos related to the area where your hotel is located.
Oh and don’t forget about video! Mix in some creative videos every once in awhile!
Once again, with any of these niches feel free to do research on your competitors or other brands in a similar niche that have a good Instagram account and see what type of content is doing well for them!
Now let’s get to it!
4 Ways To Create Amazing Instagram Content For Your Brand
NOTE: To take your Instagram account to the next level download our FREE Instagram Success Guide
1. Do it Yourself Photography, Filmmaking and / or Graphic Design
This is the best option if you’re just starting your business and you’re on a budget. Once you figure out what type of content you’ll be creating for your brand you should learn how to do it yourself.
If you aren’t naturally good at photography or design, this might be difficult. However, if you can’t afford to hire someone, you might have to learn in order to get things rolling.
Photography
If you don’t have a nice DSLR camera, that’s okay, you can take great looking photographs with pretty much any smartphone these days. Check out iphonephotographyschool.com to help you get started with taking professional-looking photos on your smartphone. If you’re going to do product pictures or other type of pictures at home it would be smart to get a basic lighting set up as well. I have listed the best beginner lighting set up down below under photography tools.
Photography Tools:
VSCO — Photo editing app.
Snapseed — Photo editing app.
Lightroom — Professional photo editing program for desktop computer.
Filmmaking
Video is all the talk on Instagram right now! Instagram’s algorithm definitely gives videos an extra push when it comes to putting your content at the top of your follower’s feed. I encourage you to think about creating some interesting short videos for your brand. You’ll need to get your creative juices flowing and figure out a way to showcase your brand through video. If you decide to create some videos yourself, once again, you don’t need a fancy camera, your smartphone will allow you to get started!
Filmmaking Tools:
Videorama — App that allows you to create short videos.
iMovie — App and desktop video editing program.
Graphic Design
If you plan to create nice looking quote images or other informational images with words, you’ll need to level up your graphic design skills. It might be okay to use some stock images here as long as you’re making them unique by adding quotes or statistics and your logo.
Graphic Design Tools:
Typorama — App that allows you to add words and logos to an image.
Word Swag — App that allows you to add words and logos to an image.
Canva — User friendly internet-based graphic design program.
(NOTE: For a complete list of all the Instagram marketing resources we recommend check out our RESOURCES PAGE)
2. Hire a Photographer, Filmmaker and / or Graphic Designer
The bottom line is that you need really good content for your brand if you want to be successful on Instagram and sometimes you just don’t have time to do it all yourself. Or maybe you’re just not the creative type and you need to focus your efforts on marketing and product production! Hiring talented creatives can do a lot for your brand so you might want to consider this option if you have the budget.
Photographers and filmmakers can be a little pricey these days, however, depending on your business you may be able to swap services. Make sure you like the style of someone’s work before hiring them.
It’s a good idea to hire a photographer for a photo shoot because you can stockpile a ton of quality images and use them over the course of several months. Just make sure that you instruct the photographer to shoot a variety of different scenes so that your pictures don’t all look like they’re from the same photo shoot.
Graphic designers are very easy and cheap to hire these days. You can get many images created for your brand at a good price by using Fiverr.com or Upwork.com. One of these resources should allow you to find the right graphic designer fairly quickly and at a good price.
3. Pay Creative Influencers
This is similar to hiring a photographer but it works a little bit differently. This option will cost you but it’s also a growth and sales tactic, as well as a way to obtain creative content for your brand.
This strategy is so new in marketing right now that only a few people really know how to use it properly. It can be incredibly powerful for certain eCommerce brands with trendy products. I’ve even seen it work for people who sell services like hair stylists and teeth whitening. Instagram is the best platform for working with influencers right now.
Here are a few examples of companies who have used influencers to create content, build their Instagram accounts and generate millions of dollars in sales:
What you need to do is find influencers in your niche (super popular people on Instagram who’s followers might be interested in what you have to sell) and reach out to them to see if they would be interested in trying your product or service for free in exchange for them posting about it on Instagram.
Smaller influencers might post for free if they really like the product, however, big-time influencers will cost you. If you find someone that really aligns with your target customer and has a highly engaged following it might be worth it to pay the influencer a couple hundred bucks to post about it.
Working with Influencers will accomplish two things for you. First, you’ll receive promotion from the influencer and their audience will hopefully act on their recommendation and check out your brand. Secondly, many of these influencers are very creative so they will be creating content for you which you can then post on your own Instagram account.
This marketing strategy is gaining momentum and is working so well for certain brands that many influencer marketing platforms are starting to form. These platforms, or agencies, make it easier for influencers and brands to work together. They help match the right people with the right brands and make it simple for both parties to work out deals. Check out some of the top platforms here: 5 Influencer Marketing Platforms for Instagram
This option is definitely worth looking into if you have trendy products, a few posts from Influencers and your products might go viral!
4. User Generated Content (UGC)
You may also consider using User Generated Content (UGC) to build up some content for your brand. This also works well for businesses with trendy lifestyle products.
Use Instagram to encourage your followers and customers to use a certain hashtag when they post a picture on Instagram using your product. This allows you to then scan that hashtag and find the best photos that your customers took and then use them on your page, just be sure to tag that person in the picture.
This works great because there are so many creative people out there on Instagram so you’re bound to get some quality content that you didn’t even have to create. Also, Instagram users love to be featured on brand pages so once you start doing it people will notice and start posting more pictures of your products and tagging your brand. This will really help you create some social buzz!
A great example of an account using UGC is @thebalibible.
When you search the hashtag #thebalibible you will see that it currently has almost 700,000 photos posted to it.
Because they’ve encouraged people for so long to use #thebalibible for a chance to be featured on their page, they now have an endless supply of amazing Instagram content that they don’t even have to create!
I highly recommend that you mess around with UGC and see if you can make it work for your business, it has tremendous potential.
There you have it! 4 ways to create amazing Instagram content for your brand!
( NOTE: Take Your Account to the next level, download our FREE Instagram Success Guide )
Hopefully this article helps you create amazing Instagram content for your brand! Content is key, the better it is, the more eyes you’ll get on your products and the more sales you’ll make.
Let me know if I left anything out, what ways have you created amazing Instagram content for your business?
FYI: This article was originally published on our website, 4 Ways to Create Amazing Instagram Content for Your Brand
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