Instagram can be an incredibly powerful tool for your business when used to its full potential. Between influencers, collaborations, networking and paid ads, there are many moving parts to the platform. Each of these elements can be integrated and optimized to help your business meet its specific goals.
The Importance of Networking with Other Brands on Instagram
Each social platform has its own strengths in benefiting your business. Instagram’s key strength is its ability to connect people, whether that be a personal connection between users, your business, or even influencers. While Influencer marketing has become more popular in recent years, opportunities to network with other brands are still being underutilized. Similar to influencer marketing, networking with other brands on Instagram can be very effective in growing your audience and boosting engagement.
Organizing Smart Collaborations on Instagram
Collaborating with the right brand is important. Just like with influencer marketing, choosing brands that reflect your own core values is crucial. Despite these values not playing a direct role in many collaborations, carefully aligning your brand can subtly reinforce these core values to your audience. In recent years consumers have shifted to care more about brands taking social stances, making brand messaging even more crucial.
Additionally, selecting partnerships in a relevant industry or community makes a key difference in how effective the collaboration can be. While the brand you collaborate with should be relevant, typically you should avoid partnering with products or services that are too similar to your own offerings. An ideal brand collaboration would include offerings that are complementary yet differentiated so the audience is not split. For example, a coffee company would have a more effective cross-collaboration with a creamer brand than a tea brand. While creamers and teas are relevant, both appearing in the beverage industry with coffee, one offering works harmoniously with your product while the other acts as a substitute.
Beyond values and relevancy, picking brands with a large following and good engagement are paramount to reaching goals like reach and brand awareness. Numbers always matter when creating a successful partnership, brands you collaborate with should ideally have a slightly larger following and consistent, strong engagement. However, other brands are also making strategic choices when choosing partnerships, making it hard to partner with brands too much bigger than your own. As a reminder, the size of a brand’s audience doesn’t mean much if it’s not the right audience. While large followings are great, they aren’t valuable to your brand if the audiences don’t align with your offering or brand.
Executing a Collaboration with Another Brand on Instagram
In order to maximize effectiveness, it’s crucial to prepare in advance. When driving web traffic, a great advertisement doesn’t do much good if the website it leads to is poorly constructed. Similarly, before posting a collaboration of any kind, your Instagram must have a strong foundation so that when new users visit your page they stay engaged instead of clicking away.
As for the collaboration itself? Creative freedom is completely up to you. There are a wide variety of ways to use a brand-to-brand partnership on Instagram, however, the most common form of collaboration is joint giveaways. This form of collaboration creates a significant amount of cross engagement and provides tangible value to both audiences. Beyond the collaboration, it’s important to stay active with relevant posts in order to maintain the new following you may have gained.
Overall, following a successful collaboration, not only does your reach and brand awareness increase into new audiences, but you also create a lasting relationship with the other brand. Good networking is priceless and can present many opportunities for the future.
Over 75% of businesses will use Instagram for marketing purposes in 2020, will yours be one of them?
You don’t have to do it alone. KWSM develops fully customized strategies based on your unique business goals. You run your business; we run your social media.
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