Create a SMART plan for Instagram
As with any other marketing campaign, you need to have a detailed plan for execution and achieving the result that you are expecting to receive from the investment, may it be time, effort or money. Implementing a SMART marketing plan would be the best strategy.
Let us look into setting a SMART plan for Instagram Campaign.
Specific
Setting a particular objective related to the campaign would not be a difficult task. Regarding marketing on Instagram, it could be metrics like followers, likes or click-throughs to the website.
Example: Increase Instagram followers from 100 to 300 in 1 month.
Measurable
A crucial element of the SMART plan, there is no use setting up the plan if there is no method to track and measure the effectiveness.
In the case of the Instagram campaign, you could always use Instagram for the metrics, and if your objective is a click-through to your website, you can use click tracking tools like Clickmagick or Voluum.
You can measure the engagement on Instagram using tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, etc.
Tracking
Hashtags:
Business profiles can measure how useful their hashtags are. Instagram uses hashtags to categorize and link content to topics.
Instagram collects and displays all the content on a topic with the respective hashtag. There are millions of hashtags related to millions of topics; broad and narrow.
If you are targeting a broad audience, then choose the hashtags suitable to reach the broadest range of audience in the topic.
Attainable
Make sure that you set your goals according to your baseline rather than setting industry standards which are good to work towards, but if you have 100 followers and have been struggling to post 30 posts a month, it wouldn’t be practical to set a goal of reaching 100,000 followers in 30 days with 3000 posts.
Do you get the idea? Make sure you look into what you have been able to achieve and use that as a point to start with.
Example: Post 5 posts a day, 150 posts a month to reach more audience with new content.
Relevant
The campaign needs to have meaning in the overall marketing strategy of the brand. Does it add value to the bottom line? Does it increase brand value and reach? Is it relevant for the audience and industry?
Example: Increasing more followers will increase brand awareness and also click to the website, which in turn will increase email signups and sales. The campaign is relevant to the primary marketing objective of increasing sales and revenue here in this example.
Time frame
Deciding on the campaign duration is something most marketers forget during the campaign-creation process as most often, the results or the objectives are not clear.
Since you have already planned a campaign that is measurable and attainable, setting a timeframe for the campaign execution is not difficult. With a definite time and date for the completion of the campaign, you can always check if you are moving towards your goal within the time allotted.
Most of the time the resources are allocated according to time so it would also be more comfortable to calculate the ROI in case of resources when it is tied with time.
Example: Reach the target no. of followers in 30 days. Check the stats week and compare with the target goal. Make adjustments if the plan is not working out as expected.
Originally published at https://harigopinath.com.
