When it comes to Instagram marketing there are great strategies and there are some horrible Instagram marketing mistakes that you can make that will hurt your growth and sales or even totally KILL your Instagram marketing forever…
Mistakes that you need to avoid at all costs. And that’s why I will reveal them to you in this fantastic article…
Pay close attention to every mistake that you are going to read about.
So, are you ready to begin? If so, let’s dive in…
1. Not Engaging
This is a giant mistake as engagement is one of the most important things you need to do to build a relationship with your audience, and with influencers…
And when you are beginning also reach new people and get new followers. The problem is that there is a right way to engage and a wrong way to engage.
So, even when you’re engaging you can make a giant Instagram marketing mistake. That is because commenting just for the sake of commenting doesn’t work. So, if you’ve been making comments like this in the past – “Thanks for sharing this.” or “Great post.” – then you better start giving some real feedback and add value to the comments you share.
Another thing that you also want to do is to have an engagement strategy. Engaging with random people is not likely going to work and it is an Instagram marketing mistake on its own.
Instead, you want to target all three types of audiences:
- Cold Audience (People Who Don’t Know You At All)
- Warm Audience (People Who Know You And Are Following You)
- HOT Audience (Leads And Customers)
There are many different approaches that you can take to appeal to all of these 3 audiences, but if you have no idea how to structure your engagement strategy, here is my favorite that I use all the time…
- 50 Comments On Hashtags
- 50 Comments On Big Account’s Posts
- 50 Comments On Follower’s Posts
- Reply To All Comments And Messages
When you are going to follow this engagement strategy every day, you are going to get absolutely incredible results. But the key is to stay consistent so make sure you do so.
OK and now let’s move on to another Instagram marketing mistake you want to avoid because not engaging is just the beginning…
2. Buying Followers
This is one of the worst mistakes that you can make as this is not only going to hurt your Instagram growth, engagement, and sales…
This is going to totally KILL it.
When you buy Instagram followers, what you are going to get are BOT followers that don’t engage, don’t buy, and don’t do anything.
For example, when you have 300K followers and you have only 5 likes on a post, you will instantly lose the authority and trust of your dream customers because everybody sees that you try to “cheat” instead of growing organically, and also it is going to kill your organic reach because your engagement is going to be nearly (if not) zero percent.
DON’T BUY FOLLOWERS. The only way to fix this Instagram marketing mistake if you already made it is:
- Remove all bot followers
- Delete your account and start a new one
There is no other way, so as I said, you literally kill your account. Be careful.
3. Not Posting Every Day
This is not such a big Instagram marketing mistake as you can still get great results without posting every day…
And some people won’t even consider it a mistake, however, if you want to get the most reach and best results, then not posting every day makes you miss out on reach, traffic, and sales.
And because elite marketers are always going big, we don’t want anything short of posting once a day.
So, in our case, it is a big Instagram marketing mistake. Now, I get that posting every day is overwhelming for some…
And the best way to solve it is by batch /creating your content. Instead of creating a new post every day and then manually sharing it, you should create all of the content at once and then schedule it using a tool like Sprout Social in one day so that you don’t have to think about it at all later.
Don’t forget that you are going to get the best results when you are going to use a broad range of content formats. For example, don’t just share carousels but share reels and single-image posts as well.
And on and on.
4. Reposting Or Copying Content
This is a giant Instagram marketing mistake that can kill your brand sooner than you can blink. When you are copying content then don’t even think somebody is not going to find out about it and reveal it to the world.
When they do, your brand is undermined FOREVER. And that’s even if you take the design and change the colors into your own branded ones.
If you follow me, you know I teach design hacking…but that is NOT copying. Be careful about it.
A second big mistake is reposting content. That’s because when you are reposting content the content is not by any means aligned with your Instagram marketing strategy.
It can’t promote your products or services as it is not yours and certainly it can’t help you build your brand as it is not yours.
Instead, you are building a brand and driving sales to the business that you repost the post from.
There’s hardly any situation when reposting is good. So avoid it and share your own content instead…
5. Not Being Relatable
Being relatable is absolutely essential if you want your audience to trust you and buy from you. That’s why not being relatable and sharing cold-fish content without personality is such a giant mistake.
When you’re on Instagram, you want to go more behind the scenes and more personal sometimes so that people can actually relate to your brand or personal brand and you also want to consistently talk about your values and what you stand for in your content.
That way, people who believe in the same thing you do will relate to you and they will build a strong relationship with you…
It is absolutely essential that you do it.
6. Not Sharing Your Offer
This is a giant Instagram marketing mistake for one reason. If you are not going to share your offer often in your content, nobody is even going to know that you are selling something. If they don’t know you have an offer, they are never going to buy.
So, it is absolutely essential that you do it.
However, you must do it in a way that doesn’t interrupt the main flow of the message in the content.
So, for example, if you are sharing video content you want to share the offer at the end of the caption and at the end of the video. Not in the middle as it would hurt your engagement and cause a lot of people to stop watching.
If you are sharing carousels you want to share the offer on the last slide. NOT in the middle, and not at the beginning. The only exception are, of course, promotional carousels.
And on and on.
You have to promote but be careful about how you do it. If you do it the wrong way it is going to kill your reach and growth.
7. Not Using Video
This is a big Instagram marketing mistake for a reason. When you are not sharing video content, you are missing out on a giant reach…because Instagram is promoting video content like crazy.
So, start sharing Instagram reels. Even if you’re not great at it and your audience loves video content DO IT.
However, do it in a way that is not going to collide with the normal posts you share. That means, you will still share the same amount of the content you share now, you’ll just add, for example, 3 videos to use reels and reach a new audience.
That way, you’ll be for example sharing 7 image posts and 3 reels a week instead of just 7 image posts.
That way, those who love image content will still get it but you’ll also reach and convert those who are more video-oriented.
Got it? So, definitely incorporate video in your Instagram marketing strategy and avoid the mistake of not using it.
Filip Konecny 