How To Create A Successful Instagram Marketing Strategy For Agencies In 2022

I used to work in an agency. I remember we were always excited to create someone else’s Instagram Marketing Strategy but overwhelmed and never had the time to do it for ourselves. It was one of the biggest challenges we had. In fact, many agencies struggle with having a website not optimized and no social media presence. Tell me – is this you?

As a marketer, I developed many digital marketing strategies in the past. I believe it’s crucial for any online marketing agency to be active on Instagram and having a strong presence there.

In the following piece, I’ll talk on how to actually execute a great Instagram Marketing Strategy, not only plan and keep it in your Google Drive as we all did once.

Why Agencies Need An Instagram Marketing Strategy?

Developing a robust Instagram strategy will help you become an industry leader. It will allow you to establish a strong online brand and land the best clients you’ve been wish for. You’ll see the community offering you more and more potential clients every single day.

I’ve seen many agencies landing between 20-35 new clients each month just by establishing the correct funnel on Instagram, copy, message, and stick to the strategy.

It’s gonna be hard, Instagram requires lots of attention and effort but I’ll tell you few key tricks that you can easily use to save 80% of your time and make sure you keep building a great presence.

How Will An Instagram Marketing Strategy Help My Agency?

An ocean of potential customers may be reached directly by using all the basic Instagram features, like Direct Messages, Stories, Carousel Posts, IGTV, and many others.

Increase brand awareness.

Focus on building a strong online brand, instead of creating 1 post a week, spamming influencers’ profile and asking your friends to like your posts. A worldwide known brand may be built on Instagram if you gather a community around you that shares the same values.

Quality sales lead.

It never hurts to have more customers, right? Instagram is highly effective when it comes to acquiring new clients.

You can quickly jump into the conversation and offer valuable feedback directly in the comments or help your audience by sharing the best tips via Instagram Stories, which will contribute to generating highly qualified leads in your pipeline.

Create a community.

There are many agencies in the world with thousands of followers, like @jellymarketing, @antisocialsolutions, @thisiscrowd that use Instagram to share their agency life, parties, company meetings and what’s going on in the company.

When it comes to recruiting, you’ll have 10x advantage compared to other agencies so people will be more incentivized to apply for your opportunities and you’ll be able to find the right talent.

See More: 15 Creative Digital Agency Instagram Accounts For Inspiration

Understand the industry.

It’s always easy to lose touch with reality when you’re hiding in your own bubble and stop looking for new challenges.

That’s right, developing an Instagram account for your agency will help you be aware of what’s working for your competitors, what are the best social media experts in the industry doing and how you can replicate the success.

How To Build An Instagram Marketing Strategy

You can add a picture of what’s happening in your office on Instagram at anytime, but what’s next? If you’ll be blindly publishing one piece of content after the other, it will become a complete mess – no story and no logic behind it.

That’s why we have to build exactly the same approach as we do for our clients. Assign a team with a clear strategy behind that. Let’s see how you can build an Instagram Strategy below.

Establishing Main Objectives for Your Instagram Account

As you know, any strategy starts from the objective, let’s see what exactly you’re looking to achieve with by becoming a superstar agency on Instagram. Here’s a list of the main objectives you should be aiming to cover:

• Increased brand awareness, constantly pop-up in people’s mind
• Demonstrate company culture, see how BBH is excelling on this
• Showcase your team and recruit new talent
• Increase customer engagement and loyalty
• Showcase products and services, tons of great examples from BBDO New York
• Share company or industry news to always keep your audience up to date
• Build a more engaged community, see how Ogilvy is doing this
• Connect with influencers to establish a better relationship and help your clients
• Drive sales through traffic to the website, lead generation forms or events you’re organising

How Does Instagram Compare To Other Social Pages?

Decide what fits your agency best, it might be multiple or it might be one. Remember to establish clear goals in mind as it’s the first step to be a successful agency. Also, there are a few key questions you need to answer:

• What will you do differently on Instagram compared to other social pages?
• Who is your target audience on Instagram?
• How can you reach them in the best possible way?
• How will Instagram be integrated in your social media strategy?

It’s often easy to get lost when you don’t have clear metrics and KPIs. Vanity metrics like followers and likes are not good because they are not telling you if you’re building a successful brand on social media and whether this drives customers to your agency.

We often think about likes as a success, when actually it’s just dopamine for ourselves. Don’t count likes. Don’t look at metrics that give you nothing but the opportunity of a pat on the back.

Research Your Competitors For Better Social Media Results

Before we discuss best practices and examples (I’m almost there!), it’s really important to look into your competitors. Put this into a spreadsheet or Airtable and analyze what they’re doing best.

“Good people copy, great people steal”, remember that quote from Jobs? Always keep learning from your competitors and understand how can you replicate their success. You need to grow from their failure and be ahead of the competition.

When searching for competitors just go the Instagram search or Google and look for them based on keywords, phrases or industry terms to see what shows up.

If you see a great example, make sure to save it. I’m using a tool called Competitors.app to spy on my competitors, and there’s also Awario.

Write a descriptive bio

Ok, let’s start from the basics. Instagram bio is the way many people will end up finding you through the keyword research.

We need to make the most out of it. Write out multiple descriptions about your agency and see what sticks. I’ve added a few great examples below.

Next, there’s @360i, on topic – no bullshit strategy.

@Edelman made sure people know they’re a big agency and they’re working with the best brands in the world.

See how can you learn from them, and see other agencies to follow like:

@Ogilvymather
@Carrotcreative
@Wiedenkennedy
@Redantler
@Bbdosf
@Agencyvcph
@Bssp93
@Akqa

Create Engaging Social Media Content

It’s obviously the most important part of your Instagram Strategy if there’s no content then why would you do this? We recommend creating content that fits your brand’s identity and content you’re passionate about.

Make sure to always post the correct image sizes on Instagram so that it looks brilliant. If it’s not fun, attractive, or engaging no one will ever be interested in following you. Here are a few content ideas for your agency:

• Share real customer testimonials (if they give you permission)
• Behind-the-scenes picture in your agency
• Introduce employees
• Share your latest agency work (video, campaign, image etc.)
• Start a debate on a trending industry topic
• Share any impressive PR or awards your company has received.
• Ask your followers questions or run an informal poll, find 25+ examples here
• Highlight the people and processes behind the company.
• Keep followers informed of important happenings (i.e. major product updates, moving locations, opening a new store, etc.).
• Post charts, infographics, videos, and other visually appealing content.
• Market-relevant upcoming events like conferences or speeches.
• Share posts from your own blog or articles from your own website.
• Record events or speeches and upload them after the fact, or live to stream them in real time.
• Livestream your office and what’s happening there
• Post interviews with employees or “meet the staff” introductory videos.
• Create how-to videos, tutorials, hints and tips, and other informative content.

The pet-friendly offices of Wieden+Kennedy provide plenty of “aww”-worthy moments on Instagram. The #wkdogs hashtag is a perfect way to draw in followers who might never follow an agency. By following, you will also get a healthy preview of the creative work the agency is doing, as well as a few employee candids. See more examples here.

Consistency Is What Matters

Post at regular intervals, like twice a day or one post each day. Four to 7 times a week is a good goal to set so your page stays up-to-date and is relevant for all of your followers.

It’s easy to see a stagnant Instagram account that has no new content or if they’re publishing every once in a while.

Engage, Engage & Engage

Your followers are worth zero if you don’t interact with them and if you don’t connect on a personal level. Start paying attention to the community you’re building.

A lot of brands make the mistake of ignoring their comments or questions and leave their followers with no information or reason to interact again in the future. Don’t just say “thanks” when someone leaves you a comment.

Be human! It’s an essential hack and makes a colossal difference when reaching your first 10000 followers on Instagram.

Use a Social Media Content Collaboration Platform

Marketing on Instagram will always be a task for at least someone in the team. It’s doesn’t have to be complicated and take 40h a month.

Social media is about making things fun and easy. You don’t have to create the social media plan in a spreadsheet, then send an email to team members to ask for feedback and attach files from your G Drive or Dropbox.

It’s easy to do everything in one place if you use one platform such as Planable or any other platforms offering an effective social media content collaboration for agencies, freelancers and marketing teams.

In fact, by using a scheduling platform you’ll save up to 30h / month just on that.

I am a strong believer that strategy is 3% of your work when it comes to Instagram. In the end, it’s all about the execution, content and people you’re connecting with.

When it comes to Instagram planning make sure you’re building strong habits on creating the best content in your niche, then constantly interacting with your audience and use all the best available tools to make the most of it. If you want to outsource your Instagram marketing, here are the best Instagram agencies in the USA.