It used to be that to get attention for your business, in a market like Ottawa, you had to spend a lot of money. You needed to make sure your message was seen on every local channel possible in the hope that you could connect with the right people. In crafting your strategy, you had to consider purchasing time on regional radio stations, buying up ads in local newspapers, and creating enough buzz to interest the city’s news-outlets in doing a story.
But times have changed, and the incredible thing about social media is that it leveled the playing field for almost everyone and every business. Now, absolutely anyone can start posting and spreading a message as far as their networks will allow. And, with targeted ad buys, a company can extend that reach and market to a well defined demographic, with considerable frequency, for very little investment.
However, when it comes to using social media to build your brand, one of the platforms that connect with an audience best, is Instagram.
Owned by Facebook for several years now, this photo-sharing platform has quickly become an increasingly important digital marketing option for two simple reasons. Number one, beautiful photos that tell your story in a flash. And, number two, it’s popular with people 18 to 44, while still being relevant enough with kids 13 to 17, and those in the 44 to 65 age bracket. This means you can target most of the primary decision-makers in a family without neglecting everyone else. A claim most other social platforms can’t make.
Social Media Audiences:
- Facebook – A fantastic place to connect with Baby Boomers and older Gen-Xers.
- Twitter- Everyone is arguing about politics, sports or some other divisive issue of the day. It’s entertaining sure, but ad buy results can be hit or miss.
- TikTok- You better be able to dance and really be after the tween market.
- LinkedIn- A place to post a job ad, talk about an upcoming conference or try to promote yourself as a self-proclaimed guru.
With Instagram, you have a unique opportunity to reach the broadest range of communities. And, with the right tactics, using a blend of paid and organic postings, you can create a brand presence that gets the right people to double-tap and followthrough.
So how do you go about building your brand with Instagram in Ottawa?
Set Up a Profesional Account
When you launch your Instagram account, you want to be sure to activate the Professional Account settings. You can do this at sign up, where they will ask you if you are either a creator or a business. Selecting the business option is entirely free and will provide you with some extra features to help you grow your profile, such as access to analytics, ad targeting, and a contact button. They also make it super simple to connect your Facebook page so you can target across platforms. However, keep in mind that at the moment, you are limited to one linked Facebook page.
Of course, if you have an existing Creator account that you want to convert over, this link will take you to Instagram’s step by step method for changing your account.
Use Local Photos, Be in the Moment, and Hire a Photographer (Sometimes)
If you want to create a brand in Ottawa, you need to use photos that connect to the city. Your pictures need to feel familiar to the people who live here. And, they need to attach your brand to the place that you are, at least some of the time.
Whereas with classic advertising, good stock photos could be used to add life to a page, social media requires an authentic look and feel to connect with an audience. With Instagram, your ability to stop someone scrolling and get them to engage with your content is connected to your ability to show them something exciting, something familiar, or occasionally something that distresses them. Albeit, often it’s about combining two of the three to really drive it home.
To develop your local Instagram brand, you need to consider your overall content mix and what that says about your business-personality. For most brands, this is going to be a mix of four types of imagery.
- Beautiful Professional-looking photos
- Quirky candid shots that provide personality
- Memes or inside jokes that connect you to your audience
- Straight-up advertising with words and pictures
A fantastic local example is Pure Kitchen, on Elgin Street. If you scroll through their account, you’ll see quite a few photos of the food they serve, beautifully shot. Needless to say, you’ll also notice there are several pictures of patrons enjoying their space and some others of the staff celebrating the reopening of Elgin Street. Every once in a while, they will also include a direct offer. In one, they suggest buying gift certificates. In another, they announce a morning lecture series. And further down, they provide details for a contest they’re running. Each image is engaging, but when seen together, you get a fuller picture of the broader community and the brand they are creating.
Use Photos That Tell Part of a Story
The photos you share on Instagram need to generate interest. They have to make the people who see them want to know more. They should tell part of a story that only gets finished by exploring the rest of your collection or following through to your website. An Ottawa example we love for drawing us in is Black Squirrel Books and Espresso. In addition to teasing with intriguing book piles and upcoming open mic shows, they also pull select books, place them esthetically next to a cappuccino and extract pull-quotes from the text in the description.
Naturally, you have to be careful where you’re sending people, though. Instagram has protected its dominance as a photo-sharing platform by limiting your ability to link viewers off to your website. The most common way to get around this is to place the relevant link in your bio (the one place you can have an active hyperlink) and direct people in the photo-description to click the bio link for the full story.
Of course, the trouble comes when you are posting more regular content, and the link in the bio is changing too quickly to be useful. If you find yourself running into this problem, a great solution is to create a tiled blog landing-page that mimics your Instagram profile. That way, when followers click the “link in your bio,” they are greeted with a page of tiles and will be able to quickly identify which one piqued their interest. Another common workaround is to create a shortened URL and place it in the description. It won’t be a live link, but many users are getting used to the idea of highlighting a link, right-clicking it, and selecting “Go to.” Keep in mind though that this only works on the desktop version and not the mobile app.
Plan Your Content, Mostly
The struggle with Instagram is that you want your profile to feature specific, planned content, and yet have it maintain some semblance of spontaneity. To do this, you want to begin by creating an editorial calendar. Consider what sorts of products you want to feature at different times of the year. If, for example, you’re a clothing retailer catering to seasonal variations, you will have a general idea of what sort of items sell best in each season. Next, consider what stories you can tell about those products. For our clothing retailer, it may be the search for the perfect fall sweater. A feature could be created by following a “Goldilocks” style tale of having someone try on several cardigans across multiple posts, before finally landing on the “right one.”
Now in between these planned series, you could include specific slots for staff fun, favourite customers, and “in the community.” While you won’t know precisely what these pictures will be, you will have the theme scheduled to ensure you add some opportunity for planned spontaneity.
Be Very Local
More than ever, consumers are looking for brands that they can connect and build a relationship with. They want to feel that the businesses they support are a part of their community.
If your brand is based in Ottawa, and your customers live in the Ottawa area, you have an excellent opportunity to use the city to create a local connection and stoke civic pride. The usual starting place is to use the iconic local photos (Centre Block is the first thing everyone from anywhere else in Canada knows Ottawa for). For new followers, it quickly gives them a sense of place. However, if you’re a business with a deep connection to the community, finding those unique places in our city and creating an image only an Ottawan would recognize allows you to let locals in on something that only they will get. With our Pure Kitchen example above, no one from Toronto is going to understand what they went through with Elgin Street being dug up the way it was.
A-B Testing
One of the incredible things about social media is the ability to reach a sizable, engaged audience for a fraction of the cost of booking traditional media. What this means for brand building is that you have an excellent opportunity to try a few different outreach options and see what works before committing to a particular direction. With Instagram, you can post different photos promoting the same product and see which variation performs best. You can measure which image gets more likes, which receives more comments, and with a unique URL, you can track how many viewers actually follow through to the website from each picture. Over time this research will give you unprecedented insights into your customers. However, there is no reason you ever have to completely stop testing. If you have a new product, or merely can’t decide which caption you like better, A-B test both and see what works. You may even find your Instagram testing starts to influence which products you keep in stock.
Local Celebrity Take-Overs
If you’ve never heard of this before, it’s precisely what it sounds like. Giving a local celebrity control of your Instagram account and letting them post images and stories for your followers to see. Your brand benefits from new creative content and the celebrity can share a new brand association with their followers and continue to build their online prestige.
These celebrity partnerships work great if you have a significant international star that loves your products. However, a local radio personality or even an Ottawa based “influencer” with a sizeable following can be brilliant partners to expand your reach.
Just be sure that when you engage in a takeover, that you spend some time upfront with any celebrity partners talking about the type of content they are going to post. Similar to your own posts, you want structure, with a bit of room for spontaneity. Here is a great video post, done for Oreo by an influencer on how to make an Oreo hot chocolate.
Hashtags
Using hashtags is essential if you’re attempting to build a following and develop your brand, for the simple reason that it makes you easier to find. Of course, you’ll want to do a little bit of research and find a selection of existing tags that have good numbers and fit with your product. Instagram will allow you to use up to 30 hashtags, but if you can find five or ten that assist your target customers in locating your profile, that’s probably enough. You will want to be sure to move your hashtags a few spaces down from your description copy to keep it clean and easy to read. Some folks even put their hashtags in the first comment spot to keep them separated. Just be sure that you have them typed and copied so you can paste them in a few seconds after you make the post and before someone writes a comment.
Some local tags that might make sense for you:
- #ottawalife – 372,562 posts
- #myottawa – 696,159 posts
- #613 – 841,851 posts
- #ottawa – 5,771,914 posts
Every now and again, an “expert” will come out saying that using hashtags is a bad idea. They say it’s a sure-fire way to collect followers outside of your target demographic or even end up with hundreds of bots. And that it’s better to build up quality followers more slowly. However, the truth is the more followers you can gain, the better your odds of ending up with more people that really love what you do. Once you hit 10,000 followers, Instagram opens up the “Swipe Up” option in Instagram Stories. This allows you to give your followers instant access to a product page or other web content.
Videos and Stories
As you get more sophisticated with your Instagram account, you can start taking the content up a notch.
Short videos, shot on your smartphone, can give your audience a more immersive brand experience by showing real personality. It’s an opportunity to introduce new product lines, staff team members, or even show different ways to use a particular product (like the Orea example above). Instagram allows you up to 60 seconds of video before you have to finish your content on IGTV. However, when you’re starting out, work on perfecting your 60-second shorts before jumping over to the longer format. You can also look to engage a video production company to create more professional-looking pieces for your feed. Just remember that while polished ad pieces look superior, more grassroots videos can help establish the authenticity of your brand.
Here are a few other video examples to get you thinking about what’s possible.
And, once you have video uploads down, you’re ready to start posting to Instagram Stories. These short “in the moment” segments allow you to communicate your brand to consumers in quick bursts that can be added to throughout the day. While you can incorporate professionally shot videos or photos, their 24-hour shelf-life means you are continually updating your stories with new segments, and they tend to lend themself better to on the go content creation. If you’re venturing into IG Stories, you want to take advantage of music, interactive quizzes, and captions to allow your followers to feel even more connected. Here is an excellent example from a Lego Story, celebrating their partnership with Harley Davidson.
We Can Help
If you’re looking to get started or wanting to take your existing Instagram efforts to the next level, we are here to lend a hand. Rocket Focus has a diverse and agile team of marketers, copywriters, developers, and social media specialists focused on creating digital marketing campaigns that deliver immediate results. We take a holistic approach to each of our client campaigns, considering the impact of every decision on your brand image and your bottom line. As Ottawa locals, we know how to build a brand here at home, but with clients and team members across the country, we have the skills to go way beyond.