When marketing your brand and products online, which social media channels should you use? This can be a confusing and tough choice to make. Ideally, you will want to be present everywhere but that can backfire; it takes up way too many resources to be dedicated to all the popular platforms out there and to be able to do justice to the audiences.

So as you are being selective, trying to decide which few channels you should be focusing your marketing strategy on, let us make a case for the use of Instagram for your business.

If you are a SaaS company, Instagram might not be your most intuitive choice for the marketing of your products or services. Yet, millions of people access it daily, which combined with the ability to use hashtags to enhance your brand’s visibility and the availability of paid ads that allows you to reach specific demographics makes it a highly relevant channel to fit into your marketing plan.

Instagram is an obvious choice for brands like Nike and Starbucks, but if you don’t have any physical products to show, does using it still make sense? Moreover, as a SaaS company you are generally not looking to reach a mass audience, so why spend any of your resources in casting a wide net?

If you need some convincing, here are some interesting statistics from Instagram

• Over 500 million accounts are active every day on Instagram
• 80% of the accounts follow a business on this platform

At the end of the day, people who buy your products, whether other businesses or individuals, are still very much present on the platform and using it actively. So why not get them to see your brand and its efforts, and build an engaged community of users?

Top tips on how to use Instagram

Use visual content to attract your audience

Even in the case that you don’t have a physical product to showcase, you can get innovative and use visual aids to interest the audience. You can provide data that is of interest to potential clients by compiling it into infographics.

You can create posts with industry-specific humor or memes. Instagram allows you to get even more creative by posting images, videos, and animated gifs, streaming videos live, and publishing Instagram stories that expire after 24 hours.

Build a community of active followers

One of the ways to maintain the attention of your audience is by showing them what’s going on behind the scenes. This can be used to introduce them to the business’s workings or highlight the community culture within the company.

You can post screenshots of the latest software developments, announce upcoming launches or create interesting campaigns like asking employees to post selfies of views from their desks and tag your company within the posts. Such community-building efforts give your business a human touch and show that you are approachable and friendly. What’s more, it can also be used to entice potential employees.

Promote yourself at events and trade shows

Instagram is the perfect medium to show yourself in action at a trade show or an event where you are busy giving demos of your product to potential clients. You can create a steady stream of photos, videos, and even live commentary through Instagram stories of what’s happening at your booth. You can use the opportunity to offer discounts as well; for instance, the first 10 people to take a photo at your stall can avail of a 30% discount on your product.

Engage with the existing users of your products

Don’t forget to engage with your existing customers using Instagram. You can do this by recording video tutorials on how to use your software or showing them the use of interesting features or shortcuts to make their work more efficient. You can use the success stories of your clients and post their testimonials to add greater value to social proof.

Leverage paid advertising

Paid promoted posts are a way for you to extend your reach beyond what you are gaining through organic techniques. You will have to make the ad copy interesting enough so that the audience is tempted to click on the CTA button. Make sure that the CTA redirects them to your website or product subscription page and increases the likelihood of signups.

Optimize the use of hashtags

Hashtags allow you to organically reach those people who don’t follow you and would thus, normally, would not get your posts in their feed. However, if they follow a hashtag you have used in within your post, your post is likely to make it to their feed. You have the flexibility to use up to 30 hashtags with every post. As a business, you must focus on using SEO-optimised keywords as hashtags so that people who are interested in those keywords and follow them, can see your posts in their feed.

Instagram can give your SaaS marketing efforts a much-needed boost

As long as you share genuine content and original stories about your brand, you will find yourself creating a highly engaged community of fans on Instagram. With its many creative features, you can optimize engagement by choosing from a mix of content formats - you can post content in real-time, publish it for a limited time period or keep the posts permanently in your feed.

For example, businesses on Instagram get up to 37% of their total impressions from Instagram stories, the content that users can see on top of their feed page and which disappears after 24 hours.

With the right content planning, you can showcase your involvement within your industry or niche and find yourself in a strong position to compete with other SaaS brands or B2B businesses that are not yet using Instagram to their advantage.