We're going to be deceiving ourselves if we say that all Instagram marketing strategies are one and the same because they aren't. While some strategies are known to bring instant results, others take a while, and some don't even live up to the hype at all.

But as a brand or business marketer, the last thing you want to do is invest your time and money on strategies that don't work. 

Here are seven powerful Instagram marketing tips that you can use to your business' advantage.

Create a business account

Switching to a business account on Instagram is a no-brainer if you want to reap the rewards of any marketing plan you intend to put in place. You can switch to settings on your IG page and click on "switch to business profile." Once your business account is launched, you can start benefiting from the plethora of perks that come with business Instagram profiles.

For example, with a business account, followers can contact you directly by clicking on your page's contact button, just like they would from your website. 

Business accounts on Instagram are allowed to create Instagram ads without using Facebook's advertising tools. 

Use Instagram free tools 

With your business profile, you'll become eligible for free tools on IG, such as Insights. Through Insights, you can view statistics such as impressions, engagement data, reach of posts, and even geographical data of your followers like their age, location, and gender. It is important to keep track of these statistics because the more you know about how users are interacting with, the better you can adjust your content to boost engagement. 

Sponsored ads

Even if you have a million followers already, sponsored ads are still a great option for you to explore. Remember that Instagram attracts over one billion monthly users, so even if you have a million followers to your name, that's just a fraction of the total number of people on the platform. 

Without sponsored ads, only the people following your business profile can see your updates and posts. But when you invest in sponsored ads, you get to promote your posts to anyone that fits your target audience.

Although sponsored ads don't come cheap, you can still control how much you want to invest in them, just like when you buy Instagram auto likes. 

You don't want to ignore Instagram stories

As we both know before now, posts on Instagram are not arranged chronologically; instead, the app algorithm updates them according to their recency. Now when you create a post, some of your target audiences can miss them if they don't come online to see the post. 

But with Instagram stories, you can keep your posts alive and visible to everyone for up to 24 hours. Rather than appearing in the news feed, they appear in the dashboard at the top of the screen, which is an area where users are quite used to looking at it. 

You can leverage Instagram stories to post product teasers, some mind-blowing behind-the-scenes content, photos, ads, and videos.

Influencers still work magic

If you want to boost your Instagram marketing results, you cannot do without working with the princes of the platform. They're your best bet if you want to build brand awareness, reach newer audiences, gain trust and loyalty, and ultimately sell more. 

Like it or not, most Instagrammers are still buying things and ordering services based on the influential people they follow or suggest.

If you can get a few influencers to mention, interact, or speak about you to their audiences, you would expose yourself to a far greater number of Instagrammers within a short while.

A perfect example of how massive the influence of an Influencer is on their followers can be seen in the relationship between Coca Cola and Selena Gomez. In a post published by Selena, she was seen sipping a bottle of Coke. And guess what happened afterward? The post got over six million likes.

Create an interactive branded hashtag

If you're looking to create instant engagement that makes users interact with your business, interactive hashtags are a great way to get it. 

Just take a look at what Red Bull did recently. The brand created an interactive hashtag #itgivesyouwings, and ever since, the tag has gone viral with over 299,612 posts created already. 

Interactive branded hashtags like this one encourage customers to post user-generated content on their pages in a bid to go viral . While your customers are doing this, they're exposing your brand to their followers, many of whom will likely want to check out what your brand is all about.