Instagram marketing has a unique role to play in most any social media campaign. And one of the nice things about Instagram as a marketing tool is its ease of use. Because it is image-centric, it tends to convey very straightforward and easily digestible messages. That is beneficial for both consumers and content creators. And both of those groups also have virtually unlimited opportunities to develop engagement through text captions, comments, and content curation.

Paid advertising adds still another dimension to your Instagram marketing strategy. And you may find that users appreciate the transparency of these ads, while not overlooking them as readily as they tend to do on some other platforms. Such ads are clearly marked, but they are also skillfully built into users’ feeds. The site’s algorithms go a long way toward presenting paid ads to the right audience. And a social media marketing company can help to narrow the audience down even further through the use of keywords, hashtags, and active engagement.

This also goes to show that while Instagram is easy to use as an individual, Instagram marketing can be made much more powerful with professional assistance. An experienced digital marketing firm can help its clients to fully utilize the wealth of data that is available through Instagram. Some of that data comes from Facebook, the platform’s parent company. And this represents a clear opportunity for your marketing campaign to be quickly built into a cross-platform, integrated strategy.

Effective social media marketers should be able to draw upon relevant experience to analyze traffic patterns, engagement statistics, and other details of your Instagram marketing campaign. And from there, they should also be able to fine-tune your strategy, on an ongoing basis. In this way, you can be sure to maximize not only your Instagram’s views and likes but also, crucially, ecommerce conversions.

Obviously, such conversions are the ultimate goal of most social media marketing campaigns. But it is important to remember that they are always dependent upon the more near-term goal of building an audience. In the right hands, Instagram marketing can be especially good at that. The platform’s day-to-day popularity and ease of use make it a great tool for building brand loyalty and long-term interest in quality content.

And if some of that loyalty comes from people with a strong following of their own, so much the better. Instagram is the primary platform for “influencer marketing,” and a professional Instagram marketing campaign can use it to great effect. By fostering relationships with influencers, your social media managers will help your account to reach beyond the normal constraints of both “organic” marketing and paid advertising.

The existence of a third alternative demonstrates that Instagram marketing – and social media marketing in general – is sometimes more complex and nuanced than amateur users realize. By partnering with a professional digital marketing agency, those individuals can gain access to whole new areas of the social media landscape.