Instagram is a critical piece in today's social media marketing world. However, we often hear the frustration coming from certain businesses accusing IG to be only for "fun, cool brands." That's why we wanted to talk about building an Instagram strategy for non-visual businesses. Are you a B2B business in a less digitalized niche? Or a service-based company? Or perhaps you simply don't feel comfortable sharing too much about yourself visually? Then this guide is for you.

In this short article, we will cover the fundaments that will help you understand how you can leverage Instagram marketing to grow your business. Topics include:

• What your audience expects to see on Instagram

• What is visual storytelling

• A quick guide to building an Instagram marketing strategy

• How to free yourself from the IG peer pressure of having to be pretty and hip

IG Audience Behavior Overview

Why are people on Instagram?

According to the latest Hootsuite report, 81% of people use Instagram to research products and services. However, the average engagement rate for posts made by an Instagram business account is a sad 0.96%.

What this tells us is an urgent need for businesses - especially non-visual businesses, to embrace Instagram properly so they're not just "being visible," but begin to use Instagram as a conversion tool.

Instagram Audience Demographic

The popular misbelief is that Instagram is for "cute, pretty things." However, the male and female user proportions are almost half and half on Instagram in real life. The largest age group on Instagram remains the young adult bucket. This explains why businesses positioning for long-term market return should take Instagram seriously — because in a few years, the main decision-maker population would be those adequately using Instagram as a research tool.

Basics of Visual Storytelling

So, how do you attract, engage, and retain Instagram users when you don't have "pretty things" to share?

To answer this question, we must first understand the core components of visual storytelling and how it fits with your audience's behavior.

Ignite Curiosity

Social media marketing targets audiences in the awareness and interest stage of their customer journey. Therefore, your first goal is to ignite someone's curiosity.

Think about the things that make you curious - what prompts you to click on a post?

Some tactics you can use to ignite audience curiosity on Instagram include:

• Short videos showing only a thumbnail image

• Reels with a fun or relatable opening - such as your laptop screen with a page pulled up

• multi-image posts with a cover calling readers to keep swiping while telling them what the content is about.

Educate and Inform

For non-visual, service-based businesses on Instagram, your goal is to aid your audience in their research process. Therefore, your content should focus on educating and informing, with a mixture of other things you believe your audience would be interested in.

Think about magazines. Usually, you see the following content in a magazine:

• Personal messages: an editor's note, Q&A columns, or commentaries

• Informative content: what the magazine is actually about

• Community content: what's going on among the audience or professional community, such as events and major news outbreaks

• 3rd party content: content that you didn't create

Keep it Digestible

For some people, long captions work. Yet, generally speaking, your audience has a short attention span when browsing on IG. Therefore, you must keep your content digestible.

If you make a video, add any captions and pointers in the video. The fewer steps your audience needs to take, the better. Again, let's use the magazine metaphor. Remember how most articles have a summary blurb at the beginning? Unless the blurb interests you, chances are, you would move on to the next page without reading any further.

With Instagram being a graphic platform, the image or video your user lands on is the blurb. That's why you must make your content digestible — always be prepared that people won't actually read your captions.

Conclusion

When building an Instagram strategy for a non-visual business, you must treat the platform more as an educational platform than a conversion tool. For a service-based business, keeping the look-and-feel means maintaining your brand identity on Instagram. Because pure image content has less value for a service provider, we recommend you treat your account as a magazine and put text or informative content at a higher priority, but use simple images as spacers to give your readers a break.