Guest post by Mitt Ray.
When you tell people you want to promote your B2B company on social media, they all tell you to jump on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is an excellent B2B network, but Instagram is another great option for B2B and B2C companies alike. All types of B2B firms – including SaaS companies, ecommerce stores, infopreneurs, coaches, and service providers – use Instagram to successfully promote their businesses.
If you’re unsure about how to use Instagram for your B2B businesses, here are several post-type ideas to get you going.
Create carousels with tips
According to this study from Buffer, the content format that gets the highest engagement on Instagram is the carousel.
So, instead of posting just one still image, post a series of photos.
You might start by creating a “Five tips to…” post with seven slides, where the first slide teases the contents of the carousel. Then, you share five tips in the next five slides, and in the final slide, you have a call to action.
For ideas, check out the carousels that Buffer publishes themselves.
View this post on Instagram
They regularly publish carousels with a ton of tips. I especially like this one, in which they share graphs that help you quickly identify the best types of posts on each social network.
You can easily create carousels like these using a tool like Lightricks Photoleap, even if you have zero design skills. It gives you access to filters, collages, effects, text overlays, icons, and a background remover.
You can also add photos and edit colors to make sure they match your brand style. And you can do it all directly on your mobile device. They have apps for both Android and iOS.
After you create carousels like these, make sure you accompany them with a good description and also schedule the posts at the best time using a tool like Buffer or Tailwind.
Build relationships using video
If you are an excellent writer, you can build relationships with your audience with just text. However, videos are arguably more impactful. Even if you don’t create the greatest content in the world, videos will help you connect with your audience in a way that you won’t be able to with just text.
You can record these videos with your phone using a simple PAS (problem > agitate > solution) script. You start by stating the problem, then agitate by describing it in more detail, and finally, share the solution at the end.
With most of these videos, you won’t ask people to buy anything, as your goal is simply to build a relationship of trust and value. You need to mostly share tips, but you can also experiment with sharing fun videos from your personal life or the lives of your employees.
You can occasionally share content that asks people to sign up for something like an eBook or course, or even a rare video that asks people to buy something. People will be more likely to take action when you share more promotional content because of the relationship you’ve already built with them.
For some ideas, check out HubSpot’s videos. You might think that they only post tips on marketing CRM tools and social media marketing, but they also share fun videos like the one below.
View this post on Instagram
Videos like these help you to have positive feelings about HubSpot and its employees.
In a similar manner, create video content that helps build a bond with your audience. To get more clicks, make sure you add a thumbnail like they did.
It’s a good idea to publish your videos as reels instead of stories. I am not suggesting that you completely refrain from posting video stories, but to keep those to a minimum and publish more reels.
Instagram rewards you with more engagement with reels, because they are using this feature to convince people to use their platform instead of TikTok.
You can sell products after you build a relationship. You could publish content such as video tutorials of your products or services and ask people to click the link in your bio (where you send them to a landing page) to learn more.
Instagram also offers a checkout feature where people can make purchases directly on the platform. This feature is mostly used by ecommerce stores, but B2B businesses can also try it out.
If you have Shopify, you can also connect Shopify payments to ensure the transaction goes through your Shopify account instead of Instagram’s gateway. You can even connect a merchant account like PaymentCloud to your Shopify account to ensure the payment gets directly deposited in your account.
You might think using Shopify for a B2B business sounds weird, but there are a lot of apps in their marketplace that make it easy to sell SaaS products, services, and even courses.
Go live
If you want to get better results with video, you could also try going live. Few people take advantage of this feature. When you go live, Instagram updates its users that you just went live, and they perk up and check out your videos, especially if you consistently publish good content.
You could also promote this live session on your other social networks and with your email list and run it like a webinar.
Run ads
If you log in to your Instagram account and scroll through, you are likely to see a ton of ads for B2B businesses.
SaaS companies, coaches, infopreneurs, and all sorts of other B2B businesses try to sell you their services and products here because Instagram, with its over 2 billion users, is one of the best places to do this. And because the ads are on Meta, you can simultaneously run ads on Facebook.
People feel proud of doing everything organically and generating clients and customers for free, but this is hard to scale on social networks, especially when you have a small following. 
To get the best results, you should combine organic methods with ads.
Your organic content can help you test your offers for free, while your ads can help you scale results.
However, make sure that you also run TOFU (top of the funnel) ads on Instagram. Your TOFU ads should focus on acquiring and nurturing an audience with helpful content. Your MOFU (middle of the funnel) ads should get your target audience to sign up for a lead magnet, and your BOFU (bottom of the funnel) ads should get prospects to buy something.
For an idea, check out this ad (right) from Seth Godin’s nextmba. This is a BOFU ad about his course.
You can run ads like these by yourself or use ad automation tools like Revealbot to help you out.
It has all the necessary features to launch, manage, and track ads, which is extremely useful, especially if you have never run ads before. The tool also lets you manage ads on other networks, such as Google, TikTok, and Snapchat, which can save you a lot of time.
Get influencers to promote your products
B2B influencer marketing might sound weird, but it’s actually a major force in B2B marketing right now. A lot of companies are investing in B2B influencers to promote their products.
It’s just like traditional B2C influencer marketing, which is mostly used to sell products on ecommerce stores. While, with B2B influencer marketing you find influencers with followings that consist of the people you want to reach. And then you team up with them to get them to promote your product.
The B2B influencer could either share some tips and talk about how they use your product in one of the tips, or they could do a complete review of how they use your product. You could also reach out to customers (with big followings) who are already using your products. You can find influencers with Instagram search and reach out to them via DMs or by using a tool like BuzzStream.
Make sure you accompany the images or videos with good copy, hashtags, and a call to action that gets them to check out your Instagram page and products.
Don’t sleep on using Instagram anymore
If you log in to Instagram at any time of the day, you will notice multiple ads from B2B companies. If you check out the accounts of these companies, you will notice that many of them have an organic presence as well.
They actively market their business with both organic and paid methods on this site because it’s a massive network with over two billion users.
If you, too, want to get the most out of this network like them, follow the above tips and launch your Instagram marketing strategy for your B2B company.
Mitt Ray is the founder of Social Marketing Writing. Visit his website to download free social media visual templates for Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and more networks.
The post Five Effective Instagram Post Ideas for B2B Businesses appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog | Webbiquity.