Define Goals for Your Instagram Growth

You must know how to define goals to kickstart and sustain your Instagram growth. The great thing about social media is that you can have more control over your brand’s marketing with a carefully crafted content strategy. Indeed, many e-commerce startups are born on Instagram because it provides an accommodating and user-friendly platform for small businesses that can only afford a “hands-on” approach. Many enterprising individuals soon discover, however, that growing their brand and gaining more followers on Instagram is not as easy as it seems

When you’re taking your first steps toward Instagram growth, you have to define your goals to have a clear view of where you’re going.

Properly Define Goals to Optimize Instagram Growth

There are two key measures of Instagram growth: the rate of increase of your follower numbers and sustained engagement levels. But in order to achieve good numbers for both and optimize your growth journey, you must properly define your goals to get started on the right track and to make sure that you stay on it.

Keep in mind that Instagram gives your brand direct access to your target audience. This presents both wonderful opportunities and challenging goals to reach and engage with them on a personal level. This is where your defined goals come in, as they’ll help you determine the appropriate content strategy that will attract the right people and encourage them to follow you and interact with you on Instagram. 

When you set the right goals for your Instagram growth, you’ll be able to:

• Layout a suitable and long-term content strategy for a more efficient account management. 
• Properly manage your budget for sponsored ads and other social media marketing needs. 
• Define clear ROI expectations and goals. 
• Adeptly steer your business toward success.

Smart Goal Setting for a Smart Growth Strategy

When defining your goals for Instagram growth, remember that they have to be SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Define Specific Goals

When you define goals, ask yourself this: What are your brand’s specific needs? Your Instagram presence should specifically address these needs, first and foremost. Do you want to build brand awareness, boost conversions or sales, increase traffic to your website, provide customer service, or boost Instagram engagement? Aligning your Instagram goals with your brand’s needs will help streamline your growth strategy.

Define Measurable Goals

You should be able to measure your goals using reliable and quantifiable performance indicators. For Instagram growth, you can evaluate the performance of your organic content strategy and/or your boosted posts using Instagram Insights, which will also help you determine if your current strategies are suitably aligned with your goals. You can set your goals and assess your progress on the platform based on these insights:

• Recent highlights, which show you any notable increases in account performance. 
• Accounts reached or accounts engaged, which provide numbers categorized according to specific demographics. 
• Total followers, which show follower growth, top locations of your followers, age range and times they’re most active on Instagram.
• Content insights, which include interactions, discovery insights, and ad insights for boosted posts.

If your specific goal is to build brand awareness, for example, metrics that are commonly used to measure success include post reach, audience growth rate, potential reach, and social shares and mentions. If your goal is to boost conversion, you can get various conversion insights based on your conversion rate, click-through rate, and bounce rate.

Define Attainable Goals

You can set yourself up for success when you define goals that are realistic, which does not preclude lofty ones for your brand’s future. When it comes to business, how far you can go is often only limited by the heights of success you can envision for your brand. But to achieve your big dreams or your lifetime goals, you must set smaller, attainable, milestone goals that ultimately lead to the big prize.

For your Instagram growth, smaller goals can be a specific follower growth rate per month according to industry standards, a monthly sales target that may vary according to seasonal trends, or a target number for app installs by the end of an ad campaign.

Define Relevant Goals

If you’re exclusively growing your business on Instagram, your brand goals and Instagram growth goals are usually the same. But if you’re only using Instagram as one of your brand’s marketing platforms or for customer service purposes, then you have to define goals that are relevant to your Instagram account’s specific purpose. Setting relevant goals also means setting milestone goals that fit together perfectly to create the big picture — which is your ultimate vision for your business.

Relevant goals for your Instagram growth strategy could include reaching certain demographic groups through enhanced targeting or reaching a target number of participants in a Facebook contest to driving more traffic to your Instagram account. 

Define Time-Bound Goals

When you define your goals for your Instagram growth, you must also set a timeline within which you should achieve said goals, both short-term and long-term ones. If goal attainment does not occur within the specified amount of time, then your goal/s may not be specific or attainable or your timeline may not be realistic. You can determine the appropriate time frame for a certain goal based on your brand’s historical data on the platform or your competitors’ numbers for the same goal, or both. 

Final Thoughts: Start With a Goal-Oriented Approach for Lasting Instagram Growth

You have to know exactly what you want to achieve so you can formulate and execute the right plan to achieve it. Every business needs a road map to lead them to Instagram success. Best practices for Instagram growth serve as general landmarks that let you know where you are on the map; your defined goals are the specific markers you set for your brand based on your specific needs and targets.

With the right goals, you can be self-sufficient and achieve impressive organic Instagram growth. You can also go much farther with the help of a reliable growth partner, like Path Social. Path Social understands that lasting growth can only be attained if it’s organic and through proper audience targeting. Take advantage of their proprietary AI targeting technology and in-house team of experts, and start growing and gaining instagram followers today!