The Top Instagram Tools To Help You Improve Your Marketing Strategy

Top Instagram Tools: The key to successfully growing and reaching your target audience on Instagram, fortunately or unfortunately, lies in the strategy. You can have the most beautiful pictures, the best-crafted captions, and the most amazing brand to promote, but those won’t mean much if you don’t have a top-notch strategy to go along with them.

Over 200 million users visit at least one business profile per day on the app. Instagram is becoming more and more useful for businesses and brands, but it’s important to remember that using Instagram for personal use is different than using it for building your business in a handful of ways. The biggest of those is the use of strategy.

On a personal page, only your personal ego could be hurt if you post at a non-optimal time: maybe you won’t get as many likes. When you use it for business though, posting at a bad time could mean that fewer people see your post, which could indicate fewer sales from that post.

A great Instagram strategy involves hashtags, timing, image curation, scheduling, graphics creation, editing, analysis, and growing your platform, just to name a few. This can all seem overwhelming, so if it does, don’t worry. There are plenty of Instagram tools to help you move through this process and improve your marketing strategy and presence on the app.

Top Instagram Tools for 2020

1. Kicksta for Instagram Growth

The best way to find and attract more real followers to your Instagram account is to go out there, engage with their posts, and entice them to come learn more about you. Instagram is a social media platform, so it makes sense that they want us to be social. However, you probably already know that spending time engaging on the app can sometimes lead you down a rabbit hole of lost time. And besides, you probably have more pressing items on your to-do list than going and “liking” the most recent posts of people you want to have following you.

That’s where the Instagram growth service Kicksta comes into play. Let’s address the elephant in the room first: with Kicksta, you aren’t buying likes or followers or the risk of getting into trouble with Instagram itself. Nope – instead, you’re working with a time-tested company that has helped over 10,000 brands build authentic connections with ideal followers.

You provide Kicksta with a list of accounts who are similar to you, but more importantly whose followers are similar to your followers. Then, Kicksta will do the heavy lifting for you and like the posts of those accounts’ followers – chances are high that if they like brands similar to yours, they’ll like yours too. Then it’s up to the users – they can now see that your brand liked their post, so they’ll go check your profile out. If you have excellent content that sparks their interest, you’ve just gained your followers.

By building your audience this way, you’re sure to get real, organic followers who are interested in your posts and eager to engage with you. They chose to follow you, after all! Your follower counts won’t be inflated, they’ll be full of people who want to learn about your brand and potentially become customers.

And Kicksta works for profiles and brands of all types:

2. Crowdfire for Scheduling

One of the most useful tools when it comes to Instagram is a scheduler. No one wants to have to think about posting every single day. Scheduling your posts in advance gives you the freedom and flexibility to not have to worry about remembering to post – especially when you realize it’s 7 pm and you haven’t even thought about the post for the day.

With Crowdfire, you can organize your thoughts and put together all of your posts for the week at once. You can even see your gallery preview to make sure your posts flow well and look good next to one another. Drag and drop your posts to create a plan that works for you and your brand.

Planning and scheduling your posts in advance gives you the space to create meaningful content that actually resonates with your audience, rather than hastily-thrown-together posts at the last minute. You can be thoughtful about your hashtags, call-to-action, and any associated links or pages.

Oh – and did we mention that Crowdfire lets you schedule Instagram stories, too?! Yep, if you have content you know you want to have in your stories, let Crowdfire handle that for you too! Some of the magic of stories still comes in the live-posting moments of a behind-the-scenes look at your day, but it can also be nice to have a mix. That way you don’t have to worry about remembering that core messaging, but your followers can also see behind the curtain.

Not convinced? Take it from someone who loves Crowdfire:

3. Iconosquare for Analytics

When talking about any type of strategy, marketing included, it’s crucial to have a means of measurement. If you don’t have some type of data about how your posts are resonating with your audience and how your account is doing, it can be very difficult to improve.

That’s why one of the most important tools you can add to your Instagram suite is an analytics provider. Instagram itself provides you with some basic analytics that you should already be monitoring, but there are many tools that exist that can give you a much deeper look into your results.

Iconosquare gives you access to beautiful, easy-to-read analytics that show more than just your followers’ demographics and the best time to post. (Although those are indeed both important things to know.) They’ll help you understand your average engagement rate on each post so you know what’s resonating and what’s falling flat.

You can also see industry benchmarks so you can understand how you’re doing compared to your competitors and other similar accounts. If you use promoted posts as part of your marketing strategy, Iconosquare gives you analytics on those so you can fully understand how well they’re doing.

Using analytics gives you the ability to make changes and optimize your strategy so that every post you publish is working for you and your brand.  It’s why Iconosquare is one of the top Instagram tools, but don’t just take it from us:

4. Over for Graphics Creation

Depending on your brand, goals, and strategy, you might not want every single post to be a photograph. For many accounts and industries, mixing graphics into their feed is a great way to create visual variety and engage with their followers, rather than just posting photographs. Creating graphics can seem daunting, though, especially if you’re not a graphic designer. Advanced Adobe programs can sometimes feel overwhelming when you don’t know how to use them.

Over, however, solves that problem. They have evolved well beyond their initial text-over-photos mission and now offer easy-to-use features that the pros love. From blending images seamlessly, to hiding parts of a layer to show a different image, you can easily achieve high-quality results.

But they don’t stop there. The team at Over wants to make sure you never have a shortage of content, so they provide inspiration libraries as well as access to stock images you can use and edit to your heart’s content. Simply upload your logo, set your brand colors and fonts, and start creating content that’s sure to impress your followers.

We aren’t the only ones who love Over:

5. VSCO for Photo Editing

While the overly-perfect Instagram feed is starting to go out of style in favor of a more realistic look, it’s still important to have images that look good next to one another and that all seem to flow. One of the easiest ways to create this cohesive look is with consistent photo editing. Whether you love to spend time creating the perfect filter, or if you’d rather use a preset, make a tweak or two and then schedule it, we’ve got the perfect tool for you.

VSCO is one of the most popular photo editing software options that doesn’t need you to well-versed in editing. You can create or find the perfect preset for your brand that matches your colors, vibe, and overall theme. If you’d rather play with the contrast and saturation levels yourself, VSCO gives you the tools to do so.

Like Over, VSCO also has a gallery of inspiration so you can check out popular content if (okay, when) you happen to have a block in creativity. As a member, you can edit your videos, and participate in the weekly photo challenges that encourage you to try something new and see how it works. (And you can verify that with your analytics, right?)

VSCO is by creators, for creators, and is here to help you create an aesthetically pleasing feed.

Top Instagram Tools Final Words:

So there you have our top five Instagram tools that are sure to have an impact on your Instagram marketing strategy. Each of these excels in their own specialty. When you combine all of their strengths, you have the tools to support and implement an Instagram strategy that builds your brand and engages with your followers. These tools will save you time while helping you consistently serve your followers.

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash