How to Boost Your Instagram Marketing with Data Driven Campaigns

You will get better results for the same effort you put in if you build your Instagram campaigns on solid data. For example, you can double your engagement rates if you know when your audience is active on Instagram.

Instagram is the perfect place for brands to expose the products and offers by creating an attractive “digital showcase.”

Instagram marketing is not only a large number of posts and followers but the customer-centric campaigns that can bring your target audience to your Instagram account and draw your followers to truly engage it: like your photos, comment them, even make reposts and create their posts about your brand/product. So the first questions that come to mind:

How to plan the perfect Instagram marketing campaign?

Before you start your Instagram marketing campaign, there are a lot of things to do: create a unified theme for posts, make a content plan, schedule the posts for a week/a month, choose the right popular and niche hashtags, think over the captions and other useful steps. But the first step that you need to take – research all possible data about Instagram users.

Instagram marketing can’t exist without your account’s performance analytics. The statistics of the followers got, your posts liked and viewed are highly important. The blogs explaining how to measure the data of your account usually forget to mention about other Instagram users research: your current and potential customers, your competitors, Instagram influencers. This valuable knowledge for marketing lets you be aware of the audience’s interests and preferences, competitor’s growth strategies, influencers and micro influencer’s ways of engagement.

So to start planning your Instagram marketing campaign – you should first monitor and study the Instagram users activity: likes, comments and follows they make during a week/a month will help you to analyze the Instagram users and their behavior, user group interests, popular trends and much more.

Let’s consider in detail what data you can get from this research and how it can be useful. We used the data from the reports provided by the Instagram monitoring tool Snoopreport that tracks what users like, comment and follow.

Instagram user’s interests

The best way to get data about the user’s preferences is to analyze the posts he likes and the users he follows. Let’s view a report with all the likes and follows made by Katy Perry for one week.

The weekly report of katyperry account’s like and follows made

There are photo snippets of the posts liked and the usernames of the people that posted these posts. You can check the photos by clicking on them to see the content and make conclusions on the user’s interests. Plus in the interaction changes column, there is the information about the users that become more and less engaged by Katy Perry.

There are also content themes that attract the monitored user in the liked media tags:

Hashtags of the posts liked by jlo account

The cloud displays the hashtags are in the captions of liked posts, and most frequently used hashtags are in the bright font. Without checking every post separately, you get a complete list of tags and can highlight those that user focuses on when liking a post. This data is required when you target certain users by your content on Instagram and draw them to take action.

Instagram user’s activity periods

The information when the user is active on Instagram can enrich your marketing campaigns and make them more pertinent. But there is no such option on Instagram to see if a user is online: you can only guess by checking his posts and your following feed. If you need to know about the specific hours or days this data is in Actions Hitmap:

A weekly actions hitmap of jessicaalba account

This actions hitmap displays the data of the weekly activity. By analyzing it, you’re able to research the time frame and days when the user signs in on Instagram and checks his newsfeed and the frequency of the Instagram use by the following user. On the hitmap above you can see that Jessica Alba is most active from 16.00 to 17.00 and although she uses Instagram every day, she spends more time on Saturdays and Sundays there.

A monthly report provides more accurate data as it covers the longer period and contains more activity so the tendencies of user behavior are more precise.

A weekly actions hitmap of nickiminaj account

In the Nicki Minaj account’s report, there are no likes or follows made on Fridays, so she didn’t sign in and wasn’t active at all. The most active hours are from 2 pm till 18 pm and mostly on Thursdays, Wednesdays, and Sundays.

This way you can monitor all the users required to update your posts scheduling to target your audience so they wouldn’t miss your post. And if you need to get activity period insights of a large group of users you should use a group report feature that we’ll describe a little bit later.

Instagram user’s growth strategy

There are two common ways for Instagram users to grow their accounts: organic and automated. When the account’s growing organically it’s the user himself who performs all the actions: he likes and comments the posts, follows other users – so he engages them in the order they would like and follow him back. The automation, on the contrary, supposes the bot's activity: they like, comment and follow on your behalf – the only thing you should do is to target the hashtags or geotags or the specific users so the bot's actions would be more effective.

The best way to learn what method your competitors use to get followers is to monitor them for 2-4 weeks and compare their activity data with the common user behavior.

Normal user activity on Instagram

The organic growth data usually varies from 50 to 500 likes a week, and 20-50 follows. When these numbers are greatly higher, it’s obvious that the growth is automated.

Mass liking with 2482 likes a week made by kim_larry account

Above there is a weekly report of kim_larry account’s activity: 2482 likes are the proof that the user engages other accounts with the help of Instagram bots. But if you want to be 100% sure of the mass liking used, check his Activity Hitmap so to see continuous 24/7 activity and targeted time zone which is west coast.

The actions hitmap of the automated mass liking of kim_larry account

Liked media tags cloud will complete the strategy research by revealing what hashtags were used to target the media: SEO, socialmedia, contentmarketing, socialmediatips, business and more. The brighter tags are the most frequent in the liked posts.

Liked media tags of the posts liked by kim_larry account

Another approach to the Instagram automation is called the follow-to-follow method. The bots engage the users by following them, and usually, they will follow your account back.

The follow-to-follow method used on Instagram by jeffbullas account

As we mentioned earlier the normal follow activity is about 20-50 users followed within a week and if the number is more than a thousand be aware of the follow-to-follow tactic used.

You can also check the Activity Hitmap:

The actions hitmap of the automated follow-to-follow of jeffbullas account

The data displays the peer number of follows distribution and the 24/7 activity is distributed equally likely to avoid Instagram bans.

The user engagement strategy can be truly useful when you plan your campaign. You can use all the data for settings: borrow the list of targeted users, the required time periods for posting and other useful tricks.

Instagram influencers data

The Instagram marketing can’t be separated from influencer marketing as influencers can boost your brand to hundreds or even thousands Instagram users just by publishing one post or a story with your product. Their services can affect your budget as the influencers with 1 million (and more) followers charge huge rates. When collaborating with such influencers, you should reflect if you’ll get the best result from choosing them. Their followers may not coincide with your target audience, and you won’t benefit fully from this collaboration.

The better way to distribute your budget and attract the exact client you need is to pick micro influencers that have better engagement rates and more targeted audience.

Here is the guide to research the micro influencers on Instagram.

Select the users whose actions you want to monitor to get a user group insight. The easiest way is to check likers of yours and your competitor’s last Instagram posts. The number of monitored users can vary from 100 to 500 depending on your market size. Don’t forget to eliminate the bots from the list.
Add the users chosen to the dashboard and set the time of monitoring – 2-4 weeks will be enough.

Instagram users added at the Snoopreport dashboard

When the weeks are expired, generate a group report including the users whose activity is in the report during the period you set.

Group report with the list of users monitored and the users that got better engagement rates

The last step is to study the performance of the accounts to single out the accounts engaged mostly. They are the exact influencers you need – huge and micro influencers whose posts can target your audience with their promotional posts.

When using the data of this research, you can save your budget and get perfect results from your influencer marketing campaign by the cooperation with micro influencers.

Instagram user group behavior trends

Instagram can give insights of the user group’s behavior. By including the relevant users in your customized group report, you can research your customers and competitors.

Group report with the actions of 78 Instagram users

Likes and follows made by a group of users reveal the users that are gaining popularity on Instagram and the number of their posts that can be considered successful basing on the number of likes to each post. By analyzing the content of the most liked posts, you can highlight the user group common preferences, namely content that draw them to interact on Instagram.

The tags cloud will inform you about the engaging topics in a more detailed way so you can choose the hashtags to apply them to your content strategy. The periods of activity represented in the actions map will help you to adjust the scheduling of your posts.

Instagram marketing data for in-depth user analysis

The experienced marketers and researchers have a great opportunity to get the user actions chronologically in the CSV reports that are rich in exclusive data of the users, their posts, geotags.

CSV group report of 78 Instagram users (click to zoom)

You’ll be able to analyze the following data: the exact time and date of the action, usernames and full names, URLs of posts and media, posts captions geotags, metrics of likebacks and verified accounts. The user actions in CSV are available for an Individual user’s study as well as users’ group research.

The data is a valuable source for marketing. We described just one of the many tools that can help you to become a professional in the Instagram marketing field. There is plenty of Instagram analytics services as Iconosquare, for example, that will keep track of your account performance, or simply Instagram insights that are already built-in in the Instagram app. In the modern digital world that is constantly changing you should look for and use several tools to explore all possible statistics and profit the user activity data by tailoring your marketing campaigns.

The data for this article is provided by Snoopreport, the service which tracks Instagram user actions such as likes, comments and follows. It suits for the use by marketers who need to learn the competitors, target audience and influencers activity on Instagram.

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Image credit Priit Kallas