6 Easy Ways to Delight Your Instagram Business Audience

Updated March 25, 2022

Rejuvenate your team, create your brand, and grow your business in the process.

Right, this minute, there are 1.3 billion (with a capital B) Instagram users, and 81% are using the platform to research businesses and brands.

That’s a lot of opportunity to delight even more people with what you have to offer the world. (Look at that! The HubSpot Flywheel works everywhere).

If the phrase “Instagram for Business” sounds a little intimidating and conjures ideas of highly curated, sharp images and infographics that look expensive, we get it. 

We remember that feeling, so we put together this guide to show you that it’s actually a lot easier than it looks for a number of reasons.

The most important one? It's FUN, and when something is fun, it’s not really working at all—especially if you follow a content framework that fits your business, involves your team, and evolves your brand over time.

Here’s a little secret: because Instagram looks like a website no matter what, it’s always going to look fantastic with minimal effort—especially with Instagram’s built-in tools in Reels, Stories, and Live—so just play! 

All the best play has a dash of order, and we’ve discovered that alternating our posts for balance and structure helps us stay focused without having to think too much about what type of content we’re going to post from day to day. 

Our Content Framework 

Remember how much fun it is to cook when you haven’t spent all your energy figuring out what’s for dinner? That’s how it works. 

With this organic plan in mind, our team is free to be creative inside structure, and that inspires us to be ourselves and really show off who we are while creating a stunning Instagram presence that we love.  

When you post with that kind of authenticity, you engage the right followers, and, over time, that just naturally translates to more work that feels like play, more sales, more leads, and more delight for all. 

We like to break our posts into these six different types of content that serve our followers and clients: 

• Give Without a Get = Create Value 
• Highlight Clients through Reviews = Spread the Love
• Inspire People = Free Motivation
• Celebrate Your Achievements = Show Off Your Brand
• Engage Your Community = Make a Difference
• Show How You Play! = Attract the Right People

Give Without a Get

It’s one of our core values at Growth from our inception, so it makes sense that we would give without expecting anything in return on Instagram, too. 

Offering up a free eBook, webinar, tip, or tool is a great way to say: Hey! This is what we do, and we want the world to have it. Because that’s who we are anyway. 

Instagram’s business account allows for a simple link tree that puts your best free products as close as a click, and when it’s that easy for people to get a real chance to check out what you do, gathering happy supporters along the way is just a bonus.

Free Helpful Content: HubSpot Developer Resources

 

Highlight Clients through Reviews

When you get that raving review from a client or a fantastic comment on social media from a follower, post it on your Instagram. These referrals represent countless hours of love and energy that you’ve put into the work you do, so share it. 

A post like this accomplishes 4 really important things:

1. It shows clients and followers how much they mean to you—especially when you make it beautiful by using a creator platform like Canva; 
2. It delivers top-notch client service that shows people who are not yet your clients how special the experience of working with you can actually be.
3. It spotlights your clients and builds value for them using your platform. (We all want success for others as much as we do for ourselves. Help create that world by spreading the love).
4. It highlights the work you do every day.

Bonus Content Alert: How to Inspire Customer Reviews

Inspire People

Posting motivational quotes that mean something to you and your team is a presentation of your company culture that not only correlates who you are to potential clients, it gives them something of value to take away. 

One of our favorite ideas: Write down the brilliant things your team members say during creative collaborations, and post those quotes (with their permission, of course). 

Here’s another: ask your team for their favorite quotes, poems, or song lyrics. Sets the words against images that fit their meaning. 

Motivational posts go viral because they have the power to change people for the better. 

Make sure to attribute quotes to their sources and to your business. Everyone deserves kudos for spreading goodness, and your business is no exception, so don’t forget to place an 8-font or smaller trademark inside the meme itself to ensure that your business gets the credit it deserves for putting it out there in that format.

We use our own hashtag + out logo to let people know that it came from our team even if it gets separated from the original post.

Inspirational Bonus Content: How to Create a Company Culture for Growth

 

Celebrate Your Achievements

Celebrating your accomplishments tells a story about who you are and what you can do. It’s authentic advertising that feels good to your team, too. When you’ve all done great work, it deserves an acknowledgment that should be shared far beyond your boardroom. 

Instagram is the perfect platform from which to yell from the rooftops when you’ve scored big (or small). When you celebrate yourself, the world celebrates with you.

It’s a great way to keep the focus on your business with a weekly check that says: YES; onward!

Check out our Latest Achievement: Growth: A HubSpot Platinum Solutions Partner

Engage Your Community

Whether our team is helping to clean up Lake Ivanhoe in our Orlando headquarters, shopping local, actively caring for the environment, or collectively working to show gratitude for essential workers during the pandemic, we’re representing what it means to Grow Better, Together as a business in a changing world.

It’s what leaders do, and it makes a difference. 

When community posts are in our content rotation, it gives us another moment to focus on who, what, and how we’re serving what matters most. We love the opportunity to ground ourselves in the now, be grateful, mindful, and act for change.

Another Way We Help Our Community + Our World: Our Blog!

Show How You Play!

At the end of the day, your team is your brand, and Instagram’s image-driven platform allows for infinite opportunities to show the world who they are. 

All of us are building more quality time with people we admire and respect, and when you create fun in the workplace (even if it’s on Zoom), these are snapshot moments that lend themselves to building a team image on Instagram that your customers and clients will love and eagerly follow for more. 

Make sure everyone understands the value of documenting team-building and collaboration with video and photographs and encourage them to share. Put together a file of the best shots of your team and show the world how much fun work can be.

Calendar events like International Women’s Day are choice times to showcase how truly valuable your team is. Because we have such a small team, we love to recognize each of them on birthdays, too. This gives everyone an opportunity to meet and engage with your clients and followers as part of your brand. 

Alternate Focus + Creators

Nothing puts the social in social media like inspiring each of your team members to contribute, and Instagram makes that easy.

When you alternate the focus of each post and assign a day to each of your team members, you can build your business and your team at the same time. 

Having a plan and giving your team free rein to post around a content framework like ours makes Instagram feel like play and look like hard work. That’s engaging content that inspires people on both sides of the dashboard.

Everyone has something to offer to social posts, and Instagram can be a tool to engage the creative in every member of your team. Let your people show off what they do and who they are.

Instagram as a Branding Tool

Mindfully choosing the color, design, and tone as you create a post on Instagram can actually develop your brand organically over time. We stick with specific shades of green and images from nature that pop with our logo and theme of #growbettertogether because we’ve discovered that we naturally gravitate toward this look and feel.  

If you begin with a simple idea and a color, as you grow and change and see what pleases you and your team, trends emerge that really build your brand.

Watching our content grow right there on one scrolling page allowed us to create an overall image for our firm that we love more with every post.

We’re constantly evolving, and Instagram is one of the tools we use to clarify what we love about our brand and help us keep growing. When we love it, our clients love it, too.

It’s okay if you don’t have an idea, to begin with. Just start.

Take a look at how our brand has changed. This screenshot from earlier in our Instagram journey (above) is hardly recognizable from the look we sport now, but that’s part of it, too: seeing our evolution on the platform over time shows us also how far we can go in the future.

It’s like looking back over a hiking trail to inspire us to keep it up.

When you think of Instagram as a branding tool, involve your team in creating your presence, and utilize our 6-day framework for alternating posts, delighting an Instagram audience for your business can become the actual fun that inspires a following.

If you need help figuring out where to start or how to boost your social media presence, we’re right here to square your shoulders for moving forward.