There are 11 ways to make your next Instagram marketing campaign stand out.

1. Don't start the campaign until it's the right time to do so.

When it comes to marketing, timing is everything. Don't start a meaningful Instagram campaign until the timing fits with the bigger plans and goals of your company.

A great example of this is Apple. The company didn't have an Instagram account for a long time. About a month before the iPhone 8 and iPhone X came out, Apple did a bold marketing campaign on Instagram that got them hundreds of thousands of followers in just a few hours. Try to time your launch with the same care if you want your campaign to be as successful as possible.

2. Make your campaign goals clear and easy to measure.

Setting campaign goals in the form of numbers will give you and your social media marketing team something to work toward. It will also encourage everyone to keep making improvements to make sure the goal is met or surpassed.

If a marketer doesn't tie an Instagram campaign to numbers, it will be hard for them to decide which updates or improvements to make first. If you have a clear goal in mind, it will be easier to figure out which tasks you should do first to get the best results.

This Instagram user with more than 2 million followers literally cooks her content.

3. Talk to people in your target audience to find out what they do on Instagram.

Understanding your customer is important if you want to make a good product or service, and it's also important if you want to make a great Instagram marketing campaign.

During the process of making a campaign, you should talk to people in your target audience to find out how they use Instagram. With this information, you can confidently come up with a campaign plan that meets their needs.

4. Try out different kinds of content to improve the campaign.

Even if you talk to people in your target audience, it might not be clear what the best Instagram content format is. The best way to find out what works and what doesn't is to try out different types of content and choose the one that does the best.

Instagram is different from other social media sites because it gives marketers a variety of formats to try. The newest format, Instagram Stories, has been a huge hit. Already, 250 million Instagram users use it. Instagram has a more traditional photo, video, and carousel content in addition to Stories, which has worked well for many brands. Last but not least, Instagram Live Video has been shown to work, especially with younger people.

5. Make a cross-channel strategy to get the most out of your efforts.

One study found that 72 percent of consumers prefer to interact with brands through multichannel campaigns. This is a clear sign that marketers should create coordinated Instagram campaigns that use other channels as support.

Marketers who want to make Instagram campaigns that work well should think about adding channels like email, display ads, direct mail, and live events to the strategy. This will help engage the target audience more.

6. Use hyper-targeted Instagram advertisements.

With Instagram ads, it's easy for marketers to reach the right people at the right time. But ads can get pricey very quickly. To keep costs down, think about making a hyper-targeted Instagram ad with the many targeting tools Instagram advertisers have access to.

Most likely, the cost-per-click or cost-per-impression of a hyper-targeted ad will be higher. But the total cost will be less than if you run an Instagram ad campaign that reached a large number of users.

7. Get ideas from all kinds of people who make content.

All of the best Instagram campaigns have one thing in common: they all have stunning content. This could be an image, a video, a live video, or a story. Look at the Instagram profiles of big brands, well-known influencers, and well-known photographers or videographers to get ideas for your own Instagram campaign.

8. Think about working together with a micro-influencer.

Influencers with a large following on Instagram can be expensive, hard to reach, and not on brand. Instead, think about finding a smaller influencer in your industry who has sway with your target audience and teaming up with them.

This will make sure that the money you spend on an influencer gets content to the people you want to reach. Also, a lot of micro-influencers are happy to take free products or contracts for less money, which can help keep campaign costs low.

9. Put together interesting Instagram captions and content to get better results.

Even though visual content is the star of Instagram, a catchy caption can go a long way toward making Instagram content more popular. For each image you want to post on Instagram during the campaign, make sure you have a compelling caption that fits the image and the campaign.

10. Come up with a clear, relevant call to action.

Make sure to include a clear and compelling call to action in the caption or in the visual content itself. This will encourage people to interact with your brand in a deeper way.

Instead of just telling people to go to your brand's website, try sending them to a certain page for a certain reason. Remember that some Instagram users log in about 11 times a day. That means that Instagram is a very "sticky" platform. You'll need to give your audience members a good reason to leave.

11. Decide when the campaign will start and when it will end.

Like any other marketing campaign, an Instagram campaign shouldn't last forever. You should instead make a campaign that has a clear start and end date. Doing so will give you and your team a clear way to measure how well the campaign is doing and can encourage everyone to find ways to improve it faster than usual.

Setting a start and end date will also let you and your team do a post-campaign analysis, which will make it easier to learn from successes and failures in the future.

Conclusion

Instagram campaigns can have a big effect on how well a business does. Why else would some of the biggest brands in the world spend so much time and money making Instagram marketing campaigns that make people gasp?

Marketers who want to make a campaign that moves the needle should first set clear, time-bound goals. Then, they should talk to people in the target audience to come up with ideas for interesting content that will get people's attention. Marketers can also make their Instagram campaigns work by working with "micro-influencers" and coming up with interesting captions.