If you think promoting your conference or another event on Instagram won’t bring desirable results — think again. Instagram is no longer just a platform for posting pictures but an effective tool for promoting any product.

How To Promote Your Event On Instagram

We will show you how to succeed in advertising your future webinar or any other event. Do not worry if you haven’t yet an Instagram profile — this is where we will start our little journey.

Setting up and filling in an Instagram profile

The registration process is very fast and intuitive. Watch this video if you encounter any problems.

Profile picture

The first thing a potential client will see is your profile picture. Make sure your smiling face is visible. It’s also a good idea to add your brand logo.

Profile description

The description will go right under your profile picture. You should indicate your occupation as a family psychologist or school teacher.

It’s worth highlighting your unique proposition. For example, unlike your competitors, you can help teach French in just 30 days, or lose weight without any diets.

You should also include a link to your website or a landing page.

Posts (content marketing)

Create a couple posts on your website or social media before you begin with the event promotion. This will help your potential participants and you to get to know each other better. So what should you publish?

If you conduct webinars, most likely you possess valuable knowledge and skills. Use that expertise to write interesting posts, which are likely to grab your audience’s attention. There are no limitations here.

What should be taken into account?

1. Schedule your posts at least one week in advance.
2. Ensure readability by dividing your content into paragraphs.
3. Take high-quality pictures.
4. Choose the best style for your photos and stick to it.
5. Use hashtags correctly.

Useful tools for Instagram promotion

We’ve great news for you: many tools exist to help you promote your event on Instagram. Here are some of them:

Social Captain: Its AI will help you find your client and connect with them by liking and commenting on their posts.

HootSuite: This platform provides content management, post scheduling and analytics services.

Grum: This application allows you to schedule and publish your posts automatically.

Tailwind: It analyzes user engagement, facilitates post scheduling and helps you manage your account.

Hashtracking: It is a simple and effective tool, allowing you to track and analyze your progress as well as create successful campaigns.

Hashtags

Probably everyone knows what a hashtag is, however, only few understand how to use them correctly. Therefore, we must first understand what hashtags are for, and how they can benefit your promotion efforts.

The word that comes after the # symbol has several purposes:

1. Sorting out content
Let’s say you primarily write about healthy eating, but sometimes you blog about jogging or reading. We recommend adding hashtags to sort out the content and make navigation easier for your subscribers. For example, add #runwithme under a jogging post, while #fridaybook will be perfect for a reading article.

2. Defining the topic
These are content hashtags, since they define a particular type of content. They also help increase the reach of your audience.

3. Popularizing the post/brand/product
These are branded hashtags, since their goal is the promotion of product/service, such as a webinar. Every company creates their own, unique hashtag.

Using hashtags to promote event on Instagram

Other users must include your hashtag in their posts. This way more people will find you.

Many popular brands can serve as examples on how to do hashtags right. For example, Red Bull encourages its clients to take pictures with their energy drinks in unusual places and add #PutACanOnIt to the photo. This marketing campaign had extraordinary success.

In other words, you need to think of something fun and engaging. In case of an upcoming event, it makes sense to organize a small competition.

Example. If you hold a conference on photography, you may hold a contest on the best photo from your subscribers. Ask them to mark their pictures with your special hashtag. Invite the most creative artists to participate in your webinar for free.

Talk about the future webinar on all social networks. To find out how to promote your webinar on Facebook, click here.

Event promotion

A marketing campaign does not mean posting “Come to my webinar because it’s so cool” every 5 seconds. People are tired of ads, and this kind of approach is only going to alienate them.

The task here is to post useful information that will encourage people to sign up for your webinar discreetly.

Example. Answer all comments under your posts. This will boost your reputation and consequently help promote your brand.

Instagram stories for event promotion

Do not forget about Instagram Stories, since they are a useful tool not only for your subscribers, but also for you. You can use Stories to poll your users and find out what time works best for them as well as decide upon the topic for your next event.

Don’t hesitate to ask your subscribers for their opinions about recent webinars, seek their advice, and do everything you can to keep the conversation going.

Do not ignore live streams, as this is a perfect way to answer all the questions you gathered via Instagram Stories.

You may think that streaming is not necessary, since you are going to cover everything in your webinar anyway. However, your task here is to give partial answers so that your audience gets curious and comes to your webinar for more.

Just keep in mind that Instagram will never replace a webinar service. You may, of course, stream on Instagram, but do not expect an excellent broadcast quality. Instagram simply does not offer the benefits that a professional webinar platform can provide.

Influencer marketing

This type of marketing is very effective. It comes as no surprise, since people often rely on those, they deem competent and trustworthy when choosing products or services.

Instagram’s influencer marketing hinges upon the bloggers and thought leaders who have power to persuade their audience.

You can pay them directly or suggest a cross promotion. As a result, they will recommend your product or service to their subscribers.

How to choose an influencer?

The content they post should be related to the topic of your webinar. For example, beauty bloggers are unlikely to attract the audience interested in a marketing webinar.

Look for creative people. A simple “Come visit a cool webinar” even from an extremely popular blogger won’t do you any good. Choose influencers that have an interesting and unique approach to advertising.

Make sure the influencers’ reach corresponds to your goals. We do not mean that you should only consider profiles with half a million audience. Beginner firms can benefit greatly from partnerships with smaller-scale influencers with up to 100 thousand subscribers. They do not have many promotional offers yet, which means you can get an ad for quite an attractive price.

Advertising

Ad on Instagram is configured on Facebook Ads Manager. The entire process goes in several steps.

Ads Manager

Go to your account on Facebook. Click on “Create ad” in the left column.

Purpose

Choose a purpose for promotion considering your tasks. We must admit that not all aims are suitable for advertising on Instagram. Only 6 of them are supported:

Name

Come up with a name of the ad campaign.

Audience

Specify demographics of users whom you want to show your ad. You can filter the audience by age, gender, location and language.

Placements

The ad is displayed on Facebook, Instagram and applications of Audience Network by default. If you want to limit a display of ad only on Instagram, select “Edit placement”. Remove a checkmark in front of Facebook and Audience Network.

Budget and schedule

Specify a budget and schedule according to which your ad will be shown.

Ad

Choose the ad format. Add a text and images.

That is all. Your advertisement is sent for moderation. After approval, it will be shown on Instagram.

Conclusion

It is definitely worth investing into the Instagram promotion of webinars and other events. Whether you choose regular advertising, content marketing or influencer endorsements, your posts must be regular and useful for your audience.

Try and find some time to talk to your subscribers in the comments and personal messages. Adopt a human-oriented approach and put a face on your brand.