5 tips for wedding businesses on Instagram

With more than 300 million people sharing their photos, videos and stories every single day, Instagram is the social network to be on if you want to find media-savvy, image loving millennials on the brink of marital bliss. With engagement on Instagram 15 times higher than Facebook, you have an opportunity here to convert interactions into potential sales, so here are our top 5 tips on utilising Instagram for your wedding business.

1. Create a brand

When people choose to follow your business on Instagram, they are effectively signing up to receive marketing imagery, so you need to make sure you’re offering something beautiful (after all this is Instagram) but also something consistent and frequent. There’s no point posting pictures of puppies one day and a corporate business card in a few weeks’ time (although pro tip – animals always go down well).

Consider paying attention to colour palettes and arrangements in the same way you would if you had a physical presence – Instagram is your virtual shop window so think about arrangements, layouts and displaying everything holistically.  A great example is Amie Bone Flowers who posts a lot of floral designs and is consistently posting stunning images of flowers, but also dips in with luxury event and wedding images.

2. Use hashtags

This is how Instagram users will potentially find you at first. They’ll be looking for wedding ideas, and therefore you need to look at what hashtags work for your business. Check out rival companies and how they use hashtags. It’s best practice to only use 3-4 maximum in the text copy of the image, as you don’t want to look spammy.

Luxe Proposals are all about hashtags, so they’re worth a sneaky peek at for inspiration. They also add more hashtags in the comments later on. You can also turn hashtags around and search them yourself to find potential customers who are posting them. Then, comment on their photos acknowledging them with a comment such as, ‘congrats’, as a way to introduce your business and get them looking out for you.

3. Utilise your profile

The only place on Instagram where you can share a clickable link is in your bio, so this is the real goldmine when it comes to driving traffic back to your website. You can update this link with your newest pieces of content or for specific campaigns to drive engagement. You also only have a few characters to describe yourself, so make sure you include plenty of contact details and some smart keywords such as where your business is based (locality is important in the wedding industry) and a little synopsis on your business. Think of three things your business is all about and create your 150-character bio around them.

4. Jump on the new innovations

Instagram is always looking for next big thing, and it recently launched ‘Stories’ as a way to counter rival Snapchat. Allowing users to create videos documenting their daily life which then disappears after 24 hours, is great concept for businesses to show their behind-the-scenes stories, run quick and limited offers and general highlights; without worrying about over posting. Paperknots is a fantastic stationer who has been utilising this new feature; including videos of her pet cat, some sneak peeks of her stationery photoshoots and some wedding photography too.

Boomerang is also a fun platform Instagram owns, where video is stitched together to play back and forth. And then there’s the newest addition of its carousel post, where you can share 10 photos and videos in one single post. Perfect if you can’t decide on just one photo! Wedding businesses are commonly targeting millennials, who want to see the newest innovations in technology, so you need to get yourself associated with these developments and embrace them to gain followers.

5. Network with likeminded professionals

You can find some real valuable contacts through searching through hashtags and users near you. Make sure you comment on other posts as Instagram really does work both ways! You might strike such a rapport that you end up collaborating in the future. Wonderland Invites is a great example of this. The wedding stationer commonly shares others’ posts which are still true to her brand, and has worked on shoots collaborating with other businesses met via Instagram.

What do you think of our advice? Tell us what you’ll be posting on Instagram, or if you have tips and tricks of growing engagement and traffic through it by commenting below!