Part of your aim as an Instagram marketer, is to sell a dream. You want to promote a certain lifestyle and communicate a particular way of life that your audience will find inspiring and that will convince them to follow your channel and hopefully buy from you.
If you have a fitness brand for instance, then you need to portray a lifestyle that’s all about health and fitness and that makes you appear to be in amazing shape and to have everything going for you. If you have a clothing brand meanwhile, then you need to show people looking beautiful and attractive and thereby sell that dream.
So, the question is… how do you go about selling the dream?
Think About the Details
When it comes to painting a picture with your Instagram pictures, it’s crucial that you pay attention to the small details. You need to communicate an image of being successful, organized, healthy and confident. No one wants to buy from someone who seems as though they can’t get their own act together!
And it’s the tiny things you forget that can imply a lot about you.
For example, if you are taking photos of technology in order to make it look desirable on Instagram, then you need to think about the condition of the tech and you need to think about the backdrop. Is the phone that you’re showing off covered in dust? Because if so, then it’s not going to look premium or desirable!
Is there a coffee stain on the table? Because if so, it’s going to make your home look untidy and therefore unprofessional!
Even the weather matters. If you take a photo of someone outside in the sun, then that will look glossier and more professional than the very same photo taken in the rain.
Telling a Story
What you also need to think about, is how small details in your photo can allude to other things about yourself. Think about the story you are telling through the things that are present or absent in your image.
For example, you can take a photo of yourself running, or you can take a photo of your running shoes covered in mud with your headphones strewn next to them for effect. In just a few words, this is telling your audience that you’ve just been on a run and it says something about your determination and your love of fitness.
When you leave the viewer to fill in the blanks, it can often be more impactful than if you come right out and attempt to ‘say’ something with your photo.
Settings and Filters
Of course Instagram is all about the filters and this is one of the things that makes it so well suited to being used for marketing. A filter can increase the saturation and contrast in a photo, thereby making a sunny location look that much brighter and more vivid. Even if the viewers know it isn’t true to life, it’s all about the way it makes them feel.
Other filters can make a photo more retro, or more ‘grungy’. Think about the emotions you want to evoke and tweak your photo to suit!
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