Have you ever heard the story that humans are much slower than the fastest animals on earth?

Have you also heard that if you add a bike to the equation, humans all of a sudden win? Not even to talk about cars and planes.

The moral of the story is:

Humans are tool-making creatures.

Tools are how we have advanced our lives and everything we have around us.

If you want to boost your Instagram Marketing efforts, you need to right tools. Not just the right tools, but also understanding how they should work together, what you need before using the tools, and more.

In this article, we’ll go over which Instagram Marketing Tools you should be using and how.

Let’s get into it!

1. Set up your Social Media Strategy with StoryLab.ai’s Growth Storytelling Framework

Before learning how to ride a bike, it’s good to know why you want to learn how to ride it. You want to get somewhere faster or you want to have fun, right? Knowing the why can motivate you to put in the work.

For boosting your Instagram Marketing, you really need to hone in on a couple of things before you just start creating Insta posts and scheduling them.

We’ve created a Growth Storytelling Framework which you can access for free here (no email signup is needed). It consists of the following spreadsheets AND guides to walk you through it. Use what you need, trash what you don’t. Make it your own and use it to your advantage. Included in the framework:

Content Marketing Strategy Guide
Brand Story Guide
Content Marketing Goals and KPI Guide
Setting up your Brand Style Guidelines
How to tell better stories
How to come up with Effective Content Ideas
How to find the best Instagram Hashtags
Content Distribution Strategy

2. Having a clear Instagram Marketing Strategy

I hope you will use a couple of our guides from our Growth Storytelling Framework or that you already have a clear vision about who your target audience is, what content they like to consume, and how to effectively communicate with them.

When you have this crystal clear, you can move to the next step which is actually creating some awesome Insta posts!

Related: How to Create a Great Social Media Marketing Strategy.

3. Make use of an Instagram Caption Generator

In order to really boost your Instagram Marketing efforts, you need to create a lot of high-quality posts. An Instagram Caption Generator can help you with brainstorming the caption (copy) of your post.

Simply input what you would like to post about and the tool provides you with awesome ideas. Then, you make a couple of small edits and done! You have your Insta caption. Here’s what we got on the first run:

After a quick re-write, we ended up with the following captions. And that’s just from running the Insta Caption Generator once! I can re-run the tool as often as I like and get more inspirational pieces.

Insta caption 1

We all know that Instagram is a powerful platform for building your brand, and one of the best ways to do so is by leveraging the best tools. Our team has put together a list of 6 Instagram marketing tools that you can use to boost your engagement, as well as grow your follower base.

Insta caption 2

Instagram is one of the most engaging and visual platforms out there which has made it a hotbed for marketers. Brands are creating new and exciting content daily to help get their followers engaged and interested, but growing your following can feel like a full-time job with minimal results if you’re not utilizing the right tools. Check out our list of awesome Instagram Tools and learn how to use them properly.

Actually, I got excited about the outputs and how I want to visualize the power of the Instagram tools I’ll be discussing today and how they work together, so I ran the Caption Generator again and got the following results:

With these outputs, I created the following captions:

Insta caption 3

Whether you’re looking to build your brand or sell a product, growing your audience on Instagram can be extremely helpful. Check out how the following Instagram tools can help you do just that!

Insta caption 4

Despite the fact that I’ve been in business for well over ten years, and have been a marketing consultant now for almost seven years, I still get really excited when there are tools introduced to make my job even easier. Today I want to put a smile on your face by sharing the golden nuggets I have received over the past couple of years. Check out how these Instagram Tools make my life easier and how they can help you boost your marketing efforts.

Insta caption 5

The world of Instagram marketing is a dynamic one. There are new tools and strategies popping up all the time. There’s also a lot of clutter surrounding what actually works for your brand and what doesn’t. Today, I want to share with you my time-tested Instagram tips and tools.

So now I got 5 potential Instagram Captions to work with which I created in just 2 minutes or so.

Let’s get into creating some nice visuals!

3. Create beautiful visuals fast with Canva

I’ve already set up my Brand Style Guide, I also already set up Instagram Templates in Canva, so creating new visuals for this post and the captions we’ve just created should be a breeze!

I simply duplicate the template in Canva, check out the caption, think about how I want to draw in attention (stop people from scrolling down), and maybe change some colors around while staying on brand.

Here’s what I’ve created in about 5 minutes:

Your brand might be more complex so it might take you a bit longer, but having a great visual tool, guidelines written on paper and templates will help a lot nonetheless!

If you’re not using Canva yet, you should! It’s super easy to get started, learn how to use it and scale content creation. Here’s a print screen of our Canva visuals:

4. Find the best Hashtags

Using the right hashtags is important to reach an audience beyond your followers. We’ve already written a guide on how to find the best hashtags and the template is included in the Growth Storytelling Framework, so we won’t go too in-depth about it here. Because I wanted to showcase all tools needed to be successful on Instagram, I did want to mention it.

There are a couple of tools you can use to find data on Instagram Hashtags, I simply use Instagram’s data for my research. here’s how that looks like:

You can find how many people have posted using that hashtag which gives you an estimate of how competitive a hashtag is and guidance on whether to include it in your hashtag mix or not.

5. Time to Schedule your Instagram Posts with Buffer

Well. We’ve just created 5 Instagram captions in two minutes and 3 visuals in 5 minutes, how long do you think it will take to schedule the posts? Exactly, 5 hours!

I mean 5 minutes. My bad!

I already have My Buffer account set up. All I need to do is copy / paste the caption, upload the images, add the hashtags and we’re good to go! Here’s what scheduling in Buffer looks like:

Scheduling posts is possible in Buffer’s free version, but a limited number of posts.

If other Social Media Planners are a better fit for you, or you don’t like to schedule posts, that’s of course fine. Some alternatives are Hootsuite, Coosto, and AgoraPulse.

6. Let’s get some traffic to your website

Instagram doesn’t allow you to link to your website from individual posts. In order to get traffic from Instagram you need to build your brand or mention in your post that they can find a link in your bio.

In your bio you are allowed to add one link. You can either choose to link to your homepage, resources page or change it every time you post something new.

Or!

You can opt-in for a Link Tool (not sure what they’re called) like LinkTree.

this way you can set up your links in LinkTree and when people click on your Instagram link, they see the pages you’ve chosen. Here’s what it looks like (you can also check it out on our Instagram account:

7. Time to set some goals and look at the data

Ok. You’ve now thought about your strategy, have the tools to create awesome Instagram posts at scale, know how to schedule them, also know how to get traffic to your website, how do you know if what you’re doing week over week, month over month is working?

You need to set goals and dig into the data.

In our Growth Storytelling Framework there is a sheet to help you set your goals. Here’s the complete guide to content marketing goals and KPIs that walks you through it step-by-step.

Please check out the resources we’ve provided in this article. We’ve created them with care and based on our decades of marketing experience to make marketing and content creation easier.

If you have any questions, join our LinkedIn Group and ask us anything.

Related articles

Top AI LinkedIn Marketing Tools
ChatGPT alternative for great Marketing Copy