Instagram Marketing: Sharpen Your 2025 Strategy

Instagram continues to be the pivotal social media channel for brands aiming to connect with an audience, build online communities and sell directly to consumers. Its 2 billion monthly active users places it behind only Facebook and YouTube in terms of popularity and the channel’s different formats and features offer unparalleled opportunities for brands to engage with viewers. 

Instagram’s US ad revenue is projected to increase 15.9% in 2025, taking Facebook’s crown as the largest social media ad business. This is no longer the photos-and-filters app from 15 years ago — Instagram is now the largest digital billboard and tapping into its full potential means expertly crafting a social media marketing strategy that takes every facet of the channel into account. Although there is a lot to learn, we’ve broken it down in simple terms to help you sharpen your Instagram strategy in 2025.

Instagram marketing is when you use the platform’s features to promote your product or service. This can mean building brand awareness, increasing community engagement or even directly linking your products with Product Tags to e-commerce pages for easy online shopping. These efforts encompass a range of activities, from organic content creation to paid advertising to influencer marketing campaigns, all the way to managing your community, responding to comments and giving your brand a personality.

To put into perspective how important Instagram is, 30.4% of Gen Z find products most often on Instagram, while just 18.8% find products most often on Google — imagine telling that to someone 15 years ago. Social media has become the primary search engine and discovery tool for younger demographics like Gen Z and Gen Alpha and if you don’t use it, you won’t get discovered. The secret that powers this channel is what’s called the ‘network effect’. Consumers are much more likely to buy something if someone they trust recommends it and popular products can spread like wildfire through the Instagram algorithm, reaching millions of people overnight.

This also comes as the “cord” has been all but cut and audiences are now using social media for their daily dose of entertainment. Marketing on Instagram differs from traditional marketing like placing a snippet in a magazine; think of it as a primetime TV ad buy, except good content rises to the top, often to a particular audience (typically, your target audience) for a fraction of the cost. The best content goes viral on Instagram for zero cost. Brands that are good at developing viral content earn millions of dollars worth of brand awareness and earned press and it often comes down to a ten-second clip filmed on an iPhone. Anyone can find success on Instagram with the right blend of authenticity, strategic tactics and of course, a little luck.

Creating an effective marketing strategy for Instagram is challenging in the planning stage, but simple and scalable in execution. A little bit of prep work goes a long way in creating a presence destined to appear on user’s feeds and the top of the Explore page. The first steps are defined below.

1. Define Your Instagram Goals

Different brands have different objectives and this is the determining factor in what direction they take in terms of content strategy, formats and tone of voice. If your brand wishes to grow brand awareness, sales-focused messaging will likely take the backseat and your content will be more about engaging consumers with content they enjoy. If your brand wishes to drive sales traffic, your content will be more about your product, perhaps tapping into seasonality to feel relevant on feeds. Whatever your goal, align your Instagram content and profile links with your overall business strategy to help keep things coherent and remove roadblocks that prevent you from being agile or users from completing the ideal online journey from your socials.

2. Create and Optimize Your Profile

Your profile is your brand and you have a few seconds to make a good first impression before audiences swipe away. Ensure it reflects your brand identity by using a recognizable, accessible profile picture (remember, some people use Instagram on small screens!), crafting a short but effective bio and including a link to your website.

 3. Conduct a Competitive Analysis

It’s likely that you already have competitors on Instagram. Analyzing their strengths and weaknesses is a great way to determine how you should be approaching the channel and how you can differentiate your brand in the market. We’ve even prepared a competitive analysis template for you, so you don’t have to prepare a spreadsheet yourself and can dive right in.

4. Explore Your Audience Demographics

One of the most interesting parts of Instagram’s native analytics is audience demographics, which give you a general idea of the age, gender, location and interests of the people who follow you. These demographics tell you who is actually following you, which may or may not align with your own brand’s perception of what its target audience is. These social media analytics could be a sign that you need to switch things up to appeal more to your desired audience or that Instagram is simply a channel for expanding into new demographics.

5. Connect Instagram Tactics to Broader Business Goals

An Instagram strategy that treats it like an island, far off from the rest of your marketing strategy or a place to simply dump photos, will not be successful. Instagram marketing needs to be fully integrated into broader business goals and initiatives, otherwise your content will not be serving a purpose other than existing. For example, a strong creator strategy is an avenue to announcing new products across dozens of different touchpoints, making your brand the thing everyone talks about, which will snowball to even more clicks than you had ever imagined.

6. Discover Your Best Times To Post

Timing plays a crucial role in building engagement. Analyze when your audience is most active, and schedule posts accordingly to launch when more people are going to see them. Even in the algorithmic era, finding the best time to post on Instagram remains important, as the initial reception to your post is a huge signal to the algorithm that it is something people are interested in.

7. Create a Content Calendar

Planning and scheduling your content in advance allows you to be tactical with your approach across all channels, not just Instagram. It also frees you from the monotony of figuring out what you’re going to post today because sometimes ideas just don’t flow. A content calendar is also a great way to ensure your content is aligned with your business’s core marketing activities and goals.

8. Learn About the Instagram Algorithm

Learning how both the Instagram algorithm and Instagram Reels algorithm work will give you a huge advantage in post performance. Factors like follower retention and relevancy influence how many people your posts are shown to and simple tweaks (like making videos shorter and snappier) can make a huge difference.

9. Incorporate Boosted Posts

Instagram incorporates ads into its platform and while it is a powerful channel for organic performance, boosting your best content can launch its view count to the stars. Paid tactics are effective for growing your reach, as well as your net number of engagements.

10. Conduct Regular Social Media Audits

Social channels like Instagram never stay the same for long. Periodically reviewing your performance and historical social media benchmarks gives you a good idea of what’s working and what’s not. Use these insights to refine your strategy and post content that works better in the current environment.

11. Measure Performance and Refine

There are powerful social media analytics tools that allow you to monitor metrics like follower growth rate, web clicks and even how entertaining your content is. Regular analyses allow for continuous improvement and adaptation to changing trends.

Instagram is a platform of many formats and all of them are impactful for different reasons. Diversifying these formats helps to keep your audience engaged and can even help show them different sides of your brand. We’ve outlined what these formats are below and the circumstances in which they work best.

Carousel Posts

Instagram Carousels are slideshows of multiple images or videos that work together to tell a story. They’re also very effective if you have a lot of content from one initiative, but don’t want to post it all individually. When used artistically, Carousels can create a certain mood or vibe that audiences will respond well to. Think of these posts as a scrapbook or journal entry.

Static Posts

Static posts are the bread and butter of Instagram; single, non-moving images that you see immediately on your feed. In the distant past, this was the only format on Instagram, but they’re competing with a lot more flashy content formats for attention now. To make them stand out, focus on high-quality visuals that reflect your brand’s aesthetic and message. And make sure your caption is captivating, as they are a huge engagement driver for static content.

Instagram Reels

Instagram Reels are short, engaging videos displayed to users in an infinite scroll. Making content that stands out is important here and brands can maximize the impact of their Reels by focusing on trendy content and authenticity. Reels are a great way to show a different, more relatable side of your brand.

Instagram Stories 

Instagram Stories are ephemeral posts sent to followers and visible at the top of brands’ profiles. They are ideal for time-sensitive content, such as Black Friday sales or contests with a deadline. They are also commonly used to share perspectives of live events, creating a storyboard of photos and videos that make the viewer feel like they’re also there.

Instagram Ads 

Instagram ads are how brands ensure their content is seen. Brands can either boost organic posts, giving them an extra nudge to be seen by more people or they can set up dedicated ad campaigns and dark posts (not visible on the feed) for larger endeavors. No matter what your Instagram advertising strategy looks like, ads are a valuable tool to maximize the impact of your content.

No two Instagram marketing strategies are the same, however looking at top-performing brands can give you a good idea of what types of content audiences respond the most to, which helps with conceptualizing your own strategy. The following brands and metrics are taken from January to March 2025:

Rhode (@rhode) 

• Engagement rate: 3.55%
• Follower growth rate: 13.17%

Rhode by Hailey Bieber is the modern, trend-setting beauty and skincare brand that has become a phenomenon with Gen Z. While the brand uses its feed for glam campaign shots, it makes a point to put GRWM (get ready with me) posts front and center in Reels, with relatable real world applications of beauty products that engage audiences on a deeper level.

Mirror Palais (@mirrorpalais)

• Engagement rate: 2.94%
• Follower growth rate: 1.18%

Mirror Palais stands out on Instagram with its romantic, feminine and often vintage-inspired aesthetic. They often show the brand in beautiful lush settings that match their romantic vision or on celebrities who wear its clothes. Aspiration and a clear understanding of its visual brand helps set them apart on social.

Alo (@alo)

• Engagement rate: 2.46%
• Follower growth rate: 9.54%

Alo is a wellness industry brand that covers a broad range of athletic styles and gear. Notably, the brand makes full use of carousels and videos to show its products in action, often worn by trusted influencers, giving depth to its content strategy and making it far more interesting to watch and engage with. The brand, which manages multiple handles, like its Alo Yoga (@aloyoga) handle for yoga-specific content, along with a unified brand handle, is an expert at using Instagram to curate a specific vibe.

Peachy Den (@peachyden)

• Engagement rate: 1.74%
• Follower growth rate: 7.78%

Peachy Den knows how to make a splash with content featuring new drops and limited restocks of its fun everyday fashion. Its robust community never misses an opportunity to ask the brand for certain colorways or restocks and its comment section acts as a focus group of its most passionate fans. They share photos of celebrities to add a layer of aspiration to its feed. 

Jacquemus (@jacquemus) 

• Engagement rate: 1.32%
• Follower growth rate: 1.12% 

Jacquemus has been a regular top-performer in fashion industry social media benchmarks for years and for good reason. The brand’s bold, vibrant and playful photoshoots are social media gold and were an early adopter of AI-generated out-of-home marketing, inspiring the viewer to stare way too long to figure out the story behind the photo or video. It is a prime example of a brand that understands how to translate its fun designs and quirky silhouettes to its digital assets while cutting through the noise to stand out.

Using the right Instagram marketing tool can help you simplify your content strategy, get out of boring spreadsheets and have more time to spend on the creative work you enjoy doing. Below, we’ve highlighted several tools, as well as Instagram’s native tools and described how they can make your Instagram marketing strategy easier to execute and more successful overall.

Dash Social 

Dash Social has a simple, clean interface and puts all of its sophisticated tools front and center, making content management easy and intuitive. It integrates powerful Instagram management tools to streamline posting and scheduling, but it goes much deeper than that. Dash Social’s Instagram insights give you clear analytics and insight into your posts’ performance, which gives you the information you need to understand your audience better and refine your strategy accordingly.

Instagram Insights

Instagram insights are the built-in analytics offered by Instagram to accounts with a business profile, providing data directly related to your audience and content performance. With metrics on follower demographics, engagement and reach, Instagram Insights is a valuable tool right out of the box for marketers looking to get more involved in social media strategy.

Instagram Ads Manager 

Instagram Ads Manager allows marketers to create, manage and track advertising campaigns directly within Instagram. It provides advanced targeting capabilities, straightforward budgeting and performance analytics to understand how a campaign should be optimized, or how it performed in retrospect.

Adobe Lightroom 

Adobe Lightroom is one of the most popular video editing apps and helps marketers produce visually appealing images for Instagram. It provides professional editing tools and filters, but in a way that a novice user can understand, which allows social media managers to maintain a consistent brand aesthetic without having to learn Photoshop.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a customer management tool with strong integrations with Instagram, allowing marketers to measure campaign performance and track customer interactions. HubSpot is ideal for corporations with sophisticated customer relationships and e-commerce strategies and it has countless integrations with other tools and platforms, which allow you to gain deeper insights into your product and audience.

What is the 5-3-1 rule on Instagram? 

The 5-3-1 rule is a strategy for gaining new followers on Instagram. It suggests users like five posts, comment on three posts and follow one new account every day to increase their visibility. Although it certainly does not guarantee success, keeping your account active and engaged is a great way to receive more engagement.

How to grow your business on Instagram? 

You can grow your business on Instagram by posting content about how your product fills a particular ‘need’ in the market. People prefer to hear from other people, rather than brands, which should inform your approach. The best way to do this is by letting your audience do the talking, particularly with a creator marketing strategy, or by encouraging user-generated content.

How to use Instagram for marketing? 

Instagram is an important marketing tool. It can be used for anything from generating brand awareness to driving actual sales and conversions and even brick-and-mortar traffic. Marketers should put significant effort into developing an Instagram marketing strategy that works well for their brand.

What are Instagram testimonials?

Instagram Testimonials are a new feature within Partnership Ads that allows brands to work with creators to post sponsored comments on posts and ads. As creators are a major driver of word-of-mouth on social media, using Instagram Testimonials can help brands give their biggest fans space to share their personal stories.