By: Jason Williams

Styling your Instagram is one of the most important factors to consider when marketing on Instagram. The colors, tone, layout, and overall theme should generate new followers while allowing you to convey your brand’s voice and company personality. Creating the right aesthetic for you isn’t easy, but today, we’re going help with that as we go over how to set up a good Instagram Profile and create a theme that will generate/increase company presence online. Let’s jump in.

3 Tips on Setting Up a Good Instagram Profile

Use a Viable Profile Picture

When making a business profile on Instagram, it’s best to use a logo, logomark (your secondary logo), or a mascot rather than a picture of yourself (Personal or Professional). This isn’t a cardinal rule that you must follow but helps your audience recognize your brand faster.

Write a Good Bio

Studies show that it takes two-tenths of a second for a person to form an opinion on your brand online, and first impressions are essential. It would be best if you took your time drafting your bio as it will play a key role in converting visitors into followers. A good bio should explain a bit about your brand and appeal to your target audience. A great example of this is Madewell

Madewell takes an all-encompassing approach that works great for their bio. They’ve included simple instructions for shopping in their feed, making them seem more friendly and any visitor more likely to buy something. This approach likely increases conversion since people are more likely to shop if they see how easy it is to do.

Include a Link to your Website

Your bio is the only place on Instagram where you can add a clickable link, which means that it won’t be clickable on a caption and won’t be clickable on a comment. I’ve seen many startup companies not add links in their bio, which can significantly lower the traffic from Instagram to their homepage.

3 Tips on Creating a Theme

Find Your Color Scheme

Finding a color scheme is the easiest part of creating a theme because there are many ways you can approach this. While you can use brand colors and call it a day, there are tons of variations to your brand colors that you can use. I would suggest creating a color palette full of colors you know you want to use,  then use a website like colorcodes.com/ to go variations you might be interested in.

You could also create themes based on your product colors but utilizing only pastel colors. Great examples of this are takearecess and halotopau. takearecess is an excellent example because they took a relatively common product such as sparkling water and recreated it with lilac colors and fun illustrations. halotopau is a perfect example because of its playful color scheme. They always use white for their base color and any color that coincides with the flavor, which allows them to create a refreshing graphic that stays relevant to the brand.

What You Should be Posting

Now that you have your colors, a great question to ask yourself is, “what should I be posting?” If you want to grow your brand with Instagram, creating high quality, engaging Instagram content is critical. It was a lot easier in the early years of Instagram to grow a following, but now consistency and quality are needed to keep your audience engaged. Creating content isn’t always easy, depending on your brand, but many brands have found strategies around this problem, such as Apple and Pepsi.

Apple is an excellent example of this because they don’t showcase their products; they showcase the results of what their products can do. Photos shot on iPhone, graphic designs created on the MacBook, and films shot on iPhone but edited on the MacBook, resulting in an art page that shows off how good their products are.

Pepsi is a fun example of quality content because their Instagram is modeled like a lifestyle Instagram. They don’t just promote the soda. They promote a lifestyle that comes with it while utilizing the drink and brand colors whenever they get a chance resulting in a page that makes Pepsi seem fun.

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Your Captions and Text

Captions are a chance to enhance your content further, and there are tons of ways brands use them. Many use captions to ask questions and trigger engagement, while some use them to add a short, snappy headline to a post. The possibilities are endless.

What’s important is to ensure that the captions are aligned with your brand. Some good examples of good captions are Buzzfeedtasty and SuitcaseMagazine. Buzzfeedtasty is incredible when it comes to captions. They always have a witty comment or a puzzling question that makes you undoubtedly interested, and it always summarizes their photos or videos perfectly. SuitcaseMagazine has a unique mix of sophisticated and artistic that make these beautiful captions. Most of which correlate to stories linked in their bio, which increases their click-through rate. As you can see, these are just some proper applications of captions, but there are a lot of times where brands have low usage of captions, such as the example below:

While this isn’t a bad page this brand has low usage of captions and this is something you want to avoid because it doesn’t look professional. Adding your link numerous times can come off as pushy, and it can irritate your audience and the constant yet random application of emojis makes it look disorganized. Your audience may not take you seriously.

As I stated earlier, styling your Instagram is one of the most important factors to consider when marketing on Instagram, and with so many brands on Instagram, styling your Instagram isn’t going to be easy, but following these steps should help you set your brand apart and stand out from the rest but, most importantly help you establish a unique and consistent Instagram aesthetic—no design degree required.