Category: Marketing Automation

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When it comes to email marketing, there’s no denying how powerful this channel can be.
According to a 2019 Campaign Monitor report, for every $1 you spend, you earn $42 – an astonishing return on investment.

If you’re scaling a business, you may have relied on personal or business email providers like Gmail and Outlook in the past. However, they’re not equipped to manage large volumes of email and provide the data needed to track performance.
That’s where a bulk email service can come in.
Discover the key features you should find in a bulk email service and the top providers in the market.
A mass email service helps you reach a large audience and nurture them one email at a time. In addition to getting direct access to your customer base, you can also track how your emails perform and test various methods to increase clicks and conversions.
While traditional advertising methods, such as print ads and direct mail, can have high return on investment (ROI), it can be difficult to understand how consumers are interacting with your materials. With a bulk email service, you can find out what attracts consumers and what elements lead to higher conversions.
Furthermore, many bulk email services offer automation tools – think workflows and sequences – to help you move leads down the funnel and retain your current clients.
Using a personal or business email can work in the first few months of starting a business but will quickly become ineffective as you grow.
Reasons to Send Bulk Emails
Not sure if it’s the right time to try a bulk email service? The first question you should ask is, “Is our brand investing in email marketing this quarter/year?”
If the answer is yes, then that’s your sign to invest in an email service.
Here are specific examples of when you would send out a mass email to your subscribers:

Sales promotion – Say you want to promote discounts on certain products or services, sending a mass email to your subscribers is a great way to generate sales.

Newsletter – Do you want to send out exclusive content to your subscribers? Then a newsletter is the way to go.

Product updates – A great way to announce a new product feature or line is via email. You can include previews to build some excitement and include calls-to-action (CTA) for conversions.

Announcements – Are you updating your hours, prices, or services? Or perhaps there’s been a change in your policy. Notifying your subscribers in an email blast is an effective way to spread the news.

With every email you send to subscribers, you’ll want to keep in mind your goals, your audience, the time and day, personalization, and compliance with data protection laws.
You want to invest in an email marketing service, but you’re not sure what to look for – here’s your guide.
These are the key features you should look for in a bulk email service. Some of these features will only be available in a premium package. However, others will be included in the standard or free versions.
1. User Behavior Tracking
The number one tool you’ll need in any bulk email service you select is reporting capabilities. Because what’s the point of investing your time in designing and sending emails if you can’t see how they performed?
You should be able to track key email metrics, such as:

Open rate
Unique clicks

Click-to-open rate (CTOR)
Clickthrough rate (CTR)
Unsubscribe rate
List growth rate
Bounce rate

Email providers with advanced reporting features may also allow you to track revenue per subscriber and revenue per email.
2. Drag-and-Drop

A drag-and-drop tool makes designing your email easy. This intuitive feature allows you to select an element from the sidebar, like an image, quote, or button, and drag it to a section in your email.
This will save you time as you determine the best flow for your email and move things around.
3. Email Segmentation & Personalization
Segmenting your emails ensures that your emails are reaching the right people at the right time.
You should look for a bulk email service that allows you to segment your subscriber list based on:

Location
Actions taken in the email
Purchase history
Type of subscriber (ex: prospect vs current customer)

When you segment your list, you can get higher engagement rates, as the content will be more relevant to your recipients.
4. Split Testing
Split testing, also known as A/B testing, is a great way to understand what resonates with your audience.

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This feature is particularly helpful if you are struggling to generate high open rates and get subscribers to convert.
By testing out different subject lines and elements within the body of your email, you can determine what works best.
5. Automation
When you’re scaling your email list, the name of the game is automation.
Say you have a content offer and you want to send a sequence of emails to leads after they’ve downloaded the offer. With an automation tool, you can pre-select which emails will go out, in what order, and how many days in each email.

Once you complete the set-up, the automation does all the work for you – nurturing your subscribers and moving them down the buyer’s journey.
This hands-off approach allows you to focus on strategy instead of the tedious work of sending out emails. It can also become impossible to keep track of each subscriber’s stage in the journey and send the appropriate email.
With automation, you can take the guesswork out of the process.
6. Design Templates
If you’re like me, designing isn’t your forte. So, when designing an email, you’ll take all the help you can get.

Having a design template based on the type of email you want to send can not only save you time but ensure you’re following email best practices. This is particularly helpful if you have limited experience designing emails and are just starting out.
What’s great about having a template is that it’s a foundation. You can customize it to fit your needs, but it provides a blueprint from which to work.
7. High Email Delivery Rates
Imagine you work so hard on an email campaign, and it never reaches your subscribers’ inboxes. Frustrating right?
That’s why it’s important to verify your provider’s email delivery rates. You’ll want to select a service with high email delivery rates, as close to 100% as possible.
Best Bulk Email Services
1. HubSpot’s Email Marketing Tool

With HubSpot, you can create, customize and optimize your emails without any coding or design experience.

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You can send up to 2,000 emails a month, and that doesn’t include test emails to check functionality. The platform offers a user-friendly interface and tools like a drag-and-drop tool to easily design your email, tokens to personalize every email, and an a/b testing feature.
In addition, you can create custom reports based on the data you want to collect and analyze.
The best part? It’s free.
2. ConvertKit

As their name suggests, the platform is designed to help you earn more conversions and generate more revenue.
ConvertKit is known for its advanced automation tools, including custom email funnels, smart filters, and link triggers.

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Furthermore, the platform has a 98% delivery rate, ensuring that your emails will always reach your subscribers. In addition, the average open rate for ConvertKit emails is an astonishing 30%, according to their website.
ConvertKit offers a free version of its platform all the way up to custom pricing for enterprise-level businesses with over 365,000 subscribers.
3. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a great email service for those who are just starting out in email marketing.

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The platform offers a user-friendly interface and over 100 templates to choose from.
With their free plan, you can send up to 10,000 emails a month to 2,000 contacts – a great option for small to midsize businesses. As your business grows, you can scale to the premium version, which includes unlimited audiences, multivariate testing, and advanced segmentation with up to 200,000 contacts.
4. Drip

If you have an ecommerce business, consider Drip for your email marketing.
The platform offers pre-built email templates that you can customize to your liking and a user-friendly workflow builder for automation.
In addition, you can schedule automation based on actions your subscribers take. For instance, viewing a product, abandoning their cart, and making a purchase.

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With Drip, you can easily integrate your online store (like Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce) to make data gathering easier and help you design more targeted emails.
Pricing starts at $19 and goes up based on how many subscribers you have.
5. Insycle

Insycle doesn’t fall under the email provider list. However, this software does work in tandem with providers like HubSpot and Mailchimp to keep your contact list clean.

One of the downsides of having a subscriber list is the potential for duplicate contacts. This can not only impact your metrics (and consequently your data) but also make it difficult to tailor your emails.
Insycle allows you to clean your contacts in bulk, merge duplicate ones, and avoid overwriting data.
Knowing what to look for in an email service is half the battle. Now that you have a list of key features and few tools to choose from, you can find a platform that helps you grow your email list and generate revenue.

Meet Elizabeth: a 27-year-old nurse who drives a Honda Civic, enjoys making TikToks, and spends most of her time with her beautiful 9-month-old baby.
Elizabeth desperately wants to make more time for herself, but struggles to find the balance between work and home responsibilities. She tries to give herself moments of self-care, but these moments are few and far between. Elizabeth needs a way to recharge, relax, and care for herself.
By this description, you know Elizabeth’s age, profession, gender, desires, struggles, and pain points. All of this information helps you place her in a category in your mind — but none of that information tells you why she buys your product.
Buyer personas typically include descriptions like Elizabeth’s, along with other demographics and personality information.
In the early days of customer segmentation, this would have been more than enough to inform marketing campaigns and product development. But with growing markets and increased consumer awareness, companies need to go beyond standard buyer personas to reach their audiences.
If we can apply what we’ve learned about how people make decisions, and how we as companies group people together, we’ll be able to reach customers like Elizabeth with empathetic solutions that help her, rather than stereotypical cure-alls that are easily overlooked.
Here, let’s dive into three myths of the buyer persona — and what you can do, instead. 

Standard Buyer Personas Aren’t Enough
The first mention of audience segmentation was by Wendell Smith in 1956. Smith defined market segmentation as, “the adjustment of market offerings to consumer or user requirements.”
Smith knew that creating segments would lead to higher consumer/user satisfaction. But Smith’s idea of segmentation was years before we had a clear understanding of psychology, behavioral economics, unconscious bias, and deeper knowledge about how to provide consumer satisfaction.
Since Smith’s discussion on segmentation, we’ve had major discoveries in the way people think, rationalize, and categorize others. Daniel Kahneman and Amos’ Tversky’s 1974 research paper A Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases revealed the way people process information, and are influenced. And Clayton Christensen first shared his jobs-to-be-done theory in 2003.
Both of these studies on human behavior, purchasing, and thinking have made a lasting impact on the way we create ad copy, price products, introduce call-to-actions, and influence many other marketing activities — but have yet to influence our way of creating buyer personas.
Using the lessons from Kahneman, Tversky, and Christensen, there are three myths of the standard buyer persona that could be detrimental to your marketing and customer relations. Let’s dive into those, now. 
Myth #1: Your Buyer Persona Needs a Name
We’ve all seen the old advice to give your persona a name that is memorable. Names like Sally Sales Girl and Mary the Marketer will bring your persona to life and create a more concrete persona in your mind and marketing — or so we’re told.
Fact: Naming your buyer persona introduces bias.
The problem with giving your buyer personas a fake name is that you could introduce bias into your marketing.
Introducing naming bias in your marketing means that consciously you’ve determined a particular person as your best customer. That’s good! The problem is you might also unintentionally exclude people who could be a good fit for your product but may not resemble the person you envisioned. And that’s bad.
If Elizabeth is your best fit customer, then you’re more likely to seek out customers who meet your unconscious idea of who Elizabeth is, rather than seek out customers who actually use your product or service.
Studies show that when someone has an easier-to-pronounce name, they are judged more favorably than someone with a harder-to-pronounce name.  And while most studies on unconscious name bias focus on resumes and job applications, we can apply those lessons to buyer personas, as well.
Ease of pronunciation varies depending on where you live or what language you speak. But remember, a name that sounds familiar to you might not sound familiar to your audience.
Solution: Name personas based on segmentation data.
When we create buyer personas, we’re grouping a large number of people into one category. Instead of naming your personas after a person, try naming them after the traits they share. 
Do the majority of these best-fit customers enjoy soccer? Great! Name them ‘The Soccer Players.’ Or maybe they’re using your product to free-up time in their scheduling processes. Wonderful — let’s call them the Free Timers.

Naming this group of people according to their segment, or their need, helps to eliminate any bias that could exist.

This helps focus buyer personas on the category of people you’re serving, not just one pretend person.
Myth Two: Your Buyer Persona Needs a Photo to Make Them More Relatable and Realistic
Most buyer personas have a stock photo on the first page. I’ve even heard of companies using cardboard cutouts of buyer personas in their office.
While I admire the effort to bring to life a category of people, assigning one picture or person to represent a large group of people lays a foundation for bias in your marketing.
Fact: Your buyer persona doesn’t need a face to be realistic.
The buyer persona’s picture most likely represents who you believe your ideal customer looks like, but it’s not likely a good determination of your entire audience. If you’ve given your Elizabeth persona a picture of a middle-aged white female, and 100% of your audience isn’t middle-aged, white, and female, you’ve inaccurately portrayed your audience. 
When we give our personas a stock photo it could introduce racial, gender, or beauty bias. These kinds of biases are so ingrained in our minds that we follow bias patterns even if we don’t logically believe the bias to be true.
This phenomenon is known as the bias blind spot. Studies show that 95% of cognition happens below the threshold of conscious thought. Meaning, you may not be racist, misogynistic, or ageist, but there are patterns ingrained in your mind that influence your decision-making whether you realize it or not.
A Google Image search when searching for ‘Buyer Personas’ blatantly shows the issue with assigning pictures to buyer personas. There’s not a lot of diversity in these images, and that lack of diversity hurts a company’s growth.

A 2019 survey by the Female Quotient, Ipsos, and Google found “64% of people surveyed said they took some sort of action after seeing an ad that they considered to be diverse or inclusive. Those numbers increase for Latinx+ (85%), Black (79%), Asian/Pacific Islander (79%), LGBTQ (85%), millennial (77%), and teen (76%) consumers.”
Solution: Forget the photo.
Leave the stock photo out of your buyer personas. This isn’t going to harm or hurt any of your marketing efforts and functions. It will be a step toward eliminating unconscious bias. Instead of using a stock photo, get straight to the crucial information.
You may have the urge to add a cartoon character, but that doesn’t alleviate the problem. Skip the pictures altogether, and get straight to the information that will help you resonate, reach, and sell to your customers.
This is the first step in acknowledging that your customers look like a wide variety of races, genders, shapes, and sizes.

When your marketing better represents your audience, your product, messaging, and communications will resonate more clearly.

Myth Three: Buyer Personas Should Describe Character Traits
Most B2B buyer personas are created to inform marketing teams and executives on who their customers are and keep promotional efforts consistent, but limiting buyer personas to only character traits, demographics, and socio-graphic information limits your audience and ability to reach the right people in the right way.
Fact: Buyer personas should tell you why people buy a product or service.
The best way to resonate with your audience is to understand them and empathize with their pain points. Understanding your audience begins with how you build and segment your buyer personas.
If you’re segmenting your audience based on attributes such as brands they like, habits they have, or job titles, then you are grouping people together based on fleeting attributes. 
For instance, say our persona example, Elizabeth, changes jobs, moves to a new city, or changes any trait about her life. As a result, you might unnecessarily shift Elizabeth out of your customer demographic. She loves your product,  and would still buy your product, but now you’re no longer invested in marketing to her segment.
Solution: Segment according to the job-to-be-done.
Instead of building your personas around demographics and character traits, base your personas on what your customers have hired your product/service to do for them.
For example, Elizabeth is a mom, loves long baths, and buys Suave deodorant. The reason she buys Suave has nothing to do with her age, job title, or love of baths. She buys Suave because she’s used it for years, loves the smell, and the way it makes her feel. She is ‘hiring’ Suave deodorant to keep her feeling and smelling great.
Clayton Christensen was the first person to discuss the concept of people hiring products and services for a particular job. 
Combining the emotional psychographic information of buyer personas with a jobs-to-be-done approach will help to inform your marketing efforts and open up your market in a way that allows you to serve all kinds of people. According to Christensen, “Companies that develop offerings centered on jobs, instead of customer attributes and buying behaviors, can excel in the market and avoid disruption.”
The Best Buyer Personas Will be the Tool that Grows Your Business
It’s time buyer personas caught up with our knowledge of how people think, behave, and purchase. When undertaking your next buyer persona project, ditch the fake name and picture, and focus on what your customers hire your product to do for them.
Your marketing deliverables will be more inclusive to a wider audience, while still being narrowly focused and empathetic. Creating better buyer personas will lay a foundation of better marketing practices that resonates with your audience and grows your business.

Want to increase your online presence and reach more customers in 2021? There’s no better way to do it than through your own website.

Need inspiration for your one-page website? Here are 25 examples you can learn from.

Every day, the digital marketing landscape is changing. And this year is no different. Many marketers out there compile social media tips that aren’t actionable and don’t help companies build a brand with staying power. But, don’t worry, I got your back with this one. When it comes to effectively using social media to grow…
The post How to use Social Media to Grow your Business in 2021 appeared first on Benchmark Email.

Hi Community! We have just launched in beta version an awesome marketing automation tool “Brevi assistant” give a try! https://brevi.app https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g2rsayDZHY ​
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Last Updated on May 25, 2021 by Rakesh GuptaBig Idea or Enduring Question: What if your use case requires you to use DOESN’T CONTAINS operator in Flow? With a sigh, you may want to remind me that, in Salesforce Flow, one … Continue reading →
The post Getting Started with Salesforce Flow – Part 64 (Upskill on Flow – Learn How to Use DOESN’T CONTAINS Operator – and Show-Off!) appeared first on Automation Champion.

With almost 4 billion people worldwide currently connected to the internet, there has never been a better time for businesses to include blogging in their marketing strategy.
Not only does blogging drive website traffic and promote your products and services, but it also helps you build trust with your potential customers.
In this post, we’re going to highlight the many benefits of blogging for business and how you can get started with creating relevant content that drives inbound links and traffic to your site.
Let’s get started.

The Benefits of Blogging for Business
One question many people ask after starting a business is whether blogging is worth it in 2021.
Short answer: Yes! And here the reasons why we say so.
1. It helps drive traffic to your website.
Raise your hand if you want more website visitors. Yeah, me too.
Now think about the ways people find your website:

They could type your name right into their browser, but that’s for an audience you already have. They know who you are, you’re on their radar, and that doesn’t help you get more traffic on top of what you’re already getting.
You could pay for traffic by buying an email list (don’t you dare!), blasting them, and hoping some people open and click through on the emails. But that’s expensive and, you know, illegal.
You could pay for traffic by placing tons of paid ads, which isn’t illegal but still quite expensive. And the second you run out of money, your traffic stops coming, too.

So, how can you attract new traffic or readers to your site? You can through blogging and optimizing your site for search engines.
Here’s how it works.
Think about how many pages there are on your website. Probably not a ton, right? And think about how often you update those pages. Probably not that often, right?
Well, blogging is a great way to solve both of those problems.
Every time you create and publish a blog post, it’s one more indexed page on your website, which means one more opportunity for you to show up on the search engine results page (SERP) and drive traffic to your website in organic search.
We’ll get into more of the benefits of blogging on your SEO a bit later, but it’s also one more cue to Google and other search engines that your website is active, and they should be checking in frequently to see what new content to surface.
2. You can repurpose blog content for social media.
Blogging for your business also helps you get discovered via social media. Every time you create a new article, you’re creating content that people can share on social networks — Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest — which helps expose your business to a new audience that may not know you yet.
Blog content also helps keep your social media presence going.
Instead of asking your social media manager always to create brand new content for social media (or creating that content yourself), your blog can serve as that repository of content.
You’re strengthening your social reach with blog content and driving new website visitors to your blog via your social channels. Quite a symbiotic relationship, I must say.

3. It helps convert traffic into leads.
Now that you have some traffic coming to your site through your blog, you have an opportunity to convert that website traffic into leads.
Like every blog post you write is another indexed page, each post is a new opportunity to generate new leads.
The way this works is straightforward: Just add a lead-generating call-to-action to every blog post.
Often, these calls-to-action lead to things like free ebooks, whitepapers, fact sheets, webinars, trials, or basically, any content asset for which someone would be willing to exchange their information.
To be super clear for anyone unfamiliar with how traffic-to-lead conversions work, it’s as simple as this:

Visitor comes to website
Visitor sees call-to-action for a free offer
Visitor clicks call-to-action and gets to a landing page, which contains a form for them to fill in with their information
Visitor fills out the form, submits information, and receives the free offer

If you scroll down in this blog post, you’ll see a call-to-action button.
In fact, 99.9% of the blog posts we publish have call-to-action buttons, and yours should, too. That is how you turn your website traffic into leads for your sales team.
Note: Not all blog readers will become leads, and that’s okay. No one converts 100% of the people who read their blog into leads. Just get blogging, put calls-to-action on every blog post, set a visitor-to-lead conversion rate benchmark for yourself, and strive to improve the benchmark each month.
4. It drives long-term results.
The best business blogs answer common questions their readers and customers have.
If you consistently create valuable content or articles for your target audience, it’ll establish you as an industry leader or authority in their eyes.
Can you imagine the impact of sending an educational blog post you wrote to clear things up for a confused customer? Or how many more deals a salesperson could close if their leads discovered blog content written by their salesperson?
“Establishing authority” is not a vanity metric as concrete as traffic and leads, but it’s pretty powerful stuff. You can use it to measure sales enablement.
Because at the end of the day, that’s what many of your blog posts are.
Think about it:

Suppose prospects find answers to their everyday questions via blog posts written by people at your company. In that case, they’re much more likely to come into the sales funnel trusting what you have to say because you’ve helped them in the past — even before they were interested in purchasing anything from you.
Prospects that have been reading your blog posts will typically enter the sales funnel with more knowledge of your products and services, your place in the market, and your industry. That makes for a far more productive sales conversation than one held between two relative strangers.
Salespeople who encounter specific questions that require in-depth explanation or a documented answer can pull from an archive of blog posts. Not only do these articles help move the sales process along faster than if a sales rep had to create the assets from scratch, but they position the salesperson as a helpful resource to their prospect — thus helping to build trust.

5. Blogging helps with link building.
Inbound links or backlinks are among the 200 factors the Google algorithm considers when ranking a site on its search engine result page. Many experts and small business owners also believe backlinks to be the 3rd most crucial factor in search engine optimization.
Although generating inbound links is essential, 41% of SEO experts say link building is the most challenging part of search optimization.
When you create articles that are not only valuable to your potential customers but also to other companies that your audience sees as industry leaders, it’d be easier to gain relevant links.
Links for authoritative websites serve as a vote of confidence or recommendation from other websites. And it signals to Google that you’re trustworthy and an expert in your industry.
Another benefit of backlinks is that they help you build your domain authority, which helps improve your overall discoverability in search engines.
6. It drives long-term results.
It would be fantastic if you could take a trip to Hawaii, go to the gym, and sleep for as many hours as you want, and still be able to drive traffic to your site.
Good news, though! That’s what blogging does — primarily through search engines.
Here’s what I mean:
Imagine you sit down for an hour on Sunday to write and publish a blog post. Let’s say that blog post gets you 100 views and ten leads on Monday. You get another 50 views and five leads on Tuesday as a few more people find it on social media, and some of your subscribers get caught up on their email and RSS. But after a couple of days, most of the fanfare from that post dies down, and you’ve netted 150 views and 15 leads.
It’s not over.
Since that post is now ranking, it means that for days, weeks, months, and years to come, you can continue to get traffic from that blog post. So while it may feel like day one or bust, in reality, blogging acts more like this:

So while you’re hitting your snooze alarm, surfing in Hawaii, and pumping iron, you’re also driving traffic and leads. The effort you put in yesterday can turn into hundreds of thousands of views and leads in the future.
What’s more, you can monetize your blog content in many creative ways. Business models such as affiliate marketing mean you can generate an income from blogging on just about any topic — from makeup and beauty to camping and motorcycles.
There’s a wide variety of affiliate programs out there where you can generate an income from referring people to relevant products and services.
When it comes to blogging, most of your sales will likely come from your older articles.
More than half of the traffic generated each month on the Hubspot blog comes from posts published in previous months. They come from old posts.
The same goes for the leads generated in a current month — about 90% of the leads we generate every month come from blog posts published in previous months. Sometimes years ago.
We call these types of blog posts “compounding” posts. Not every blog post will fit into this category, but the more evergreen blog posts you write, the more likely it is that you’ll land on one of those compounding blog posts.
In our research, we’ve found that about 1 in every ten blog posts end up being compounding blog posts.

To me (and hopefully to you), this demonstrates the scalability of business blogging.
While you might not see immediate results, over time, you’ll be able to count on a predictable amount of traffic and leads for your business without any additional resource investment — the work to generate that traffic and those leads are already done.
If you’d like to learn more about the long-term impact of blogging and how to reap even more benefits from the blog posts that are ranking in organic search for your business, check out this article, “The Blogging Tactic No One Is Talking About: Optimizing the Past.”
7. It helps you share company news.
Another benefit blogging affords every big, and small business is a medium to share their company news and stories.
Blogs can contain not only articles but also news that highlight what a company is up to.
Have you hired a new content marketing manager? Share it on your blog.
Interviewed online marketing and industry experts? Post it on your blog.
Have a brilliant case study that showcases how your products and services help customers? Tell your audience about it on your blog.
Are you hosting a local fair or trade show? Drum up attention for the even through your blog.
Not only does sharing company news on your blog humanize your brand, but it also helps your audience see that you’re not always about selling.
Secondary Benefits of Business Blogging
There are other reasons businesses might want to blog, but I think they’re smaller and stray from the core benefits of blogging.
For example, I love to use our blog to test out extensive campaigns on the cheap before investing a lot of money and time into their creation. I also love to use our blog to help understand our persona better.
And while this shouldn’t be their primary use, these are all significant usefulness of a business blog, but they’re secondary benefits to me.
How to Start Blogging for your Business
You’ve seen the benefits your business blog can get you — more traffic, leads, authority, and a better relationship with your audience. And you’re undoubtedly itching to get started.
But how?
Our guide on how to start a successful blog has everything you need.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in November 2020 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

Instagram has been around for 11 years.
While the app was initially meant for still images, content creators and everyday users can now share photos and videos in various forms, like Story posts, Instagram Reels, and longer-form videos on IGTV.
Although there are many content types to post on the app, simply leveraging one of the options isn’t enough to find marketing success on the platform. This is because, no matter how high-quality the content you share, the Instagram algorithm determines what succeeds on the app and what doesn’t.
While Instagram doesn’t disclose all the factors that the algorithm uses to assess content, they have released general information about what the algorithm looks for. In this post, we’ll explain everything you need to know about the algorithm to succeed on the app, from the factors that play into it and tips and tricks to use to make sure your content doesn’t go unnoticed.

As a business, unless you’re entirely reliant on paid ads, it’s essential to understand how the algorithm works and what you need to do to ensure that it favors your content and shows your posts to your target audience.
Below we’ll explain how the Instagram algorithm works and the factors it assesses when surfacing your content in news feeds.

 
How does the Instagram algorithm work?
If you’re a frequent Instagram user, you may have heard people say something like “Bring back reverse chronological order!” when talking about the algorithm. What they’re referring to is when Instagram showed the most recent posts at the top of someone’s feed and older ones at the bottom.
It was great for creators and Instagram users because, at some point, your post would be at the top of all of your followers’ feeds, so they would be guaranteed to see it.
However, in March 2016, the algorithm changed. Instagram said, “People miss, on average, 70 percent of their feeds. As Instagram has grown, it has become harder to keep up with all the photos and videos people share. This means you often don’t see the posts you might care about the most.”
It’s no longer a question of when you post, but a variety of factors that we’ll discuss below: relationship, timing, frequency, following, usage, interest.

 
Instagram Algorithm Factors
Relationship
Perceived relationships are the most important ranking factor.
The algorithm prioritizes sharing content with you based on the relationships you have with the accounts you follow. The more you comment, like, and interact with an account on Instagram, the more likely you will see their content, and see it often.
The algorithm also notes people you direct message, accounts you search for, and photos you’re tagged in.
The relationship factor applies to brands as well. If a consumer regularly likes your content and interacts with it, repeat engagement will make your posts shown to them more often and closer to the top of their feed. This means that it’s essential for you to inspire engagement in your content, which we’ll discuss further below.
Timing
Although feeds aren’t chronological, the algorithm still wants users to see the most recent and relevant posts, especially from accounts that you have a stronger, established relationship with.
Timing just means that you’re not as likely to see a post from three weeks ago as you were before 2016.
You can leverage this factor to your advantage by using your profile analytics to discover the best time to post on Instagram, helping you meet your followers when they’re most active on the app and more likely to engage.
Frequency
Frequency refers to how often a user opens the Instagram app.
Frequent users will see a more chronological feed, but those who seldom open the app will see posts most relevant to their interests and relationships since last opening the app.
Following
Following many people means that the algorithm has more content to choose from when surfacing posts in a feed. When this happens, they prioritize relationships, engagement, and perceived interests.
Again, this factor emphasizes the importance of generating a relationship with your audience, encouraging engagement, and posting at the right times.
Usage
The usage factor is similar to frequency, as it relates to how much time is spent on the app.
Those who do quick browsing sessions will see what the algorithm determines to be the day’s highlights based on the factors mentioned above, while those who spend more time on the app will see a more significant number of posts.
Frequent browsers may even run out of content to see, at which point the algorithm will suggest new posts and accounts based on your interactions and engagement history.
Interest
Instagram makes many content recommendations, so a portion of the content users see is based on the app’s understanding of their interest in specific topics.
If it detects that you always like, comment, and interact with posts around similar topics, you’ll see those posts first. Users who engage with content similar to what you post are also more likely to be shown your posts, and vice versa.
While not a direct factor that Instagram has noted as an algorithm factor in 2016, engagement does play a significant role in the algorithms process.

 
How Instagram’s Algorithm Uses Engagement
In addition to all of the above factors, engagement plays a significant role in how the Instagram algorithm prioritizes and surfaces content to users. The most important engagement metrics are comments, likes, shares, and video views.
Here is a breakdown of how engagement factors into the algorithm:
1. When you first post a photo, it’s shown to a small percentage of your audience.
2. Instagram measures how quickly that photo is interacted with, i.e., comments and likes.
3. Instagram compares the engagement that your post gets to other content you’ve shared at similar times and days. For example, is your post from today at 10 am getting more or less traffic than your post from last Monday at 10 am? The app compares to similar times to ensure accuracy when evaluating your engagement metrics, especially since certain times bring better results.
4. If your photo attracts a lot of engagement, Instagram will show it to a higher percentage of your audience and maybe even share it on explore pages.
5. If your post continues to attract engagement, your photo will stay at the top of your audience’s news feeds and reach more people. If it doesn’t attract a lot of initial attention, less of your audience will see your post.

 
Instagram Algorithm Update 2021
The 2016 algorithm update was almost a complete overhaul to how the algorithm works, so it is the most notable, publicized, and confirmed by Instagram.
Unfortunately, since then, Instagram doesn’t always make it public when they’ve changed the algorithm. So, if you notice changes to your engagement and reach, it is most likely not the result of an algorithm change but most likely due to the app’s growth.
There are so many accounts on the platform, and as people follow more and more users, competition on the app grows. It becomes more difficult to quickly generate a significant amount of engagement, which in turn impacts how, where, and when your posts are shown in your audience’s feed. This is one of the many reasons why it’s important to monitor your Instagram analytics.
Instagram Algorithm Recent Changes
That being said, the most recent update to the algorithm as of 2021 is the removal of like counts on people’s photos.
The update hasn’t yet been made available to all Instagram users, but it would effectively remove a total like count from a user’s photo and instead display only the usernames of people that have liked the post. Users who post a photo still have the option to see the number of likes a photo has received, though. Instagram is making this update because they believe it will do numbers to diminish bullying on the app and protect users from being influenced by social pressure that says they need to get a certain amount of likes on their posts.

 
How to Get Your Posts Shown Higher on Instagram
Although there is not much you can do to beat the algorithm, or so to speak, there are ways to get your posts shown higher on Instagram.
Post when you know your audience is most active.
Like all social media platforms, one of the easiest ways to generate immediate engagement is to post content when you know your followers are most active, as they’re already browsing the app and ready to see what you have to offer.
To get this information, you can use the native Instagram Analytics tool available to all users with business accounts or another option like Marketing Hub. 
If you’re new to the app, it will be challenging to get this information right away, so come back to this tip after you’ve spent enough time on the app to get valuable, actionable analytics.
Post content you know your audience likes.
Again, use your analytics. Understand the content that your audience engages with the most, whether it’s high-quality product photos, behind-the-scenes content, or Instagram Reels. Use this to your advantage, and continue creating content that they enjoy as they’re more likely to interact with something they like.
Use business-relevant hashtags.
Hashtags are a great way to signal to the algorithm about your content, which can help surface your profile to audience members interested in the hashtags you use.
Don’t overload your hashtag use, but aim to use them in all of the content you share on Instagram, from Stories to IGTV to photo captions.
Encourage engagement and interaction.
Interaction on your profile will come naturally, but encouraging engagement and interaction with the content you share can be valuable in getting the algorithm to work for you.
Create engaging captions that entice users to comment on your posts, ask for likes and shares, and be in conversation with those who interact to inspire loyalty and entice them to return.
You can also place interactive elements in your Instagram Stories, like polls, stickers, and emojis. The benefits of this are twofold, as your customers will be interacting with your content, and you’ll also learn more about their interests and desires based on the responses they give.
Stay consistent.
One of the most important things to do to take control over the algorithm is to stay consistent on the app. Develop an Instagram-specific posting schedule, and stick to it.
It’ll help you stay continuously active on the platform, which allows your followers to continuously engage with your content, which helps the algorithm learn more and more about your account. The more information they have, and the more engagement they see, the higher you will be on your followers’ feeds.

 
Instagram Story Algorithm
Instagram Stories appear at the top of a user’s feed.
The Stories algorithm prioritizes timeliness, and you’re most likely to see the most recent stories from the accounts you engage and interact with the most. The accounts that the algorithm thinks you have the strongest relationships with will always have their Stories shown before all other stories.
For businesses, this means that it’s essential to maintain an active presence on Instagram Stories and to encourage engagement within your Stories, like polls and asking questions.

 
Instagram Explore Algorithm
The feed algorithm and Explore page algorithm are relatively similar, as they both show content that Instagram thinks you’ll be most interested in based on your previous app activity. The main difference is that feed content features accounts you’re familiar with and following, while the Explore page is content from new accounts.
You can think of it like this: if one of your favorite things to do on Instagram is watch food videos, your feed will display content from the accounts with food videos that you interact with the most. Your explore page would also contain food videos since the algorithm knows you like them, but you won’t follow those accounts already.
The explore page is based entirely on interests, so, as a business, it’s important to share content related to your brand and utilize elements that would tell the algorithm who to show your content to, like relevant hashtags.
Succeeding on Instagram is not just about posting content regularly. You also need to understand how the algorithm works and leverage its makeup to your advantage. While changes to the algorithm will always happen, staying on top of the trends will help you ensure that you’re prepared for them when they do.