To be successful as a modern business, you need to make the most of your social media marketing. It’s not enough to simply have a presence on all the biggest platforms. You also need to do whatever it takes to maximize the impact of your profiles while making every post count.

When it comes to Instagram, location tags provide a great way to reach more customers. By adding geotags to your posts and stories, you make your content more searchable while telling consumers exactly where you’re operating. Tagging coordinates might seem like a minor detail, but it can have a major impact on your digital marketing efforts.

Instagram Location Tags Explained

An Instagram location tag tells viewers exactly where a post or story was generated. Also called geotags, these handy labels correspond to exact coordinates as determined by the GPS on a mobile device.

In many cases, the tagged place is a city or town like “Boston, Massachusetts.” You can also tag a specific business or place as long as a custom tag has been created.

Instagram uses geographical data to organize posts and determine feeds for viewers. That means setting a tag for your posts can help them appear to users in a certain area.

How Location Tags Can Benefit Your Business

At the end of the day, everything you do on social media should be geared around boosting engagement and driving customers to your brand. Geotags have proven to be useful tools for meeting these essential marketing goals.

The great thing about geotags is that they carry multiple marketing-related benefits. This isn’t a case of using some precise tactic to accomplish a narrow goal. Brands around the world have discovered just how broadly the simple act of geotagging can benefit their business.

Reach More People With Your Posts

Your first objective is to place your content in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Your second objective is for those eyeballs to belong as often as possible to genuine potential customers. When you tag your posts and stories to a specific place, you help the content appear to people in the same area as your business. These are the people who are most likely to become regular supporters of your brand.

Increase Engagement With Your Content

Studies have shown that posts with geotags received significantly more engagement than untagged posts. This is hardly surprising. After all, people are much more likely to “like” or comment on posts that they can see relate to their community. Your posts will also appear whenever a user clicks on the same location tag from another profile’s post, and this increased visibility is sure to bring higher levels of engagement.

Show Off Your Brand’s Geographic Range

If your company provides services around local communities, then geotags allows you to demonstrate where exactly you’ve been working. Let’s say you run a commercial painting business. It’s fine to tag some of your posts from your business’s brick-and-mortar headquarters, but you can also upload pictures from the various places where you’ve completed projects. That way, users from those outlying communities will have a better chance of stumbling across your content.

Provide Social Proof to Boost Trust in Your Brand

When you create a custom tag for your business, you encourage customers to tag their own posts and stories with your brand name. This, in turn, helps people online discover your business through their friends. When people see acquaintances having a good time or receiving good service at your business, they’ll be more willing to trust the brand and become customers themselves. Over time, this process can have a significant effect on the size of your customer base.

Adding Tags to Regular Instagram Posts

Not only are geotags hugely beneficial, but they’re also easy to create. For regular posts, all you have to do is click “Add location” after creating and editing the post. From the dropdown list of places, choose the one that best corresponds to your business. You can also search for a place that doesn’t appear on the ready-made list.

Adding Tags to Instagram Stories

Adding geotags is just as easy with stories as it is with regular posts. Once you’ve got your story ready to upload, click the smiley face icon on the top-right corner of the screen. Then, tap the “location” button and choose or search for a place as directed. You can play around with the font and dimensions of the sticker created until it goes perfectly with the rest of the uploaded image.

Pro Tip: Create a Custom Tag for Your Business

To maximize the utility of geotags, you’ll need to create a custom tag for your business. You can do this through the Facebook account that’s linked with your Instagram profile. Once you’ve allowed Facebook to access your device’s GPS, look beneath the status bar in your Facebook App and click “Check In.” Then, type in the name of your business, click “add location,” and choose a category for your business. The last step is to tell Facebook the exact physical coordinates of your business, something that’s much easier if you’re standing on the premises.

Conclusion: Geotags Can Put Your Brand on the Map

The best social media marketing campaigns act as a link between the digital and physical worlds. By tagging your Instagram posts and stories to a specific place, you can help users find your online content as well as your physical business. Before you know it, this increased visibility will pay off by attracting more regular customers.