Ask any growing business about its biggest challenge and one of the answers you’ll hear time and time again is finding customers. After all, building a strong customer base is the foundation for growth. But when you’re running a business, it can be tricky and time-consuming to reach people most likely to be interested in your business, capture their attention and give them a compelling reason to interact with you.

These days, Instagram is a serious business tool, because brands can use it to reach customers online more easily. And because it's now home to a community of 15 million businesses around the world, Instagram offers plenty of ways for your business to get noticed.

In this blog series, we’ll uncover some of the simplest steps to getting started with Instagram and making your business stand out:

More than 500 million accounts are active on Instagram every day and 80% of these follow at least one business. Not only that, but 60% of accounts say they learn about products and services on Instagram. So, with all of those people ready to discover your business, it’s time to get serious with Instagram.

When you convert to a Business Profile on Instagram, you’ll access a whole range of tools to help you grow your business. Setting up your Business Profile from scratch, or converting a personal account to a business account, is simple. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to:

• Add information about your business to your profile, like contact details, location and hours
• Get insights about followers and understand how they interact with your posts and stories
• See real-time feedback on how your stories and promoted posts are performing

Whether your business is new or already established, your first step to standing out with Instagram is to get your Business Profile set up and ready to go. Do it quickly and easily, right from the app.

Be sure to add any information to your profile that your potential customers will want to know. Briefly describe what your business is all about and add a link to where people can buy or make contact with your business. You can even add a relevant hashtag or two.

Online flower subscription service, Bloom & Wild, is one of the first UK businesses to try out Instagram business tools—and it hasn’t looked back. A highly visual brand, it already had a strong following on Instagram. But when it converted to a Business Profile and tried out Instagram’s ad formats, Bloom & Wild was able to share its stunning product photos to even wider audiences. The result? A 62% boost in orders.

By using Instagram’s insights tools, Bloom & Wild also learned which formats its audience responded to best. It found that video earned particularly high engagement, which now helps the business focus on sharing content its community values most.

For sole entrepreneur, Elodie Fagot, Instagram Business Tools have helped place her business in front of thousands of customers and stockists across the world. Her Tea Heritage brand stands out and inspires with beautiful photos of her quirky teabags—but the real difference now is that people can click straight through to her online shop to make a purchase from anywhere in the world. In fact, just a few years after starting out, 40% of Elodie's online sales now come from Instagram.

Stay tuned for the next post of this series, when we’ll be turning our attention to all things creative.

You can also take free, online training courses to help you better understand how to use Instagram to build your business.