With over 2 billion monthly users, Instagram's user base is a marketing goldmine. And if you're reading this article, you'll already know how important Instagram marketing is.

But tapping into Instagram's marketing capabilities can be difficult. Planning, executing, and tracking Instagram marketing campaigns can be time-consuming. And this is where a marketing tool comes in.

But which are the best Instagram marketing tools? And how do you choose one? Let's dive in.

What are Instagram marketing tools?

Instagram marketing tools cover a wide variety of apps that help brands grow their business. These tools offer reporting, content creation, automation, and more. The result? A more efficient, cost-effective Instagram marketing program.

There are plenty of Instagram marketing solutions available – let's explore the different types on offer.

The types of Instagram marketing tools available

These handy Instagram solutions can be broadly categorized into five categories:

Content creation tools

Content creation tools can help you create images and videos, write captions, and much more. Many offer Instagram hashtag suggestions or use AI to suggest improvements to your content for your Instagram posts, Stories, and Reels.

Scheduling and automation tools

Instagram scheduling and automation tools streamline your workflow. They let you create multiple pieces of content at once and schedule it for your audience at the right times. Most of these tools also support collaboration and include tools for content approval.

Analytics and reporting tools

Instagram analytics tools monitor the performance of your Instagram content. They can also help benchmark your performance against competitors, or help large brands assess how they're perceived among existing and potential customers. These valuable insights help brands connect with their customers and optimize their social media strategy.

Optimization tools

Optimization tools, which include hashtag analytics tools, provide content ideas and help brands stay relevant to the Instagram algorithms. They do everything from making sure your Instagram account details and bio are as effective as possible, all the way through to making sure each post goes up at the right time for your audience.

Instagram ad management tools

Ad management solutions help social media marketers run paid campaigns on the platform. These Instagram ad tools let you create, schedule, and track your ads for maximum return on investment (ROI).

Key features of Instagram marketing tools

The functions provided by Instagram tools vary to suit different business needs. Some of the core functions you'll find in Instagram marketing tools include:

  • Scheduling & publishing posts. Tools that offer publishing features offer a simple dashboard where members of your team can create and schedule posts – often across multiple social media platforms. These tools are idea for collaboration and approval flows.
  • Content planning & calendar. A content library and calendar view is a common feature of good quality Instagram content tools. These can help you visualize your Instagram strategy.
  • Analytics & reporting. The best Instagram marketing tools offer dashboards and customizable reports that give you a snapshot of key performance indicators (KPIs) and important social media metrics like reach, engagement rates, and conversions.
  • Social listening & monitoring. Social listening and monitoring tools can scan Instagram posts for brand mentions and deliver reports on brand sentiment and awareness in your dashboard. These are a more premium feature among Instagram marketing tools.
  • Engagement & community management. These features are designed to improve engagement rates and help with community management. They offer options such as a unified inbox for inbound comments and messages, tools to assign inbound communications to team members, and reports on your performance responding to these connections. 

How do you choose the right tools for your needs?

With so many options available, it can be hard to decide what tool works best for your business. These tips will help you pick the right one.

Define your goals & objectives

What are you trying to achieve with your campaign? Tools that support influencer campaigns or competitive analysis are useful if you need them, but if you're running a straightforward content plan, you might only need basic scheduling tools.

As with any marketing strategy, its important to set clear goals and objectives. Also consider your target audience. If your audience responds more to Instagram Reels, you'll need tools that let you create and track that type of post.

Once you have a clear picture of what you want to achieve on the platform, you'll be able to cull any tools that don't support your needs.

Identify your budget & resources

Every Instagram strategy costs money, and some are more expensive than others. Instagram influencer campaigns can be expensive, so consider if this is in your budget before you proceed.

The other thing to note is scale. Subscription plan pricing often scales up according to how many posts or accounts you need. If you need more seats for your content tool, that will cost more. You might also look for tools that support you by filling in where your resources are lacking, for example, in content ideation or consumer research.

Research and compare tool features

While many tools offer a similar core set of features, they all have individual quirks and different focuses. Check out the unique functions available in different tools and build a matrix of your must haves as well as a list of functions that appeal. Make sure these tools integrate neatly with your existing workflows.

Read user reviews & testimonials

We learn a lot based on other people's experience. The reviews and testimonials of each tool will help you determine how well it might suits your needs, and what sorts of pitfalls or shortcomings you should look out for.

Test drive tools with free trials

Most of the tools in our list offer free trial periods. It's worth taking each for a test drive to see how well they suit your needs, and how well your team gels with the tool workflow and systems. Everyone is different, and highly intuitive user portal for one team might be frustrating for another. Take the time to get to know each tool in turn before you make your choice. 

The best Instagram marketing tools for businesses

So, we've covered the basics. Now let's take a look at some of the best Instagram marketing tools available in 2025.

Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a comprehensive one-stop social media marketing tool for all platforms, including Instagram. We are committed to helping brands manage their identity and grow their online presence.

Our solution is perfect for advanced, large-scale campaigns across multiple channels. As a Meta Business Partner, Brandwatch is fully integrated with Meta's platforms which include Facebook and Instagram. This allows Brandwatch to track conversations, create targeted marketing and advertising campaigns, and identify influencers who your brand will benefit from partnering with.

The powerful line up of social media management tools in the Brandwatch suite offer every conceivable type of Instagram marketing aide.

Brandwatch Publish offers content management and post scheduling with approvals and collaboration tools in a unified calendar. Grab the attention of consumers with great content, then use product tags and Link in Bio to drive more sales all from Publish. It even allows Instagram users to turn posts into ad campaigns with just one click. Users can manage that ad and others from across multiple accounts and social media networks using Brandwatch Advertise.

Want to grow your brand? Brandwatch Influence will identify the right Instagram creators to follow based on audience profile, reach, growth rate, locality, and more. You can manage your Instagram influencer marketing campaigns in one dashboard to help boost your efforts.

You can also interact with your audience quickly and easily using Brandwatch Engage, a unified inbox for Instagram messages, comments, and story replies.

Brandwatch Consumer Research uses Instagram's position as a global platform for consumer opinion to help you assess brand sentiment in the marketplace. Meanwhile, Brandwatch Listen will track 12 months of Business account and Creator account content to gather even more powerful insights into how your audience responds to your Instagram content.

From creating your Instagram post to building your brand with public campaigns and measuring those results across a range of metrics, Brandwatch is the most comprehensive Instagram marketing tool for major brands.

Meta Business Suite (Meta's native tool)

Instagram Business account users have access to the native Instagram analytics tool, Meta Business Suite. This tool operates across Meta properties so it's also available on Instagram. Meta Business suite includes a calendar on which you can schedule Instagram posts, detailed analytics, and an ad planner tool.

This tool has a lot of reporting abilities, but it might lack in ease of use. Still, Meta Business Suite is a useful tool for companies of all sizes with straightforward, in-house campaigns.

Meta Business Suite has the Meta Ad Manager tool built into it, so you can use this tool to monitor and manage your ad campaigns. Meta's AI-powered tool that targets your ad to specific audiences and reformats it to suit Stories, Reels, feed ads, and more is also found in this tool. Other key features include:

  • A unified inbox for Instagram and Facebook messages and comments
  • Insights dashboard with historical reporting for up to 90 days
  • Ad planner tool
  • Content scheduler

This native solution offers many of the basic management features you'll need to operate your Facebook and Instagram marketing campaign.

Later

Later is an Instagram content strategy tool that offers automatic posting, post scheduling, and collaboration features for your social media marketing team. While Later integrates with other social media platforms, it was originally designed for Instagram, so most of its tools are focused here.

This tool also includes AI-powered Instagram caption suggestions and content generation, as well as suggestions for relevant hashtags.

Users have access to a shared content library, and one of the tools best assets is that it lets you curate user-generated content (UGC) from your Instagram feed. You can then use this Instagram tool to repost or share that UGC to your Instagram Stories with ease.

Hootsuite

The Hootsuite social media scheduling tool is one of the original social media add-on tools. It allows Instagram account managers to schedule posts in bulk with a convenient drag-and-drop content calendar dashboard. It has integrations with useful Instagram content tools like Canva, so you can create engaging images to post on your feed, all without leaving the platform.

Hootsuite is a popular tool for marketing agencies because it supports posting to multiple social media accounts. Social media marketers can work on many social media campaigns in one place and work with teams.

Other Instagram marketing tools within the Hootsuite platform include an integrated social inbox and AI editing tools.

Sprout Social

Another in the genre of social media scheduling tools, Sprout Social also offers bulk scheduling, so users can schedule post content for months on end in one go. This content management tool has a range of analytics features to help brands identify best-performing content and reuse it in other posts.

The customizable calendar view makes it easy for brands to track their Instagram Reels, posts, and Stories. This easy-to-use dashboard also pulls in Instagram insights to help you gauge the impact of your marketing strategy.

Buffer

Buffer is an Instagram scheduling tool with a focus on content creation. It offers AI-powered ideation for new social media posts with features to help you craft your content to suit your Instagram target audience.

Like most of the marketing tools in our list, Buffer also offers detailed reporting on Instagram engagement and other metrics, plus a unified social inbox to help you respond to your audience efficiently.

Iconosquare

Iconosquare's grid format content planner lets you see how your Instagram videos and posts will look on your profile page. This clever feature makes it a brilliant content scheduling tool for Instagram.

This tool has several advanced features like a hashtag manager and AI content generator that makes it easy to build an effective Instagram post. There's even an integrated content library to help you post images, videos, images, and captions to your Instagram feed faster.

There's a range of collaboration tools and advanced post-scheduling, too. In fact, Iconosquare lets you schedule Instagram videos, posts, and even the first comment on your posts. You can tag locations and other Instagram accounts from within the content dashboard. Plus, Iconosquare integrates with other social media sites, so you can post your best content on other channels with just one click.

SocialPilot

With bulk scheduling for up to 500 posts, advanced scheduling rules, and a visual content calendar, SocialPilot is another useful tool for managing your Instagram marketing strategy. Among the team collaboration tools is a function to invite other Instagram accounts so you can create and schedule collaboration posts.

Reporting tools within SocialPilot provide separate metrics for Instagram Reels, posts, and Stories, with detailed analytics on reach, engagement, audience demographics, and more. SocialPilot also integrates Instagram marketing software like Canva so you can create and edit high-quality visuals for your posts. It also lets you customize watermarks on your Instagram stories so you can protect your original content.

FAQs about Instagram marketing tools

Is using an Instagram marketing tool safe?

As a general rule, Instagram marketing software or web tools from a reputable source are safe to use. It's always important to safeguard your social media account by following best practices for Instagram management. This includes using strong passwords and two-factor authentication (2FA). Always review your settings and Instagram account activity to make sure your profile hasn't been compromised.

How does an Instagram marketing tool improve reach?

The Instagram algorithm rewards high-quality, consistent post content with high engagement by suggesting it in more user feeds. Instagram marketing tools improve reach because they:

  • Offer content suggestions to make your Instagram feed more compelling
  • Make it easier to like and respond to comments to keep engagement levels high
  • Improve post quality
  • Improve post consistency and cadence
  • Help you assess the best content for your audience
  • Suggest relevant hashtags to use that make your content more findable

How do Instagram marketing tools analyze performance?

The reporting functions of the marketing tools in this list offer insight into performance across several metrics. They do this by plugging into Instagram's API to track posts and record the number of views, comments, reactions, and more. Instagram marketing tools then collate this data into customizable reporting dashboards so your marketing team can get a clear snapshot of your Instagram performance over time.

What types of analytics can you expect from an Instagram marketing tool?

At a basic level, Instagram marketing tools report on things like:

  • Reach: How many users saw your content
  • Engagement: How many users responded to your content
  • Audience demographics: What sort of people are in your audience, and from what location

Obviously, the more reach and engagement your Instagram Stories or posts get, the better you're performing. Other metrics, like the impressions from followers versus impressions from non-followers can help you determine how well you're growing your audience.

Advanced tools will also offer insight into consumer sentiment for your brand, how well your competitor posts are performing, and where you rank in terms of performance against the rest of the Instagram community. These tools can also identify how much user-generated content about your brand, product, or service is being created.

All this data helps you optimize your campaign to get the best possible response from your target market.

How do you know which Instagram marketing tool is right for you?

The best way to find out which Instagram marketing tool is best for you is to assess your own goals. Your Instagram marketing needs could be anything from gaining more followers to driving more conversions to your Instagram Shop.

Other factors will include your budget, the scale of your Instagram campaign, and your existing workflows. If you need features to manage multiple influencer campaigns, then you'll need a tool that offers collaboration and social media research tools. Look at the unique features of a variety of tools and choose one that works best for your team and your goals.