There’s no arguing that Instagram is a prolific tool for marketing. With more than a billion active users, you have an incredible opportunity to reach a targeted audience and increase brand awareness. But thanks to recent updates, you can now do far more than just spread the good word about your business. You can also sell your products straight from the platform.
This feature is powerful because it increases the likelihood of impulse purchases. The average consumer spends nearly $5,500 per year on impulse purchases. If you give them the option to purchase a product on the same page as they first viewed it, they’re more likely to complete the transaction before they talk themselves out of it.
If you’re ready to get started with this powerful selling tool, it’s important to have the right strategies in place to maximize your sales. Here are some things you can do to begin.
Use an Automated Instagram Assistant to Get Followers
Growing your Instagram followers is the first step to a successful shopping feature. Without a decent number of followers to buy your products, it will hardly be worth the effort of setting it up.
The use of an automated Instagram assistant, such as SocialCaptain, is a great tool for maximizing your shopping potential. It will help you gain real Instagram followers with automatic growth, boosted productivity, and useful insights into an easy-to-use interface. It’s like having an automated personal assistant that makes growing your social following a cinch!
Use Shoppable Posts
With the Shoppable feature, consumers can skip the extra step of going to your bio for the link to your shop. After you’ve enabled this feature on your business account, you’ll connect a catalog of products that consumers can purchase. Since Instagram is a visual platform, it’s vital to have high-quality imagery and/or videos to showcase your products and inspire purchases.
“Once a business has a product catalog connected to their account, tagging a product is as simple as tagging a person in a post,” Instagram said in a post. When products that you share on your page are tagged as a product, viewers can simply tap a small white circle that contains a shopping bag icon to check out right on the Instagram app. Users may also click the pop-up that reads “shop” to see the rest of your products for sale on Instagram.
To qualify for shoppable posts, you have to be a resident in certain countries, have an Instagram business account, and have the latest version of iOS or Android. You must also sell physical goods that Instagram is okay with, and they must be connected to a Facebook catalog of products. You can view the app’s terms of service for more details on the requirements.
Avoid Over-Promoting Products
Once you’ve begun using the shoppable option, it will be tempting to promote your posts like crazy, but don’t give in. It’s important to keep doing what you’ve done successfully in the past and avoid advertising.
“Instagram is all about inspiration, discovery, branding, and what AdWeek calls the ‘continuation of customer journeys,’” share experts Brian Peters and Hailey Griffis in a Buffer interview.
Turning your Instagram page into a glorified advertising platform will lead to lost followers and a decrease rather than an increase in sales.
“One way to think about it is that you as a business should aim to maintain your current content strategy, and only incorporating shoppable tags on photos that are a natural fit for your profile. The same goes for organic content as well,” they say.
Your content will always be your most valuable asset, even with an active shoppable posts strategy. Without strong content, your shoppable posts will mean very little in the long run.
Add Links to Your Instagram Stories
More and more daily users (300 million, in fact) are spending much of their time on Instagram Stories. They love checking in with their friends and favorite brands through live video, filtered images, and captioned photos. You can make a strong impression on users by adding valuable selling links to your stories.
Not everyone can add links to the Instagram Stories—only those with 10,000 followers or more. This makes increasing your followers even more important! It appears to users as a “see more” button that will take them to your Instagram catalog or your website where they can make a purchase.
“Adding a link to the Instagram Story is a huge trend,” says Kristie Vaksa of Sellfy. “It can help brands, publishers – anyone who wants to sell anything, really – drive traffic much faster.”
Use Instagram Ads to Sell to a Targeted Audience
Of course, every good selling strategy comes with a strong marketing campaign. Thankfully, Instagram has a fantastic targeted advertising platform that helps you reach followers who are most likely to buy. They’re also more likely to follow your brand, so it’s a win-win.
The beauty of Instagram’s ad platform is found in the simplicity of it. All you have to do is choose a shoppable post that you’ve made, either a new uploaded post or a previous one, and click “promote.” You’ll be given options to curate the advertisement to a specific audience based on demographics that you can set.
You’ll pay for the add, an amount that you can choose based on your budget, and voila! Your ad will be marketed to a much wider audience. Watch the “view results” tab that can be found in the bottom left corner of your ad to see how well it performed during its run. This will provide valuable insights that can help you curate better ads in the future.
“Remember, Instagram Ads can take practice, so make sure you continue to tweak your boosted posts and audiences until you get the results you want,” says Matt Smith of Oberlo. “The best Instagram ads for driving eCommerce sales includes messaging that clearly explains how to make a purchase.”
Work on strong calls to action with every advertisement to promote the use of your shoppable posts. It makes shopping easy for everyone involved!