It is common knowledge that social media has emerged as one of the best platforms to market your products and services and interact with your customers. However, the potential of social media as a marketplace remains largely untapped.
Adding product links to your social media content can help you significantly drive up your sales. Amongst the various social media platforms out there, Instagram, in particular, stands out. It provides various unique features which make it an extremely attractive option to sell your products.
However, to make the best use of it, you need to be familiar with the various features it has to offer. Here are some useful tips that can help you sell your products on Instagram.
Create A Business Account
Creating an Instagram Business Account is the first step to start selling your products on Instagram.
A business account offers numerous benefits over a regular account like being able to add an industry label in your bio, the option of scheduling posts, analyzing the performance of your profile through analytics tools, and the option of setting up an Instagram shop.
You can also create quick replies that let you automate replies to standardized comments and queries.
Special Offers For Instagram Users
Providing special offers to the followers of your page is a great way of attracting more Instagram likes and followers as well as ramping up your sales.
Usually, when such special offers are provided by a seller, they are advertised across all their social platforms to drive people to follow their Instagram page as well.
This encourages your followers to follow your Instagram page to avoid missing out on any special offers. These offers can include exclusive discounts, coupons, product launches, membership drives, and giveaways.
Market Your Products Through Influencers
Influencers provide you with the opportunity of marketing your products to millions of people across the globe and making your product desirable.
Marketing through influencers is surprisingly effective and they can market your product in ways in which regular advertisements can not.
A large number of influencers tend to promote only those products that they would themselves use and that is one of the reasons why people tend to trust influencers more than conventional advertisements.
In addition, they can market your products to their followers by making use of special discount links for their followers which can help promote sales.
Tailor Your Instagram Feed
Your Instagram feed should be able to reflect your brand identity.
The look and feel of your Instagram page should be in sync with that of your website in terms of the theme, advertisements, and content, and also the tone, filters, and fonts.
This helps promote your brand identity. It helps in improving your brand recognition and makes your brand more relatable.
The goal is for a user to be able to immediately identify any of your posts that show up in their personal feed as being related to your brand. An exciting feature that makes Instagram a great platform to sell your products is the shoppable feed.
If you build a shoppable feed you can tag products that are shown in the feed and let the user purchase them with a simple tap, directly from the Instagram application.
To make the best use of this feature you should try and create content that places your products subtly and displays them in ways in which they would be used in real life.
Get Listed In The Shop Tab
Another new feature introduced by Instagram is the Shop Tab. The Shop Tab allows users to find personal recommendations and editor’s pics of shoppable products on Instagram.
The users can further filter them based on numerous categories making it easier for them to find the right product. However, in order to become eligible to be listed in the shop tab, you need to have at least nine posts with tagged products on your Instagram feed.
Use Your Instagram Bio
Your Instagram bio should always be updated. Although it might not appear so, your Instagram bio is actually a great way of promoting your products. This is because it is the simplest way of providing actual clickable links on your Instagram profile.
A lot of businesses use links in their Instagram bio to promote their new products or services and redirect users to where they can either get more information or can purchase the product.
Reach The Right Audience Using Instagram Ads
Instagram offers the option of promoting your posts. Promoting your posts is a great way of reaching out to a new audience. Simply promoting your posts, however, is not enough.
It is important to target the right audience. While promoting your post you have to account for factors like user gender, the age group, and the location of the users you wish to target.
You wouldn’t want to target men when the product you are trying to promote is high heels for women. Targeting the right audience with your promoted posts is important to make your Instagram marketing campaign a success.
Instagram also offers the facility for you to track the performance of your promoted posts. This can help you identify what works and what doesn’t, and make suitable changes to your future content.
Use Instagram Stories
Apart from your bio, the only other place where you can post links on your Instagram profile, are your stories. There is, however, a catch.
These links can be used to redirect the user directly to a relevant page which could be the landing page of your product, a purchase link, or your business page.
To be able to add swipe-up links to your Instagram stories, you need to have at least ten thousand followers on your Instagram account.
Instagram offers numerous features that can help you promote and sell your products. However, to have a successful campaign it is important to reach out to as many people as you can.
This eventually boils down to expanding your cone of influence by gaining more real Instagram followers. The best way of gaining more followers is to post quality and relevant content regularly.
Not being regular on Instagram would cause you to lose followers over time.
Once you have a sufficient number of followers, you can make use of the various features offered by Instagram to market and sell your product.
