Instagram is a growing social media giant! With 1 billion active monthly visitors recorded in the first quarter of 2021, it is one of the best sites to sell online. If you’re a passionate entrepreneur who longs to see your business grow to new levels, selling on this rapidly growing platform is an incredible opportunity that can help you realize your dreams. Instagram is truly a powerful marketing tool to improve your sales and help you stay connected with customers.
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It's never been easier to sell on Instagram and have tangible followers who are ready to make purchases from your account. This blog post will show you how easy it is to start selling on Instagram with just a few simple steps. Ready? Let’s get started!
1. Understand your audience
For you to sell on Instagram, you must know your target audience. Take time to research your target audience, and get to learn their interests. If you already have some customers, find out more about them with a short survey. This information can help you improve your brand to meet their needs.
You can also manage your audience using Sprout Social to streamline communications between you and your customers. In addition, the software can help you build a better relationship with your customers by providing quick responses to their queries.
2. Post Perfect Images
Instagram is a visual platform, which means that it prioritizes the posting of photos and videos more than written content. This allows brands to share brand photos that inspire brand awareness and loyalty. With this knowledge in mind, you should post high-quality images and videos. These should be captivating and highlight the product benefits and values it offers to customers.
If you need a free platform to create good quality graphics, consider using Canva.com to create eye-catching fliers and images. Exciting photos and videos have the power to convince your customers about a product because they give the first impression to potential customers about your product! If you want to sell on Instagram, take time and create high quality photos and videos.
3. Don’t Post Once in A Blue Moon, Post Every Day!
For you to sell on Instagram, you have to keep your account active at all times. To increase your brand’s awareness and build a solid customer base, you have to be committed to making regular posts. Making regular posts will develop your customers’ habit of looking at your products as often as you post.
4. Give Offers and Promotions.
When you have offers, let customers know by posting several times about them. Customers like to take advantage of offers and promotions, so make them evident on your posts so that customers can easily find them. When customers are thrilled about these offers, they also share the photos with friends, which translates to nothing less than increased sales! This also means that offers build your reputation and promote customer loyalty.
5. Use Hashtags That Represent Your Brand
Using hashtags that are relevant to your product is vital for you to sell on Instagram. The correct hashtag increases your visibility and helps potential customers to discover you quickly. The “correct hashtag” means a hashtag that is relevant to the brand you’re promoting and targets a specific product.
Additionally, it’s advisable to restrain yourself from using so many unrelated hashtags. Too many hashtags can sound like SPAM, which makes customers avoid your pages. It also confuses the Instagram algorithm on where to best place your post.
6. Optimize Your Profile
Optimizing your profile is a must if you want to sell on Instagram. Your sales on Instagram depend on how you reach out to people and how many of them follow you. A good profile should communicate to customers about your product and convince them to follow you using a few words.
Instagram displays the most relevant results first when a customer enters a search term. Therefore, you have to commit more time to build an impressive profile if you want to be easily found by customers.
How To Optimize Your Instagram Profile To Sell:
- Choose a Good Quality & Clear Profile Photo
A good profile photo draws people’s attention to you. The profile photo should convey a message of who you are. Therefore, choose a brand logo that fits into the Instagram profile circle.
- Have a Great Bio Profile
Tell people about yourself or your company in a few words. You need to be straight to the point because the Instagram bio character limit is 150 characters. Select your words carefully so that you won’t cut out important information. To enrich your profile, you can add a link that directs people to a page where they can get to learn more about you.
7. Engage With Your Customers
Posting regularly alone is not sufficient to keep your Instagram active, you have to blend it with customer engagement. Engagement is achieved when you react to your customers’ comments about a product. When customers tag you in a post, use that opportunity to engage them by reposting or tagging them in your stories.
Instagram stickers are an incredible way to engage your customers and stickers also drive more traffic to your page. In addition, adding stickers to your stories allows your fans to reply easily by clicking the sticker, so stickers are a great tool for establishing solid relationships with customers.
8. Involve Influencers
Partnering with influencers is another way to sell on Instagram. This strategy involves partnering with influential people in your niche that can endorse your products to their followers (also your target market). Working with an influencer is a proven method of connecting to new audiences and boosting your sales. Consumers trust influencers’ opinions and recommendations about a product and will normally follow to buy and try it. Not only does this method guarantee you more sales, but it also builds your credibility and increases your brand awareness. Influencer marketing is a more credible guarantee of your audience’s attention than conventional advertising methods.
9. Make Tutorials on Product Usage
Creating tutorials to demonstrate to consumers how they can use your product is an exciting way to boost your sales on Instagram. Consumers are reluctant to purchase a product whose features they don’t understand. Use product tutorials to explain how such products and features can build confidence and trust among consumers.
Tutorials can also help you cut down the costs of customer service. When a customer is satisfied by the product tutorials, they will find it easier to try it on their own. They will only seek help when they have bigger challenges from customer service.
10. Show The Consumers How You Make Your Products
Another tip to sell on Instagram is revealing the way you make your products. Nothing is as exciting to customers as watching the entire process it takes for your product to be available in the market. This transparency of information about a product to customers builds trust in potential customers that may be sitting on the fence about buying.
11.Display A Variety of Products
Displaying product variety helps you to reach out to a larger market. Consumers can pick the one they like from a wide range of products depending on the color, material, and size. In addition, a limited product variety can make consumers develop an assumption that the products they want are not available. Use the Instagram Shop feature to display your products.
12. Share Photos That Customers Post with Your Product
The use of social proof is a great tip to increase your sales. When customers post photos or videos with your product, request their permission to allow you to share these photos. This gives confidence in your products and improves the chances of the willingness of prospective customers to try out your products.
13. Advertise on Instagram
Another way to sell on Instagram is by making use of Instagram Ads. Instagram ads are available for all users, can be very targeted to your audience and are affordable because you set the budget to spend.
14. Create A Contest
Have you tried out everything to sell on Instagram? Before you give up, try to launch a contest on Instagram. Mobilize the customers that you already have to tag each other to win prizes. Contests can attract great attention to your brand and go viral. Promotional campaigns grow your traffic and increase brand awareness. People buy your product if they get to know about it.
However, while contesting, ensure you do with adherence to Instagram rules and restrictions.
15. Take Advantage of Shoppable Instagram Posts
The use of shoppable Instagram feeds can make customers discover your product easily. It also simplifies the process consumers have to go through to buy your product. Customers need only to click the link to purchase the product without leaving the page to view your product.
Benefits of Selling on Instagram
1. Bigger and Highly Targeted Audience
The success of your business is based on getting the attention of the target audience. When using Instagram, it’s easier to reach your target audience. Most Instagram users are there to look for products. While selling on Instagram, you can reach more people without being barred by geographical borders.
2. You Can Design Tailored Products for Your Customers
Selling on Instagram helps you to learn more about your customers. From the engagements, you can learn your customers’ likes and preferences depending on their posts and tags. This can help you develop tailored products and increase the scope of your business. Moreover, customers feel appreciated when their needs are given special attention.
3. Your Market Grows Every Day
Instagram is a social media platform whose users’ numbers are growing daily. In addition, you can get referrals when consumers share photos of your product with their friends, so your market has a great potential to grow.
4. Better Customer Relations
Selling on Instagram allows you to engage with your customers in the place where they spend much of their time. Customer interactions help to build confidence and trust in customers. Using social platforms such as Sprout Social to manage your Instagram account can help you attend faster to your customer’s concern, which creates customer loyalty.
5. Numerous Marketing Features
Selling on Instagram allows you to boost your sales using the various available marketing features. These features include Instagram stories, Shoppable feeds, live videos, hashtags, quick replies, and many more.
Disadvantages Of Selling on Instagram
1. You May Not Reach the Older Age Group
As we all know, Instagram is a platform that younger people dominate. Older people do visit their accounts, but their activity rate on the platform is lower than the young people. If your target audience is older than 45years, you might not find them on Instagram.
2. Instagram Is Not Purely Focused on Ecommerce
Originally, the platform was developed as a photo-sharing site, so many people still hold this old perspective. However, the majority of young people use their Instagram accounts as a way to connect to celebrities. Other people just visit the site to pass time or connect with family and friends. The buying culture of products is still to grow.
3. You Can Only Reach Those Who Can Access Instagram
Though we live in a digital world, not everyone can access a smartphone. Therefore, when you sell on Instagram, it means your product only serves people who can access Instagram on their phones or other devices. This means you lose potential customers who can’t access the website and will have to use other additional platforms and advertising strategies.
Final Thoughts
There are many ways to sell a product on Instagram. Some people use influencer marketing, others post sponsored content or they create their own branded hashtag campaigns for those who want to engage with the brand outside of social media. However you decide to go about it, we hope this article has given you some valuable advice that will help you in your quest to make sales on Instagram. Good luck!
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