One eighth of the world’s population uses Instagram at least once a month, making it the social media platform with the most monthly users. It’s a huge hit, and its popularity doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon. In the same vein, the sums of money that companies are presently shelling out to promote their products and services on Instagram with the hope of making a sale are, unfortunately, not insignificant. Marketers are investing more resources than ever before in the photo-sharing app, and their efforts are yielding greater results. Extreme levels of rivalry exist.
Yet, just roughly two million marketers use Instagram each month, making up a tiny fraction of the platform’s total user base of one billion. Of course, not everyone on Instagram is looking to buy something new, much less something as specific as your business or product, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take use of the site to make a killing off of all those gorgeous pictures of your stuff.
Let me to instruct you on the proper procedure! If you follow these guidelines, you’ll be selling on Instagram like a seasoned pro in no time.
Adapt to a professional profile
This is nothing new, but a surprising amount of entrepreneurs I’ve spoken with are eager to sell on Instagram without having taken this elementary step. By upgrading from a personal to a business profile, Instagram users have access to a variety of helpful tools for advertising and data analysis. We’ll get to that in a moment, but first, here’s how to actually make the transition.
Sign in, then click the hamburger icon in the upper right corner of your dashboard.
A menu will appear; pick “Settings” from the menu.
Choose the option to “Convert to Business Profile.”
Boom! This is the final word. If you change your mind (you won’t), you can always go back to the same screen and select “Switch Back to Personal Account.”
Now! When you make the move, you’ll have access to several new features, including:
Analyzing Instagram Posts
Instagram is not as user-friendly when it comes to accessing a user’s profile information as other social media platforms like Facebook. Even more challenging is aggregating this information. Instagram Insights eliminates the need for manual data analysis.
With a push of the CTA button
You may add a phone number, email address, and even a map to your profile so that potential customers can easily get in touch with you.
Story links
Instagram, as you may know, doesn’t let users to include links within posts. Each bio can only contain one link to a website. Linking to specific posts or pages on your website from your Instagram stories is a great way to increase conversions and expand your reach. This is a major benefit since stories are becoming increasingly influential and well-known. If you want to learn more about how to make the most of your Instagram story, read this post.
Organic hashtag research campaigns
When I take over an Instagram account for a business, the owner is always anxious to expand their customer base but has no clue how to do it. You may look at a hashtag and say, “That’s a frivolous thing I want nothing to do with,” if you are a serious business owner. Yet, hashtags are the most effective strategy to boost the reach of your organic Instagram posts. You may monitor how many accounts you contacted that weren’t following you when they saw your post by switching to a company profile and seeing their analytics. Both of those metrics will increase dramatically if you learn how to effectively use hashtags.
Kick off your advertising campaign
Many company owners mistakenly believe they can’t afford Instagram advertisements because their budget is too tiny. When carried out properly, low-budget sponsored Instagram ads can provide better results than organic ones. Moreover, I know what you’re thinking: Aren’t organic campaigns free, unless I pay someone to execute it for me? Yes. If you know what you’re doing with Instagram advertisements, you can generate an enormous return on investment.
Don’t be too quick to hit “Promote” on the Instagram app if you want to get the most out of your advertising dollars. Without Custom Audiences, you won’t be able to remarket to Instagram users who have performed particular actions on your website in the hopes of convincing them to buy the widget they never bought before based on their interests or demographics.
Include Facebook advertising into your Instagram marketing strategy, or switch to Instagram alone as your primary placement. Also, remember to schedule some time to create your Ads Manager campaigns.
Instagram Shopping is great for selling tangible goods
Internet buying on Instagram is sick. The only catch is that it can’t be used to peddle services. You can skip this step if that’s the case. Yet, if you own an online store, Instagram Shopping will become your most valuable tool.
How it functions and how to set it up, briefly explained. Shopping posts seem like regular posts until a user “taps to view products,” at which point the name and cost of the item are displayed.
A product information page with a description of the product and a call to action (CTA) is displayed when the user clicks on the tags that appear. They then go to a landing page after clicking through.
Having a Facebook catalogue ready to go and activating product tagging are all that’s required for setup. See our post on incorporating shopping into Instagram stories for a more in-depth explanation of this procedure.
When you turn your Instagram shopping posts into advertising, you get the audience targeting sophistication of Facebook and the intent-taming power of Google Shopping.