Today, Instagram is one of the most effective platforms for e-commerce business seeking effective marketing and conversion channels. Since Facebook purchased it in 2012, Instagram has come a long way in enabling businesses to grow and evolve. Back then, Instagram was home to 50 million global users. Nine years down the line, that number has crossed a billion. To market and scale your e-commerce business on Instagram, all you need is an effective marketing strategy.
Let’s look at some of the most effective Instagram marketing strategies for e-commerce businesses.
Create, Schedule, and Engage
This three-step strategy is one of the simplest Instagram marketing strategies for e-commerce businesses. Regardless of what platform you are on, a customer will always demand authenticity. To keep these customers hooked, you need to develop informative and entertaining content that not only resonates with your audience but also represents your brand. Creating content and coming up with new ideas on short notice isn’t too easy, irrespective of your level of creativity. Here is a three-step process you must follow to make your life easier.
Content Creation
When creating content, you need to ensure it will sell. The better the quality of your content, the better engagement you expect from your audience. Before creating content, you must make sure it revolves around certain topics relevant to your business niche. Sure, you can now use videos on Instagram, but inherently, it has always been an image-based platform. Therefore, the image dimensions should be up to par. The following image dimensions will help you get the hang if image content:
- Square Image: 1080 × 1080 pixels
- Vertical Image: 1080 × 1350 pixels
- Horizontal Image: 1080×566 pixels
The number of characters in your captions can go up to 2200. Once the content is complete, you can move to the next task: content scheduling.
Content Scheduling
Logging into Instagram every time for the slightest chore can be annoying. But you don’t have to do any of that. What you can do is schedule a month’s content in a single go. Tools like Latergramme can come in handy when you’re looking to schedule your Instagram posts. Rescheduling enables you to fill your Instagram feed with content at regular intervals.
Engage
Posting the right content isn’t the only marketing function to help your business grow. You also need to engage your audience. If your e-commerce business has started increasing its number of sales, you must integrate customer service.
Growth Hacking
The next strategy on our list is growth hacking. When you own a business, you should be well aware of what is good for you and what isn’t. If you want to grow your Instagram followers and create brand awareness, you can use two great hacks. First up, you can cross-collaborate with influencers. Secondly, you can host contests and extend giveaways. You can do the latter through the following types of posts:
Promotional Posts
As the name suggests, promotional posts are the ones used to market your business, as well as the products and services you offer.
Conversational Posts
Next up, we have conversational posts. These posts must allow your audience to engage in conversations. All you have to do is ask a question or share a piece of information regarding the industry you’re a part of.
Sharing Posts
These posts allow you to promote your business through your followers, influencers, and bloggers by asking them to share for some incentive.
The Rule of Thirds
If you want to make your Instagram photos attractive, you have to follow the rule of thirds. Here is how you can do it.
Make a Grid
You can visualize your product image using a grid that is 3 by 3. This grid is a collection of three vertical lines and three horizontal lines. Altogether they make a grid comprising of nine parts.
Product Placement
In your grid, place your product on an intersection point.
The Right composition
While it is tempting to place a product right in the center, aligning it at the intersection point will make it much more appealing to the eye.
It’s not as if the pictures that violate the rule of thirds won’t be appealing. It’s just that the rule of thirds is a guideline, especially when you are starting. The more you utilize it, the more you will learn about product placement.
Tag Your Products
Besides a catchy CTA, you should tag your products featured on your Instagram posts. It simplifies the buying process for your customers and helps them ease their way through the funnel. On Instagram, tagging products is just like tagging people. Tagging products is helpful, especially when you want to reach a bigger audience. This process is fairly easy, transforming your handle into a sales channel.
Here is what you need to do:
- On Facebook, you can set up a shop section. This section will connect to Instagram and market your products there. You can also add an option for visitors to check out your e-commerce site rather than your Facebook page. By doing so, you will keep your inventory management system updated.
- Wait for a few minutes before you receive a confirmation message from Instagram. Once you receive the message, you can start tagging your products.
- If you are posting an image, select “tag a product.” This option will allow you to monitor the products you have updated on Facebook.
Utilize Hashtags
As we have already discussed previously, hashtags are extremely important as far as expanding your reach on social media is concerned. To save valuable time, you must do advanced keyword research before choosing to market your business on Instagram. After your research is complete, list the hashtags you include in your Instagram posts. Let’s suppose your business is related to fitness, exercise, sports, and sports gear; you can make separate categories and add relevant keywords to each category. Remember, hashtags can change quickly, and you can add or replace them with new trending hashtags. Make sure you update your hashtag lists periodically.
To develop better hashtags for your post, you must keep the user’s experience in mind. Before you can attract followers and buyers on Instagram, you must be patient. It takes time, but the effort is worth it. While doing your keyword research, you must search for hashtags relevant to your products and business. This will open you up to audiences that have similar interests.
Use Contests and User-Generated Content to Increase Sales
Selling directly on Instagram is great, but your business should make your customers feel special. If you want to foster a healthy relationship with your customers and build a strong online community, you must capitalize on user-generated content. Your Instagram feed should be engaging and inspiring. Three main types of content help you engage your customers, making them trust you better.
- Number one on our list is BTS or behind-the-scenes pictures. Fashion brands are a great source of inspiration and how they post on their Instagram handles. Apart from adding to the quality of your product or service, you can also allow your customers to take a peek into what happens away from their eyes. It makes them feel as if they are also a part of your brand, which will facilitate community building.
- If you want to promote a healthy, humble, and down-to-earth image of your brand, you should use user-generated content which could be any picture or video that showcases your customers while they use your product or service. It makes your customers feel loved and cared for, which adds to your sales volumes.
- Lastly, it would be best to host contests and offer free giveaways. If you treat your customers exactly how they want to be treated, you will land the conversion you desire. You can use visually appealing graphics and put on the text that is clear and easy to read to announce your free giveaways.
Focus on Engagement
If you want to grow your business over social media platforms like Instagram, you need to focus on engagement. It would be effective to spend some time liking their posts, following them, and commenting on their content. If you can do this consistently, your business will grow organically.
Typically, when you follow someone, like their posts, or reply to their comments, there is a good chance that they will visit your page at least once. By doing so, you can draw attention to your brand for all the right reasons. The chances are that they might follow you back.
While some people purchase likes on social media, it isn’t in your best interest. While this might produce immediate results, but if you stick to this technique for a long time, it will eventually damage your brand. Like any digital platform, algorithms on Instagram are likely to change with time, and the sad part is that there is no prior notice or announcement regarding a shift in algorithms. Moreover, Instagram doesn’t share its content suppression criteria. However, one of the dangerous aspects of algorithm change is that it shadowbans accounts that purchase likes and followers on Instagram. As a result, the reach of such pages takes a major hit, and they never fully recover. It is better to grow on the platform organically rather than shooting yourself in the foot by purchasing followership.
Add to Your Stories
Speaking of engagement, Instagram stories are extremely helpful when engaging customers. As we discussed earlier, behind-the-scenes images, footage, and videos are extremely helpful for your marketing needs. The Instagram story is a great place to run those pictures and footage. Adding frequently to your stories shows your customers how serious you truly are with your business. With Instagram stories, not only do you engage with customers, but you also present them with a humanistic image of your brand, which gives you an edge over your competition, considering the competitive nature of the market. You can also make these stories more interactive by tagging your products, which directly take your customers to your landing page.
Smoothen the Customer’s Journey
By now, you might be sharing valuable content and receiving the kind of engagement you are looking for. However, are your efforts having a positive impact on your e-commerce store? It is best to have a large number of followers, as it adds to your brand’s visibility.
However, there is one more thing you need to focus on. As a brand that wants to grow, it is in your best interest to make the buyer’s journey as smooth and flawless as possible.
The traffic you welcome on your Instagram page mainly comes from smartphones, but is your landing page mobile-friendly? Likes and followers are what we call vanity metrics. What matters the most is how easy it is to shop on your online platform. If the online buying process is complex, the bounce rate will increase, which will also decrease your sales volume.
While promoting your products and services is great, don’t make the mistake of hard-selling your products. It will make your brand come off as needy and desperate, which will ruin your brand’s integrity. Furthermore, you can also benefit from third-party tools. One great example of such a tool is Like2Buy, which translates your posts on Instagram on your website. It also allows you to keep tabs on your sales traffic while maintaining the essence your brand stands on. It would be best if you also customized your product gallery to make things easy for your customers. Lastly, it would be best if you capitalized on retargeting tools to send product updates and re-engage your customers.
Work With Influencers
Influencer marketing is the talk of the town when it comes to social media, especially Instagram. One great example of influencer marketing is that of Wheels. This business made more than a million dollars in sales by adding influencers to its marketing toolkit. To benefit from this marketing technique, you need to sponsor your posts. For sponsoring your posts, the money you can spend can vary from $10-20. Your expenditure depends upon the following size of your influencer.
Celebrity shout-outs are great for cultivating your brand’s credibility in the eyes of the public. You can also host a flashmob on Instagram, just like Madmen did. Their flashmob comprised of fashion bloggers and editors for launching their campaign. Such campaigns on Instagram can stay within the memory of your followers for a long time.
Focus on Analytics
This is by far one of the best Instagram marketing strategies for e-commerce businesses. If you want to develop better marketing techniques, you should regularly monitor your analytics. The in-app analytics present you with valuable information. You can use this information to increase your level of engagement. It also informs you about when your audience I most active. Your future posts should be posted when these people are active.
Furthermore, keep an eye on the pictures that are most liked. These photos say a lot about the things your potential customers are interested in. Use this information to post more of the type of content your customers react to.
Benefit from Instagram Highlights
Instagram stories are short-form videos that disappear after 24 hours. However, there are some images and videos your customers and you want to be on your Instagram account. Stories you must add to your highlights are the ones that revolve around a new product or an upcoming event. These highlights are like a curated collection of stories you would want to stay visible to your visitors.
Mistakes to Avoid
- Your strategy should always have a goal. It could be brand awareness, engagement or sales. The absence of a goal will make your efforts go in vain, thus keeping you from benefitting from opportunities.
- Always add the product link in your call to action. Posts on Instagram receive 1.2 billion likes on a daily basis. Without a link in your bio, you will lose the opportunity to attract traffic to your website.
- Don’t make your Instagram account private. When users see a private icon, they will avoid you like the plague.
- Lastly, you shouldn’t ignore comments on your posts. Instead you must respond to them promptly, or you will never be able to build a community.
The Final Word
These were some of many Instagram marketing strategies for e-commerce businesses. You are not bound to use one strategy at a time. Instead, it would be best to use these strategies simultaneously. The best thing about Instagram is that it doesn’t need you to allocate a big budget for marketing purposes. The trick is to stay honest and stay alert. Keep an eye on all things trending. This will enable you to work on your hashtag research to reach your targeted audience.
Moreover, be as original and as organic as you can be. It can be very tempting to spend a little money and buy followership, but is it worth the risk? The day Instagram finds out, you will lose your following, tarnishing your business in a major way.