How to Grow Your E-Commerce Business with Instagram

Instagram is a social media platform whose growth has seen a huge boom in the last couple of years. This means good things for companies. Brands are gaining new customers and increasing awareness like never before through engagement with both new and loyal followers on the app.

This social network offers a wide range of features that can truly help your brand thrive. The trick is developing a sales and marketing strategy that pays off. Read below for tips on how to grow your e-commerce business with Instagram.

1. Try Advertising

Paid advertising isn’t always necessary, as organic content truly is quite effective. However, formal ads or sponsorships can help boost your reach and give your sales numbers an edge.

You can pay for Instagram Ads and tailor them to reach a specific, targeted demographic. Paid ads can be an effective way to meet several promotional goals such as gaining followers, raising awareness or increasing sales. You’ll need an Instagram business account and a Facebook page for business to run paid ads. There are numerous types of ads from which to choose, such as photo, carousel, video and Instagram Stories.

Play around with them to see which best suits your content and your intended audience. Monitor your analytics to determine which ads are most successful and adjust your future ad spending accordingly. You can rest assured that your money will be well-spent, as Instagram offers an incredibly high advertising engagement rate compared to other social media platforms.

These are a handful of techniques you can put into place if you want to grow your e-commerce business on Instagram. With some planning and strategy, you’ll soon see things moving in the right direction.

2. Make Your Posts Shoppable

These days, social media platforms are allowing business users to sell their goods and services more easily. Instagram is no exception. This social network gives you several ways to create shoppable posts that give your followers the ability to buy the items that interest them with just a few clicks. Including products in your Instagram posts is absolutely not spammy, as long as you do it sparingly. Mix things up a little when it comes to content.

Add photos, contests, Stories and more related to your niche, sprinkling in product posts every now and then. Although you can’t put direct links into your photo captions, adding product tags to your post is easy. You can also use shoppable stickers in your Instagram Stories.

Now followers can simply tag a photo to see a product appear. Once they click on it, they’ll arrive at the product page where they can check out. Shoppable posts will have a shopping bag icon on the upper right-hand corner so that people can recognize them easily. Be aware that you must have a business account and connect your profile to your merchandise’s Facebook catalogue.

3. Use Captions to Your Advantage

Writing Instagram captions can be difficult. It’s intimidating for many of us to decide what to put in that spot to speak to our audience. Marketing your product might seem even trickier. It’s tempting to write a simple one-line caption, but that’s usually not an effective approach. Longer captions tend to make more of an impact when it comes to selling on Instagram. Think of your caption as a shorter version of a blog post.

The point is to be informative, as well as provocative. It should send a message, promote a feeling and pique interest. People actually seem to enjoy reading longer captions and usually interact more when telling a story. Feel free to mix things up, though. You can vary the length of your caption content for each post to provide some visual interest.

4. Get Others Involved

When it comes to your e-commerce business, you’re likely to gain more success when you involve others in your promotions—engagement matters when it comes to social networking. You want your audience to participate in your posts and to feel a part of things.

The more personally invested they feel in your content, the more likely they will trust your brand. There are many fun and creative ways to add new voices to your feed and keep things fresh. One is to simply invite your fans to contribute to your feed. Create a hashtag and ask them to tag photos of themselves using your product. Then you can give featured accounts a shoutout of recognition.

You might also post user testimonials to your Instagram account. These are both great ways to feature user-generated content. Collaborations with influencers are also big hits for many campaigns. Approach a well-known Instagram influencer relevant to your niche and invite them to work together on a campaign. Bringing in new voices and fresh perspectives is almost always welcomed by followers. It keeps things from becoming boring or repetitive and can often drum up new followers.

5. Find What Works for You

There are several features meant to facilitate sales and grow your Instagram. However, it doesn’t make sense to use them all and just hope one shows a return for you. Instead, analyze the features that interest you and plan for how they might most appeal to your audience and be used in a way that highlights your brand.

Then, put your strategies to work, monitoring the results and leveraging what works, while pitching the ones that flop. Some features to consider testing out include tagging products in Instagram Stories and in your feed, swiping up in Instagram Stories to make purchases and simply adding an e-commerce link to your Instagram bio.

Are you wondering if Facebook may be a better platform for your business? There would be no harm in testing both Instagram and Facebook with a similar marketing campaign and then analyse the rate of conversion.