How Ecommerce Businesses Should Do Instagram Marketing to Gain Maximum Benefit

As we all know, visual content is driving social media’s popularity and audience engagement in the online world. And one of the best places to find visual content on the internet is Instagram. This visual content-centric social network has proven to be very effective in attracting leads and driving sales. According to a research, 75% ecommerce companies already use Instagram to promote their products and to create a better presence on social media.

For all ecommerce businesses (and every other business that practices online marketing, for that matter), Instagram offers a trendy way to communicate with the target audience; thus, helps in improving conversion rate.

This post will take you through some proven ways to grow your business with Instagram marketing.

But first, let’s answer the fundamental question that every entrepreneur has – “Is Instagram marketing right for my business?”

Which Business Should Use Instagram for Marketing?

To answer that question, first, we need to understand the nature of this social media platform. For starters, go through these bullet points:

• Instagram is a mobile specific social media platform
• 75% of Instagram’s 700 million users are below the age of 34
• 68% on Instagram users are female
• Most importantly, it is relevant for businesses with sheer amount of images & videos to share

Generally speaking, Instagram marketing is considered most fruitful for fitness, beauty, travel, and food & drink industries. But its scope is not limited to them only.

Suggested read: 5 Niche Ecommerce Businesses You Can Start with YoKart

Now that we have pretty much addressed the concern of Instagram’s relevance for your business, let’s move on to the key Instagram marketing practices.

Different Ways to Market Your Business on Instagram:

1. Share your followers’ posts

Sharing user generated content is important as it helps to build a vibrant and engaged community online. By utilizing this strategy, you can encourage your followers to share their real experiences (associated with your product & services) on social media.

Apart from creating better engagement, the strategy also helps your brand in earning trust of your target audience – since people don’t trust businesses as much as they trust other people.

2. Reach wider with sponsored ads

Like other social media platforms, Instagram too offers the sponsored ads feature. But unlike other social networks, ads on Instagram receive much better response. Reason being – first, the platform is mobile specific; second, the ads are visual (mostly videos) – thus, allowing Instagram ads to seamlessly fit into user’s home feed.

Instagram offers ads in all formats – photos, videos, carousel, and even stories. To get started with Instagram ads, visit Instagram’s advertising page.

3. Use hashtags smartly

On Instagram, hashtags truly live up to their reputation. So, it is really important that you make the best use of them. Here are some valuable tips in this regard:

• Find out all the relevant hashtags related to your product/service, niche, industry, location, etc.
• Create new hashtags for branding, and for campaigns

To make your captions look neat, use hashtags in the comments (just like this one ↓)

4. Use stories to create urgency

The short life of Instagram stories makes them more compelling. They are casual, can be imperfect, and most importantly, unlike user’s regular posts, stay at the top of your followers user feed. Here are some tips to make the most of them:

• Offer limited period discount through stories that only lasts till the story lasts (24 hours)
• Proactively ask followers to reply to Instagram stories via private message
• Instagram stories also allow you to put links on them – so, when you share your product in an Instagram story, you can directly lead users to your store

5. Go Live for Even Better Engagement

Stories create a sense of urgency, but not as much as live videos. An Instagram live video appears only as long as it is being broadcasted – so, followers must have to check it out if they want to see it. Also, being live, they can be more interactive than any other form of shared content. Here are some tips:

• Use Instagram Live for product teasers, big announcements, sharing key information. At the end, share a link for information
• Run an interactive Q&A session – followers ask you questions (by commenting) and you answer them live. You can also ask them your feedback live
• And lastly, however good results you get through stories, live videos can produce better – whether it is about discount offer, sales pitch, and so on

Conclusion

It is apparent that Instagram’s growing popularity as a marketing channel will continue to persuade ecommerce businesses to promote their products & services on the platform. To ensure that you always have the upper hand over your competitors, start implementing above-mentioned practices in your social media marketing mix.

To further lead the race, you can work on integrating different social networks with your store to offer customers a seamless browsing & buying experience across your social profiles & your website.  To help you with that, our next post will cover enhancing your ecommerce store’s capability with the power of social commerce. Stay tuned!