Even though Instagram has been slow to unlock its potential as an e-commerce facilitator, it now offers various features for e-commerce store owners to transform them into sales powerhouses. With over a billion active users per month, half of which are active every single day, the e-commerce potential of Instagram is unmistakable.
In addition to facilitating direct sales, businesses can use Instagram to raise their brand awareness and build loyal communities for generating valuable leads. Some of the best tips for crafting an effective e-commerce strategy for Instagram:
Create Awesome Content
Instagram with its visual centricity is the perfect social media platform to showcase your products. However, you must take care to ensure that the content is of very high quality. For your posts to be seen in the multitude of other posts in the users’ feeds, they must be striking enough to catch the attention of the audience, be engaging and entertaining, original, and add value to the audience.
The image sizes should not exceed 1080 x 1080 pixels for square images, 1080 x 1350 pixels for vertical images, and 1080 x 566 pixels for horizontal images, according to Influencer Marketing Hub. Make sure that you use captions to add more information and context to the photos.
Schedule Content for the Best Visibility
With more than 90 million images and videos being uploaded every single day on Instagram, your target audience will likely miss seeing your posts unless they are scheduled to match the times when they’re most active on Instagram. Regardless of whether you are a local business or a global one, you need to find out the time of the day as well as the best days of the week for posting content. While there are many studies available, experimenting with your posting times will help you to establish the optimum times for your business.
By using a content scheduling tool, you can not only spare yourself the trouble of remembering to post manually when required but also other members of the marketing team will know in advance which posts are scheduled so that they are more prepared to convince and convert prospective customers. Some of the better content schedulers will allow you to schedule your posts weeks in advance.
Engage With Followers
It is not enough to post high-quality content on your Instagram account and expect that you will be rewarded with sales going through the roof. You need to understand that Instagram is best for raising brand reach and building communities of loyal customers who will have your product and services on the top of their minds and also act as your brand advocates.
It can only happen when you have built a high level of trust and credibility with your target audiences. The only way of doing this is to engage with your audience by giving prompt, accurate, and comprehensive responses to their questions, observations, and complaints. By doing so consistently, you will be able to convince them that your interest in them is genuine, and you are proactive in your attitude in rendering good customer service.
In addition to responding to the queries and comments of your followers, you can try to actively raise the level of your engagement by devices like contests and quizzes, opinion polls, giving away freebies, and encouraging users to generate their content with the hashtag of your choice. You can also raise your engagement level if you buy real active Instagram comments from reputable social media marketing agencies.
Leverage Hashtags to Increase Visibility
Hashtags are the only way users can search for content on Instagram. It means that e-commerce businesses should use hashtags judiciously so that the target audience can discover their posts while using a hashtag search. For the posts to be seen by users, hashtags should be relevant to the search intent and comprise a balanced mix of popular, trending, and specific terms.
Using the popular hashtags means that your posts will be among the flood of others and will be missed by the users while using very specific hashtags! It would mean that the search volume will be very limited. Even though Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags, research reveals that the ideal number is between seven and eleven. Since every hashtag should have a purpose, it is a good idea not to leave the hashtag research till the last minute.
Plan your posts and do your research in advance for maximum impact. Use the hashtags you have identified in your posts, taking care to add only the trending hashtags before posting since they can change quickly.
Tag Products
Tagging your products displayed in your Instagram posts helps drive sales as it compels users to follow the CTA. Moreover, by tagging products, you make the purchase process easier and help reach out to a broader audience. The process is simple and can be done very quickly. All you need to do is set up a shop on your Facebook business page connected with your Instagram account and add your product catalog to it.
Adjust the settings so that potential customers can conclude their transactions on your e-commerce website, not your Facebook page. By doing so, you will not only offer more convenience to customers but also can simplify your inventory management, observes a consultant at IIgers, a leading social media marketing company.
Catalyze Growth
As an owner of an e-commerce business, you have to quickly find out what works best for you. To boost brand awareness and gore the number of your followers, two of the best hacks are collaborating with influencers and holding contests. Engaging in promotional posts serves to highlight your brand and special offers while conversational posts inspire followers to engage with you.
You can ask your followers for their opinions and experiences of various things related to your business or any trending topic. Distributing small giveaways can make the exercise more productive.
Conclusion
In addition to the above tactics, there are many more strategies you can employ to boost your e-commerce store on Instagram. The advantage is that you can get a quick response, and the ROI is high because promoting e-commerce on Instagram does not call for big spending.
