If you want to make money online by selling products, Instagram is the network you should be on. These can be physical products, digital products, or even consulting services.
Anything can be sold on this network as there are over 1 billion users here with varied interests. The average order value on Instagram are $103 and $65 for paid and unpaid methods respectively. That’s more than some of the top networks. People here like to buy stuff.
Therefore, to help you formulate a strategy to sell on Instagram in 2021, I have shared my top tips below…
Create a profile focused on selling
Your profile needs to be set up in a way that helps you reach your goals. If you want to grow your Instagram account, you should focus on setting it up in such a way as to get followers. While if you want to boost your brand, you need to focus on generating impressions and engagement.
And if you want to generate sales, you need to focus on promoting products and driving traffic. You can generate sales from your profile by doing three things.
- By writing a bio that’s all about your products and having a call to action that asks people to check out your store.
- Adding a URL to your bio that leads directly to the landing page of the product or to your store home page.
- Creating product catalogs with stories and placing them as highlights right on your profile.
If you are using your Instagram account to sell products like consulting services or other high ticket services, share URLs that send people to a landing page where they can sign up for a case study or another lead magnet. As people won’t buy expensive products immediately. You need to build an email list first.
Use more stories
In-feed posts should be an essential part of your Instagram marketing strategy. But if you want to stand out and generate more attention, you should create more Instagram stories. This is because fewer people create stories. Most people create in-feed posts. There’s too much competition in the feed. It can be hard to get your message across. One way to beat the crowd is by creating stories. Fewer people create them, but everyone likes interacting with them as they have the FOMO factor.
Another tactic you might want to try out is Reels. They’re a new feature that Instagram is using to beat TikTok, so they are promoting these video bits quite aggressively.
Use paid tactics
Organic tactics work well on Instagram. But remember that in order to grow organically, you need to spend a lot of time. One way to cut short this time is by using paid tactics. Using paid Instagram marketing techniques like ads and influencer marketing you can instantly get your content in front of the right audience and generate quick sales. There’s no need to wait weeks and months to build an audience and then generate sales.
Therefore, if you don’t want to waste any time to scale results, invest in paid tactics. Most people generate 2.5 to 3X their ad spend. So, you should be able to make back your expenditure soon.
Use shoppable posts
If you’re using an ecommerce platform, that integrates with Instagram, to run your store, you should take advantage of the shoppable posts feature and tag products in your posts. This will make it easy for your followers to find products. Several reports have shown that they can drive more traffic and sales.
Run contests
Another tactic that can help you generate sales quickly is contests. In the beginning, you will lose some time and money as you will give away gifts and spend time promoting the contest. But a contest will help you generate a ton of brand impressions and engagement in a short period. You will also build up an email list. The engagement and impressions you build up in the short period will help you drive instant sales and the list of subscribers you generate will become a vital component of your email marketing strategy.
To ensure more people take part in the contest, make sure you promote it with ads and influencer marketing. This will cost you in the short run, but in the long run, the ROI will be immense.
Pay attention to the data
When you begin selling on Instagram, your conversion rates will be low. This is normal, don’t get discouraged by it. Things will get better as you begin to understand your audience. So, pay attention to the data to see what types of posts help you generate the most sales. You can gradually tweak your organic and paid marketing methods to generate a better ROI.
This will take time, but it is worth it.
Conclusion
This is the step by step process you can use to generate more sales on Instagram. They will work whether you run an ecommerce store or an offline store or a consulting business.
