Digital Marketing

How To Sell On Instagram: Best Practices

If you want to sell products on Instagram, you’ll first need to take a step back and plan. Before you start scrolling through your favorite accounts, taking notes on what seems to be working, and seeing what other people are doing wrong, you need to have an idea of where you’re going and how you’re going to get there.

Selling on Instagram can be one of the easiest ways to make money online. There are plenty of people out there that are making a buck selling product, services, and information all through Instagram. And with so many different accounts out there doing it, it’s easy to wonder how they’re doing it.

It’s no secret that Instagram is one of the most visual social networks. You interact with images rather than text-heavy updates from other sites and apps like Facebook or Twitter. That makes Instagram a perfect place for businesses to promote their products and gain new followers, especially if you know how to sell on Instagram. However, plenty of companies has failed to harness this platform’s power. A great tool to include in your Instagram arsenal is Followers.io.

Start With a Plan

Here are some questions you should ask yourself before selling on Instagram.

What are your goals? Are you looking for brand awareness, traffic to your website, or new customers? It’s essential to set goals from the outset to have an idea of what success looks like.

Who is your target audience? You may already know who your target customer is if you’ve already been selling online. If not, knowing who you are trying to reach will help determine the content you create and how you communicate with them.

What platforms make sense for your business? Deciding whether to use your profile or a business account is one of the first decisions you’ll need to make. Each choice has pros and cons: A personal profile allows you to interact more efficiently with customers but limits the number of tools available for tracking success; a business account has more analytics tools but less flexibility in interacting with customers.

Curate Your Instagram Feed

You need to make sure that it looks good on a small screen and attracts new followers. A high-quality image will always be more attractive than an ugly one. You’ll also want to make sure you have an uncluttered look with plenty of white space between images.

Sometimes you need to immediately have followers on your Instagram page to build your presence. In those cases, check out Followers.io.

Have a Recognizable Brand

If you want to build a strong following on Instagram, you need to be consistent in the way you present your brand. Your profile picture and description should match what people see when visiting your website or other social channels. It’s also essential to post regularly so people will recognize your account and keep coming back for more.

Work With Influencers and Ambassadors

Influencer marketing is huge right now. The idea is simple: Find someone with an existing large audience, then have that person promote your product.

This can be as formal or informal as you want it to be, and you can pay for sponsored posts or send gifts for reviews. Or you could even just ask someone to take a picture of themselves wearing your shirt or holding your book or whatever it is that you sell.

You don’t necessarily have to pay influencers at all. That’s not how they became influencers in the first place — they got big because they did cool stuff and other people noticed them doing it. Chances are, if they like your product, they’ll want some free swag too!

Use Polls, Stories, and IGTV to Your Advantage

When sharing content with your audience, get them involved by asking questions with polls. This will help you understand your followers better and give them a chance to interact with your content. You can also use polls to determine which products they want you to feature next or what they think of an upcoming product.

Polls in Stories are fun and effective ways to engage with followers and get feedback. You can easily create polls using the Poll sticker on Instagram Stories, which allows you to ask questions and track responses in real-time. Use them to get feedback about new products or suggestions for what your followers would like you to post next.

Post Regularly

If you want to use Instagram to sell products or services, you’ll need to establish a following. Building a following on social media can be a long-term process, but it also requires regular work (and skill) once you have established one.

The best way to grow your audience on Instagram is to post regularly — and we mean regularly. If you post less frequently than that, you may not keep the attention of your existing followers or attract new ones.

Posting at least once per day is a good benchmark for most businesses, but more frequent posts could be beneficial if you have an especially engaged audience. If you don’t have many followers yet, it’s okay to post less often (but try to post at least every other day).

Set Up A Business Account

To take advantage of all the analytics and selling features that Instagram offers to businesses, you need to change your personal Instagram account to a business profile.

Create a Compelling Bio

The bio is the first thing people see when they visit your profile, so make sure it’s optimized for conversions. You can add links to your website or shopping pages in the bio section, so be sure to include important keywords in this section.

Post High-Quality Product Photos and Services

When it comes to product photography, don’t skimp on quality. Invest in professional photography or use photo editing software to ensure your images are enticing and accurate representations of what you’re selling.

Use Hashtags Strategically

Use hashtags relevant to your business and the content of your photos so that people who search for those specific terms will find your images. However, don’t overdo it — spammy posts filled with tags won’t do you any good!

Direct People To Your Website

Do all of these things right, and Instagram is guaranteed to help your business grow!

Get Started, and Good Luck!

Selling on Instagram can be as easy as understanding your own account and what you’re good at. How you post, what types of images you post, and what type of information you share will all impact your followers. Before you start trying to sell on Instagram, take a step back and think about who you are as an account, why you’re posting, and how to best promote your products in a way that is authentic to you. Build your brand authority by increasing your followers with Followers.io.

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