Instagram could be the key to unlocking significant sales growth for your e-commerce business. You can use quality content to engage with your niche and find new fans. From there, you’ll be able to send these fans to your online shop. Generating e-commerce sales from Instagram is not necessarily difficult, but it’s worth creating a strategy to do it right. .
How to Generate E-Commerce Sales from Instagram in a few easy steps:
You can act with generosity and kindness on this platform while still increasing your revenues. It’s a mutually beneficial situation. Your company benefits from the increased sales while the customers enjoy spending money on you and using your products. Does that sound like something you want to do? If your answer is yes, keep reading.
Visualize this as a Sales Funnel
The sales funnel is the basic concept that lets you get sales from Instagram. You can visualize this as an actual funnel with all of your fans at the top and your customers at the bottom. For every new person who enters the top of your funnel, you’ll get a certain amount of additional revenue at the bottom.
You start by attracting strangers to your brand. Once a new fan follows your brand, they have entered the funnel. You facilitate this by creating quality content and marketing it with the right hashtags.
You convince your fans to visit your shop by using simple calls to action. If your content is great, your fans will be glad to do what you ask of them.
At the end of the funnel, you have to close the sale. The customer is looking at your products and services, comparing prices and features, thinking about what to buy. If your offerings are enticing enough, they will click the buy button. This is the end of the funnel. Your customer’s journey is complete.
Aim your Content Strategy
Your content strategy should be aimed at a niche market. The more specific you are with your target audience, the faster your fanbase will grow.
You need to determine your niche before you start. Look at your current customers and fans. Are there patterns in the age, gender, location, or interests of this group? Alternately, is there an obvious target audience for your products?
After you identify your niche, start making content. You want to entertain your fans while teaching them something new. Use high quality photography, catchy captions, and interesting post descriptions to create high-value content for your fanbase.
Instagram rewards consistency. If you post at the exact same time every day, your audience will develop the habit of looking for your content. This gives you an engaged fanbase that really wants to see what you have to say.
Adopt a Hashtag Strategy
Every post you make should include 8-10 hashtags. Each hashtag represents an opportunity to reach new people who might be interested in what you do.
You can use the “discover” tab in the mobile app to explore different hashtags. Look for hashtag communities that are small enough to engage with, but large enough to be worth your while.
Don’t immediately self-promote when you target a hashtag. People don’t respond well to that kind of activity. Instead, give the community content that adds value to their lives.
This comes down to the previously mentioned idea of entertaining people while teaching them something new. Can you create content that will give potential fans an interesting idea to think about? What can you teach them that will legitimately improve their lives?
If you are able to pull this off, people will love you. You’ll be welcomed into the community as a brand that really cares. It is at this point that you can start to self-promote, using calls to action to suggest mutually beneficial actions to your fans.
After your first few months of daily posts, measure your results. Look at which posts performed best for you and identify the hashtags responsible. Get rid of hashtags that aren’t working out.
Sending Fans to Your Shop
After you build an audience on Instagram, you need to send them to your shop. You can use call to actions to make this happen.
Let’s use a boutique coffee brand as an example. This company wants to sell expensive coffees to connoisseurs on the internet. They make a post with a beautiful photograph of their newest product, using the description to say “visit the link in our bio to check out this great new coffee.”
That’s a simple call to action. It will be reasonably effective and generate a few e-commerce sales from Instagram. However, you can do even better.
Rather than just asking people to go to your shop, create a sense of opportunity and urgency. The coffee brand could say “TODAY ONLY: We’re offering 10% off of our newest brew. Use the promo code COFFEE to get the discount. Link is in our bio.”
Can you see the difference in tone? This is an urgent deal. This brand wants you to save money on this great coffee, but it’s only possible if you visit the shop today. Not only is this a good deal, it’s actually a fun experience for the customer. They get to feel like they saved themselves some money by keeping an eye on your content. Now they’ll be even more inclined to look for your posts in the future.
It’s all about mutual benefit. The customer has fun, saves money, and enjoys some great products. Your brand gets a more dedicated fan who will be looking at your content even more closely than before.
You can generate e-commerce sales from Instagram with this strategy. All you have to do is be as generous as you can. When in doubt, it’s always better to give a little more to your fans. They’ll pay you back in the long run with their patronage. If you make your fans happy, you’ll make a lot of money in the process. What are your best tips to convert on social medias? Tell us below or tweet us!