How to Best Use Instagram to Promote Your Ecommerce Store in 2021

How to Best Use Instagram to Promote Your Ecommerce Store?

There’s a reason you see more and more businesses and brands getting on Instagram. It’s not only the fastest growing social platform, it has an appeal of its own among its users that’s matched by no other social platform.

Moreover, a large number of users on Instagram are willing to spend money, which not only makes it a great option for building a brand image but also getting more sales and growing your ecommerce business.

Let’s learn all the important things about marketing on Instagram as an ecommerce store in this post.

Why Instagram for Your Ecommerce Store?

If you think Instagram is just about building a brand image or interacting with personal content, think again. If the statistics released by HootSuite are anything to go by, as many as 80% of users on the platform follow at least one business account.

Instagram also boasts a user base of a massive 1 billion users across the world. And given the fact that 70% of the users are believed to be more likely to purchase from their mobile device, Instagram offers a huge opportunity to small businesses looking to grow their ecommerce business using Instagram.

How to Set Up Your Instagram Shopping Account?

It’s important to set up Instagram shopping account if you want to directly sell through Instagram. However, creating a shopping account is on an approval-basis only, and will depend on your eligibility for one.

Eligibility

Let us walk you through some of the most important requirements below.

• Your business must be based in a supported market
• You’re in the business of selling physical goods
• Your business does not violate any ecommerce policies of Instagram
• You have a business account, and not a personal one
• Your Instagram business account is connected to your Facebook business page.

Applying for Instagram Shopping

You can set up your Instagram account in two different ways. First, you need to create a Catalog manager (if you haven’t already) on Facebook and sync it with your Instagram account.

It may take a few days to complete, so if you’re looking to do a product launch or something it’s advisable to start it as soon as possible.

The second option is to use one of the Facebook’s partners, Shopify or BigCommerce. This is a simpler, faster process, but it does cost you money. That said, if you’re looking to scale up your business or looking to have a simpler functioning of your ecommerce business online, then using this option may turn out to be your best bet.

You simply need to register an account with either of these two ecommerce platforms and then link your business Facebook account with it.

Once that’s done, you can go ahead and sign up for an Instagram Shopping account. To do so, open your Profile, click on Settings, then Business, and select the Shopping option.

This process is expected to take a few days as well. Once approved, your account will start functioning as a Shopping account and your followers and users will be able to purchase your products.

Tagging Your Products

Simply setting up an Instagram Shopping account is not enough. You need to put in some work to get more sales and grow your ecommerce business.

You need to start by tagging products in your account. Ideally, you would want to tag them to both your feed and posts.

As far as the tagging restrictions are concerned, you’re allowed to tag up to 5 products per post, and up to 20 products per multi-image or carousel post.

As far as Instagram Stories are concerned, you can only tag up to 1 product right now. However, if you can be a little creative you can create a series of Stories that product a particular category of products on your store.

Building a Foundation

If there’s one thing we really recommend with every type of marketing, it’s simply doing what’s already working rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.

On Instagram, a good, proven and well-thought-out strategy is sure to work well. You don’t really need to try doing anything groundbreaking to get traction and promote your ecommerce brand.

The first thing you should do is competitor research. Just make a list of your closest competitors that are doing well on Instagram. So for example, if you’re in the arts or crafts niche, you would want to check out those Etsy sellers on Instagram who have built a good following with impressive engagement and are also doing well on Etsy itself.

Go through the posts of your competitors. You should get a good idea of what’s working for them.

Then go to Gramfeed.com. You can search for both hashtags and users there. Put in the usernames of your competitors and perform a search.

Image credit: Gramfeed

You will be able to find out what they are doing, and how they are trying to attract their audience.

Making Your Account Look Trustworthy

You need to work on growing your account to be able to sell products through your posts, feed and Stories. But if you start from absolute scratch, you may have a hard time building an audience as your account may not look appealing or trustworthy to your users.

Buying real-like Instagram followers is a good way to get around this issue. When your real target audience would see you’re already being followed by a good number of users, you would immediately come across as a small but trustworthy brand.

This would make it much easier for you to gain real followers and start promoting your products.

Growing Your Account

Once you have made your account look more “presentable” by following what we explained above, you can start focusing on growing your account and selling your products.

As a new brand, a good way to do this is encourage user-generated content and give them credit by resharing it on your account. It would go a long way in helping you expand your reach, get a good number of sales in the beginning, as well as build trust with your followers.

When your potential customers see a lot of personal content on your account from your followers, your brand becomes a lot more appealing to them.

You can do this even when you don’t have a large following. You can ask your existing customers to just post a review of their purchase with a picture of the product they have bought.

Another way to encourage user-generated content is mention in your bio that your followers can get featured on your account by tagging you in their posts.

Besides being “free” content, it’s also a great way to attract attention from a large section of your target audience.

Using Instagram Ads

If you have money to spend, then you can speed up the “growth” process of your account and get a lot of sales right off the bat. You do have to put some efforts into learning how to set up the ads right way, but once you have a few sets running well with a positive ROI (Return on Investment) you can scale things up a lot quicker, easily.