Instagram is a great platform to build a business with followers. It is attracting young people with fascinating photos and videos. Besides having impressive images and videos, marketers get benefits on this platform to build their brands, display products and increase sales. Instagram allows you to make use of power tools for business profiles to acquire deals. Let’s see 13 ways on how to drive Instagram sales.
1. Create A Business Account On Instagram
In today’s world, Instagram has close to 25 million business accounts. If you want to achieve business success, it is good to have a business profile. A business account provides analytics data that helps one to know the statistics of the followers. With analytics data, marketers get to know their target audience and their interest. By switching from personal account to business account, Instagram allows marketers to advertise their brand easily.
Further, marketers can also include mail id, calls, and links at the top of the business account, helping customers to know your contact details, directions to your location on Google maps. By providing these details, you ensure that your customers can find you quickly as they look for simple shopping experiences.
2. User-Generated Content
User-generated content or Curated content is when your follower tags you in their posts or if they create content for your product using your brand’s hashtags. These contents give you great engagement, build brand awareness and increase sales.
3. Use Highlights and Stories
Instagram offers four ways to create a story,
1.The Add Music option allows you to mix audio of your choice to a visual clip or image.
2. The Superzoom option enables you to enhance your video with zoom in/zoom out.
3. The Focus option allows you to focus on the subject by blurring the background.
4. The Hands-Free option lets you record video without holding the button.
Instagram Stories are a great way to market the product for businesses. Using Stories, marketers can put up a short video to let followers know a glimpse of their upcoming work. Marketers can make the best use of Instagram’s stories as people are fascinated about how the business operates under the table. Like, restaurants can post food recipes every day. Business holders can also experiment on Instagram Stories with different marketing tactics.
Sharing a story lets you know what people are interested to see from you; create Instagram stories using poll stickers, asking them to vote on two answers.
Instagram permits you to save your favorite stories from profiling highlights that will stay there forever for future reference. Unlike Instagram Stories, the highlights do not vanish beyond twenty-four hours. Instagram highlights let marketers set attractive icons for every highlight.
4. Go Live on Instagram
Instagram live allows you to connect with your followers or business partners quickly. This feature lets you present real-time data to your community. To get started, click on the Instagram camera and tap ‘Live,’ and press ‘Start Live Video’. By doing so, your followers will immediately get a notification, making your way to the front of their stories bar at the top left corner. Live feature lets followers comment and ask queries instantly.
5. Instagram IGTV for Business
Another exciting feature on Instagram is IGTV, which lets users post and watch videos with a long duration of up to an hour. IGTV allows users to get new business partners and organize their content. Instagram has designed IGTV videos to appear in vertical format for mobile phones. Using the IGTV feature lets marketers gain ample opportunities for businesses to get connected with their audiences. When you scroll through your Instagram feeds, videos start playing by themselves, so it’s easy to access.
6. Make Use of Instagram Reels
Businesses can make the best use of Instagram reels to promote their brand. Reels are just 15 seconds to 30 seconds long. Marketers can experiment by using different online editing tools to showcase their product by adding music, titles, and multiple images. Instagram reels are with no sound, so always make sure that you provide attractive and explicit videos, tempting the followers to turn on sound.
7. Create Instagram Advertisements
Marketers are likely to witness incredible growth in their business using Instagram. Brands must create advertisements to make a strong presence online, not just with their followers but also with followers not on the list. These paid ads appear on feeds of followers not in the list. Businesses can make targeted advertisements or get back customers by placing retargeted ads to potential customers. Retargeting lets you put your brand before prospective customers once they leave the website to remind them to reconsider your offer.
8. Use Instagram Pods
Business owners can make effective use of Instagram pods to have a high engagement rate. Instagram pods are clusters of business owners who join together to build engagement to rank top on Instagram. Businesses have to stick to the engagement rules of the pods. All they have to do is like and comment on other’s posts in the group, which yields more likes and comments from others. If you are a business looking to receive automatic Instagram likes for your posts, you could consider using Instagram pods with around 15 to 20 members to ensure increased engagement rates.
9. Utilize Edit and Filter Features
Editing a photo might take little time, but it can significantly impact the quality of the brand. Using Instagram tools and filters to edit a simple picture into an attractive photo is an easy job. There are a large number of applications that allow you to add effects like adjusting contrast, saturation, and brightness. Instagram automatically crops photos to square format; by clicking the outward arrow, you can reshape to original and use other filters of your interest. Every filter available on Instagram adds uniqueness to the photo. Instagram editing tools let you make final adjustments like altering brightness, contrast, and more.
10. Implement Hashtags in Posts
With plenty of content over Instagram, it would be hard for businesses to get noticed by people. That is why you have to use hashtags in your posts, which lets you gain large audiences. When you post content with hashtags, it will take a copy of your photo or video to separate hashtag pages. Clicking on the hashtag takes you to a page where you can see different public posts with the same hashtag. When you want to search for a specific word or profile, Instagram shows results in different segments, they are:
Top: Displays top profiles, location, and hashtags concerning keywords.
Accounts: Shows the top account with that keyword.
Tags: Pops up posts relevant to the hashtag and those posts shared with the same hashtag.
Places: Displays keyword locations close by.
It is good to use specific hashtags that are trending to get a large audience. Marketers can search for posts liked by many and hashtags used in them. It is always great to create a brand’s hashtag to get high visibility, promote a brand, run a campaign and collect user-generated content. It would be best to use a maximum of four hashtags that are relevant to the caption or brand.
11. Attractive Instagram Captions
Businesses must come up with eye-catchy and beautiful captions that are engaging. Instagram algorithm fetches data on what you care about; based on this, it displays the content. Hence, businesses have to create content that is exciting and engaging. Instagram allows you to have two thousand two hundred characters in captions. Whatever the length, followers can see just four lines of the caption. So, it is necessary to put striking captions at the beginning that are easily visible to the audience.
Captions with a call to action are best to grab customers to your profile. You can provide a website link, a geotag, or a location tag in the caption, where they can get more insights into your brand. Posts that are genuine and valid perform better and gain higher engagement.
12. Collaborate with Influencers
Influencer marketing is an excellent tool as it provides incredible results. Studies show that promoting a brand via Influencers increases sales. Influencers have strong connections with followers; when they post your product experience with photos or videos, it provides a positive opinion in the audience’s minds. Influencers do productive reviews about the product, helping to grow your brand and drive sales. For example, marketers can promote discounts with influencers to gain a large audience. That makes it a trustworthy and noticeable brand. Influencers are like brand ambassadors as they do reviews, create brand awareness to increase your reach and sales.
13. Get Verified
To become a trusted brand on Instagram, you can get the blue tick by applying for Instagram verification. It simply tells your audience that this brand is authentic. You can get verified by clicking on the hamburger icon at the top corner, then tap settings, accounts and click request verification, fill in the application details, and press send. Once their team reviews your application, you will get the notification.
Conclusion
Using Instagram features, businesses have to make sure their brand is visible to the target audience. By doing so, they can improve their sales, and make customers a hassle-free purchase experience. Thus we can say, brands can use the Instagram platform to build a trustworthy relationship with their customers.