Strategy

Instagram Strategies That Will Boost Your Ecommerce Sales

Social media has become a powerful marketing tool for retailers. Without a doubt, Instagram leads this list. Insta is all about engagement, emotions, and aesthetics. Therefore, the marketers’ primary aim is to elaborate a promotional strategy that fits all these peculiarities. The more loyal audience you have here, the higher will be the eventual revenue increase. It goes without saying that the quality of content, thoughtful content plans, advertising, and analytics should be fundamental aspects of your social media activity. Below we’ll consider five more ways to not only scale your audience but also nudge it to purchase.

Kate Parish

1. Ensure Seamless Customer Journey

Further, we’ll discuss how to use Instagram to generate leads for your eCommerce brand. But alongside this work, you have to take care of your online shop itself. Perfect performance and UX/UI make up a great shopping experience.

We’d recommend drawing attention to your shop’s mobile version and learning how to improve Magento Core Web Vitals (this advice also applies to other CMSs). These metrics show how users perceive your platform and prompt which weak points need immediate fixing. This is a core step if you want to see real conversions from your Instagram followers.

Now we can move on to the actionable tactics on how to win more Insta followers and transform them into customers. It’s definitely a worthwhile undertaking: Statista predicts more than 1.2 billion regular users on this social media in 2023. Loads of potential clients!

2. Leverage Shopping Tags

This is probably, the best invention for businesses on Instagram. Tags tremendously facilitate the promotion of products for brands and purchasing for consumers.

Below is the screenshot from IKEA’s account. Every tag contains the name, price, and link to an item. After tapping it, a prospect can move to the next page with details, similar products, and a link to an online shop. Tags can be added to posts as well as Stories, Reels, IGTV videos (including live ones), and Guides.

Screenshot taken on the official IKEA Instagram account

With Instagram Checkout brands can make shopping even faster and handier for users, as it allows them to buy right inside the app and use Facebook Pay for transactions. Unfortunately, the feature is still available only for some U.S. businesses and creators.

To set up an Instagram Shop, you must have a business page on Facebook. They will be connected, and Instagram will fetch all the necessary data from the store’s catalogue linked with FB.

3. More, More, and More Videos

This might have been the very first point on our list, actually. A couple of days ago, Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, revealed the nearest plans of the platform:

"“Right now, we’re focused on four key areas: Creators, Video, Shopping, and Messaging. We're also going to experiment with embracing video more broadly: full-screen video, immersive, entertaining, for mobile devices. We are no longer a photo-sharing app”."

Put simply, Instagram is about to prioritise videos over photos. Therefore, we expect to see drastic changes in Instagram’s algorithms soon. That means videos ought to become an integral part of your content plan today. Let’s think about what you can show followers via video footage:

• Stories: behind the scenes, sneak peeks, new drops;
• Reels: outfit of the day; before and after; myths vs truth;
• Live streaming: tutorials, art classes, events, interviews.

Below there are examples from Mango. The brand often launches live broadcasts: yoga, ballet, and art classes, music sessions, and so forth. The creativity of their marketing team is limitless.

Screenshot taken on the official Mango Instagram account

So, don’t rigorously stick to your product and direct promotions in every single video. Educational and entertaining videos of perfect quality raise brand awareness and make your company trusted and wholesome for followers even prior to purchasing from you. The desire to buy something increases correspondingly.

4. User-Generated Content Is a Must

UGC is a significant means in the marketing strategy of any modern online retailer. Let’s name some auspicious effects of sharing your followers’ photos and videos:

• Building a reputation of a friendly and open-minded brand. When people see not only polished studio content with professional models but also real customers, they regard this merchant as more accessible, appreciating, and close to consumers.
• Bringing up brand advocates. It’s indeed flattering to be mentioned by a beloved brand on its social media. Grateful customers are likely to become regular and devoted.
• Engaging more followers. Seeing UGC in posts and Stories, people are getting interested in publishing their own shots with your products. Thus, you can increase the proportion of followers who mention you and deliver new valuable content.
• Diversifying content. By adding lively and vibrant users’ posts, you create a cheerful and inspiring feed.

In the screenshots below are posts from ASOS. This retailer largely builds its Instagram content plan on UGC. Note that you should ask every person for permission to use their images or footage.

Screenshot taken on the official ASOS Instagram account

5. Collaborations Are Still Relevant

Work with bloggers and celebrities has always been an essential part of most marketing strategies in eCommerce. A brand can obtain several benefits:

• New audience. Blogger integrations aid in gaining more fresh followers organically.
• Original content. Often bloggers use an extraordinary approach to the advertisement for brands. It’s a chance to make an impression on your audience once again.
• “Qualitative” audience. If a blogger is an expert in some field, they have a prepared community that is ready to try what is advised by this pro.

That’s why a trend of inviting micro-influencers has been gaining popularity amongst brands. Even giants like Clinique (see the screenshots below) cooperate with niche bloggers who have not a large but very engaged audience.

Screenshot taken on the official Clinique Instagram account

Wrapping Up

An efficient Instagram marketing strategy for eCommerce is a rich blend of numerous measures. On the one hand, it’s a pool of serious tasks: getting to know your potential customers, smart targeting, and maintaining Facebook and Instagram shops to stay relevant. A massive chunk of work touches upon your online shop itself: it must be mobile-friendly, and its usability shouldn’t cast any doubts.

On the other hand, your success on Instagram is impossible without seemingly effortless things like short joyful videos and user-generated content. But every marketer knows how much organisational, creative, and technical work remains behind the scenes. Nevertheless, all aforementioned will build a community of loyal prospects that will convert into customers far more willingly.

You might also benefit from...

Want to learn more about Instagram Marketing? Check out our Beginners Guide on Instagram E-Commerce Marketing and the 5 Best Practices. 

Or are you thinking of hiring an agency to run your Instagram Marketing for you? In that case, check out: 6 Underhyped Growth And Engagement Hacks Your Instagram Marketing Agency Should Focus on. 

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