Ultimate Guide To Instagram E-commerce

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Table of contents:

Introduction

 

Are you running an e-commerce? Do you want to grow your target audience? Instagram is a highly targetable, visual marketing channel for your brand that helps you build a loyal audience and grows with your business.

Over 500 million Instagram users browse the app every day. With the most engaged audiences, Instagram is the best social media platform for ecommerce and marketing.

Instagram was launched in 2010 as a social media platform where users used to share images and keep in touch with their old friends. But it’s now a true powerhouse for increasing e-commerce sales and brand recognition.

Over the last decade, businesses and e-commerce platforms have been using Instagram to promote their products. Instagram e-commerce is the process of selling and marketing products and brands through ad types, paid promotion, reels, brand creation, IGTV ads, creative content, and other effective tools of Instagram.

marketing on instagram
Photo Credits: 99Firms.com

Did you know?

  • Advertisers can reach 1.452 billion users on Instagram
  • 44% of people use Instagram shop features to shop weekly from the app
  • 90% of all Instagram users follow at least one business on the page
  • The average post on Instagram contains 10.7 hashtags
  • Average time spent on Instagram is 53 minutes per day

The ultimate social media platform, Instagram, helps generate awareness amongst targeted customers and boosts revenue for e-commerce businesses. In the following guide, our experts will explain various Instagram merits, tools, and features that will help you with upsell opportunities for your e-commerce business.

Benefits of Instagram Marketing

 

Instagram e-commerce plays a key role in promoting the business/brand/ideas to reach billions of people. The various marketing-oriented features include reels, paid promotions, Influencer promotions, Instagram live, etc. Merchants use Instagram to promote their business. Instagram Marketing growth works wonders for the following few points.

Increases strength of brand:
One of the best advantages of Instagram’s marketing growth is it spreads awareness about the brand. People see and research products that are on Instagram. It is difficult to believe, but a good percentage of users do not believe in a brand if it doesn’t have an official Instagram account.

Keep your audience engaged:
Instagram e-commerce has helped businesses keep their audience engaged with their respective companies. It is important to consider our targeted customers. Therefore, keeping them engaged in posts, stories, and polls helps give tough competition to the competitors.

Boost sales:
Instagram e-commerce helps in sales increasing strategies. When people see influencers on social media, famous personalities, and other people following your brand, they will automatically consider you over others. Links, hashtags, stories, ads, and shopping tags all accumulate to your company’s strategic growth of sales.

Summing up, Instagram marketing creates awareness of our brand, keeps our audience engaged, and boosts our sales. Instagram marketing growth is just one part of Instagram e-commerce. All these Instagram merits have influenced people to use Instagram over other platforms. Now let us look at Instagram Advertisement, a unique opportunity by Instagram.

treat well instagram ads

Instagram Ads

 

Instagram advertising engages the audience well with the brand. Since Instagram ads appear in the feed, they play a key role in brand awareness. Instagram ads are not disruptive as normal ads. They are encouraging and provide a natural way of attracting the crowd to the business.
Remember the following key points while creating ads for your Instagram e-commerce platform:

  • It is important to claim your Instagram account. Do add relevant information about your account
  • Remember to pick an objective for your campaign. For example, if it is brand awareness, reach, traffic, engagement, conversions, or objective you want through your Instagram ad
  • It is important to add demographic and psychographic factors in your ad. Language, location, behaviors, age, gender, culture, etc. All of these factors will affect your targeted audience
  • To maximize the delivery of ads on Instagram, you should use images of 1200 x 628 for news feed on Instagram ads and 1080 x 1920 for story ads
  • You should always limit texts on images or videos for Instagram ads.

Once you remember all these important points, ads will be one of the most beneficial marketing strategies on Instagram. Big companies like Vans and Nike help spread awareness amongst their customers using Instagram ads.

Instagram IGTV

IGTV Ads

 

What is IGTV Ads?

Business people on Instagram grow their brand and reach a wider audience with IGTV ads. IGTV or Instagram Television is another useful feature of Instagram that has seamlessly helped in promotional and marketing techniques. With IGTV, businesses can upload a 15 minutes video via phone and 60 minutes video while uploading it from the web.

USES OF IGTV ADS?

IGTV ads are attractive, reach high- intent, and are an immersive tool of Instagram.
These ads have engaged audiences and earned revenue for companies after people click to watch IGTV videos from previews in their profile feed.
The expansion of IGTV ads has allowed people to share attractive, creative long videos on Instagram, allowing businesses to connect more with their audiences.

Instagram Shop

 

What is Instagram Shop?

The Instagram shop lets merchants integrate the product catalog with their Instagram profile. One can promote their product through stories, posts, explore tab, and the shop tab option on the profile. Once the viewer taps on the tagged photo, they will be able to check the prices and features of the product. Then, purchase if they like the same.

A business should include all the important information about the products on the shop product page. E.g., the name of the product, its images, price and description, a link to the main website, and other related products.

USES OF INSTAGRAM SHOP

The Instagram shop makes it easier for the customers to purchase without leaving the app.
To make shopping easy for your targeted customers, you can tag Instagram shop products in your posts.
A user can directly purchase a product by using the Instagram platform.
The reliable shop on Instagram has featured 1,000 small businesses since 2019. And is still helping various small, big companies expand their reach to billions of people.

What’s New on Instagram in 2022?

 

Instagram has continuously been experimenting with new features and functionalities that are both e-commerce-oriented and intuitive. Since its acquisition by Facebook, Instagram has grown manifold to become the social media platform of the decade. Despite tough competition, the platform has stayed resilient and has tackled the main issues of many business enterprises.

The following are the top updates of Instagram in 2022:

Product Tagging On Instagram:
Initially, the product tagging feature was only limited to the creators and merchants. However, now everyone can tag products in their feed. People can look at the details of products by tapping on the tagged product. They have the option to purchase directly from the app. The function is available to posts on the feed. Soon Instagram will also enable it for stories.

Editing Reels
Reels are one of the most popular features of Instagram. Recently, Instagram updated the editing tools. This has helped people trim and rearrange their video clips within the reel composer. Businesses can easily make attractive, short, and captivating for their targeted audience.

NFT Creator:
NFT or Non-Fungible Tokens is the latest updated function of Instagram. The idea is to help people showcase their art. NFT function will help creators or businesses share their high-profile digital artwork and sell the same for millions of dollars. The newly introduced test will include NFTs from both the most popular and the lesser-known blockchains. The new idea is to make the platform a 3.0 decentralized web.

Quick Send
Post sharing has become easier on Instagram. Posts of brands or companies liked by people can be shared easily through the quick send option provided by Instagram. People can long tap on the arrow icon and tap on their friend’s profile. This saves time for the people, as they can share while scrolling the feed.

Scheduling Live On Profile
The live option on Instagram helps businesses contact their audience, deal with their queries, and provide them with relevant information. People are now able to schedule their lives on their profiles. This will help the audience track the scheduled live session of the brand they are interested in.

instagram benchmarks

Why is Instagram important for e-commerce?

 

Instagram has been a beneficial source to its users in different ways. Following are a few ways to describe the benefits of Instagram in the field of e-commerce:
Sell and shop through Instagram:
Instagram has been a much more reachable platform for many users. People can directly buy and sell their products through Instagram. The online store on the app lets buyers and sellers interact in a friendlier way. It combines the Instagram profile of the seller with the product catalog.

Landing Page
Instagram also works as a landing page. It lets people browse through the products of the industry. People find buying products through Instagram very convenient as shoppable posts with a product of information and tagged business name makes things organized and interesting to them.

Collection of products:
While scrolling through the feed on Instagram, one can look at the various collection of products it presents of a specific organization. One of the important Instagram merits is that it showcases all the essential information related to the business, cost, and product in the photograph’s caption. It also helps buyers write the tagline or the business’s motto in the bio section of Instagram.

Instagram features:
The many different features of Instagram allows its user to use e-commerce in a business-friendly way. Through its various unique features, consumers can discover their brands and products in effortless ways. Therefore, a lot of people categorize Instagram e-commerce as online window shopping. In a comparison of Instagram versus Facebook, Instagram takes the lead with more intriguing content.

Overall, the updated and advanced features in Instagram allow users to buy their chosen products using their favorite networking sites. People quickly get an informative database through Instagram. The tracking and delivering notification of the product on the app has itself added to the satisfactory list of the customers.

How do I create an e-commerce account on Instagram?

 

For creating an Instagram e-commerce page. You will need to create a Business Account for Instagram. For this, you will require an active Facebook business page.

To create a Facebook business page:

  • Go to your Facebook profile
  • Click on the “create” tab at the top right side and choose “page.”
  • Now, name your page, and add a category for the same
  • Last but not least, write a description and other important information about your business
  • Give an appropriate name to your page. One that represents your business. Then select your business category.

Once you have created a decent Facebook page for your business. It is time to make an Instagram business account.
To create an Instagram Business Account:

  • Go to your Instagram account settings
  • Go to Account settings and select “Switch to Business Account.”

NOTE: There are two types of profiles on Instagram. A private profile and a public profile. A general account allows everyone to view your posts, and your complete profile. In contrast, a personal account allows only those people whom you allow.

Therefore, remember to set your profile as PUBLIC instead of PRIVATE.

Optimizing Instagram Profile
The appearance of your Instagram profile matters a lot. Your Instagram e-commerce profile should be unique and impressive. Optimization of your Instagram profile will convert your viewers into your followers. Below is the list of things you can do to optimize your Instagram profile.

  • It is always advisable to choose a relevant, catchy, and relatable name for your Instagram profile. It should accurately represent your e-commerce idea or brand.
  • Make sure your profile name is pronounceable. People do use it while communicating. This spreads awareness through word of mouth.
  • Make sure you write exciting and engaging content for Instagram bio. It should highlight your brand to targeted customers.
  • Select a good, high-quality profile picture for your Instagram e-commerce account. You may upload a logo or sign of your brand for the same.
  • It is advisable to add a shortened and decent URL to your bio. This way, people will be able to boost traffic to your site.
  • A lot of people suggest having good brand-based aesthetic reels and posts. This way, you will have more people following your content.
  • Make sure you are using good hashtags in your profile. Do not add any cringy words to them.

Types of Instagram Content Formats

 

Sometimes, it becomes difficult for businesses to choose the type of content for their audience. Creating content for Instagram is difficult as companies have to conjure up a well-balanced mixture of content that engages their audience. Therefore, it is important to have different types of content for your business profile.
The following are the top ten types of content for your Instagram e-commerce platform:

Quotes
Audiences enjoy quotes. Whether funny or inspirational. Sharing your recent product picture with a quote makes it look more attractive.

Lifestyle post
Your audience wants to know the person behind your successful business or the brand. Know your audience personally and give them the chance to know you better personally. This will help you write relevant stuff to your audience.

Open-Ended questions on the post
This excites the audience engagement level. Open-ended questions make it easier for the audience to interact with the business. They quickly express their views and opinions on the topic. Make sure your questions aren’t religious, particular, or sensitive topics of society.

Video Content
Video content is more fun and engaging. People like reading video content as videos on the feed help increase an account’s visibility.

Promotional post
Write promotional posts. You should be constantly building the know and like factors amongst your audience. Aim to increase the trust of your followers and turn them into your product customers.

Brand story
People like hearing stories of businesses. Tell them how you initiated the project, what made you choose your niche, your background, career, and other interesting facts about your company and how it started.

Testimonials:
Do not hesitate to share testimonials of your clients. It makes your profile look more realistic and reliable.

Behind the scenes
These are interesting posts. You can always write content on what you are working on or a breakdown of how you produce your products. People enjoy these things.

Fun facts
Share fun facts related to your business. You can share a funny incident. Make your audience smile and laugh a little more by writing them. However, make sure they are relevant.

Giveaways
Giveaways are a great way to increase the engagement of your targeted customers. Everyone likes free products, they attract your followers. Giveaways help grow your followers and customers. But make sure your giveaways are related to your business.

instagram ads 1
Photo Credits: Bizardmark.com

Sourcing Products

 

Once you have created your business account for e-commerce on Instagram and uploaded the product catalog and other important information on the Instagram app. It is now necessary to update and move with the latest trends and features of the app. Following, we have listed some of the essential steps through which you can gain a lot of attention from the customers and can take benefit from the app in numerous ways.

Add posts and captions

Professionals highly recommend that your Instagram e-commerce should be informative. It should have excellent Posts and captions.
POSTS
Your post should be your product or your services that you intend to sell in the market. You should add the price, size available, brand type, color, and other details prescribed in the post’s description.

CAPTIONS
The descriptions of your posts are famous by the name of captions. The limit for the same is a maximum of 2,200 words for your Instagram posts. Therefore, remember to use short and prescribed sentences for the same.

Be Creative
You can always be creative with the caption and pictures of your company’s products. You can post people working in your office, your first sample product, and your company’s journey through posts and captions.

Use Tags and Hashtags

Tags
In Instagram e-commerce, tags are generally the labels for your posts. A tag in your post makes it look more professional. You can add tags while informing people about your products. They create awareness. Use product tags on the picture. Once users tap on the photo, they will see the pricing and product name. Further, they will be able to find more information about the product once preceded by the page.

Hashtags
Hashtags are another trending feature of Instagram marketing. You may use up to 30 hashtags in your posts. Remember that there are some trending hashtags displayed in most of the feeds. These hashtags have a particular period. Hence, it is advisable to use these trendy hashtags to maximize your reach.

Influencer and Reel Making

With the growing world of fun-loving technology, we can’t forget our Influencers on social media, creators, brand representatives, etc. All of them have added a lot of meaning to the world of e-commerce. Influencers and Reels have undoubtedly helped create brand awareness among the targeted customers of a business.

Influencers
It is seen that influencers have increased the sales of many e-commerce business industries. If influencers on social media like Emily Canham, with 740k followers, post a story of your brand will automatically lead to many searches of your business page. Along with this, customers can directly shop from creators by Instagram checkout. People would require to tap on the image of the influencer.

Reels
Reel making is another important feature of Instagram. Reel Instagram making is an excellent source of income as they lead to an increase in the sales of an e-commerce company. The Instagram reel size is 30-seconds. A reel can be an employee talking about the company, packaging or delivering procedure, or maybe customers giving good reviews.

Instagram Best Practises

 

Once you learn how to sell, market, and promote your goods and services on Instagram, we need to do some best practices to have an edge over our competitors. Following are a few best practices that you have to follow as a business person:

Know your targeted audience

There are 1 billion users on Instagram. Hence, it is important to determine who your targeted audience is. Break down your audience into age, gender, location, and interests. Select candidates and bend the market demand towards your business.
Smart goals for your company:
It is important to make your goal SMART. The term SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Hence, make sure that your goals cover all these important characteristics.
S: The goal of your business should be specific, and it shouldn’t be general.
M: Your company’s goals should be measurable in terms of revenue and sales.
A: Attainability of goal is a must. They should make sense. You can’t reach 2M followers in a few months but can definitely meet 1K.
R: Goals should be relevant to your company’s ideal theme and background.
T: The goal should be within a time frame.

A style guide for your profile:
Your profile should have a unique style. This could be the color of any particular background theme of your posts. The style of your profile makes it look attractive to your consumers. A company can find a unique style for its page and then stick to it. The constancy in the profile makes it look attractive, uniform, recognizable, and engaging.

Use Content Calendar:
Consistency is a key to winning the e-commerce competition. The habit of pre-planning and scheduling posts keeps you uplifted and even saves your time. Your content and posts should be organized. Make sure you are posting regularly on your page. However, do not overflow people’s feeds with your content. This could further lead to unfollowing.

Make posts entertaining:
It is important to make Instagram posts fun-loving and entertaining. People are usually attracted to entertaining posts. Reels, IGTV, and live are the best ways through which you can make your posts entertaining and engaging. However, make sure with too much fun effect, do not forget the main vision of your advertising.

Instagram Analytics

 

WHAT IS INSTAGRAM ANALYTICS?

Instagram analytics is the process of analyzing the audience’s behavior, demographics, and pattern. Everyone is using Instagram for marketing purposes. It is important to be unique and make the best use of the platform. Therefore, it is best to do Instagram analytics to track your progress and work on your weaker areas.

How to check Instagram Analytics?

By Instagram account
Since you have already switched to a business account. Through an Instagram business e-commerce account, you can access some limited analytics. For example, follower growth, reach, engagement of the audience, and impression. You can access any of these for free by clicking on the ‘View Insight’ option.

By third-party apps
If you want to know your progress in-depth, it is essential to use third-party apps which ask for premium subscriptions. If you do not have enough budget to buy a subscription, it is advisable to use free tools such as Instagram insights, Iconosquare, etc.

Conclusion

 

Almost all major brands have their presence on Instagram and are making efforts to increase their reach by targeted posts, lives, reels, etc. An effective social media strategy and expert team of social media experts can catapult a business into heights that it had never imagined.
Developing the right marketing strategy is a difficult task and requires technical expertise. Our experts at PROS are professionals that help in developing a tailored Instagram marketing strategy that includes Photo ads, Stories ads, IGTV ads, lead generation, etc. We have successfully boosted the social media presence of well known businesses. Read our case studies here.
If you have any queries, feel free to contact us.

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