Instagram is growing, with over one billion-plus active users across the globe. Speaking about social media marketing, Instagram plays a significant role in promoting businesses. According to a survey, 80% of account holders follow one business on Instagram, and 70% of Instagram users make purchases with mobile.
So, why wait! Go ahead and experience the mind-blowing opportunities it has to offer to establish your small business. Then, let’s learn how to make the best use of this visual platform to help grow your business.
#1. Set Up Instagram Store
To set up an Instagram Shopping store, you need to check eligibility and proceed with account setup. For that,
- It would be best to have your business located in a supported market.
- You have to sell physical goods.
- Your business has to obey Instagram business policies.
- Your Instagram profile has to be a business profile.
- Connect your Instagram account to your Facebook business account.
Once you have done these steps, sync your Facebook shopping catalog to your Instagram business account; each of these does take a few days to process from Facebook’s Catalog Manager to Instagram Shopping. When syncing is completed, you could start a product launch or a promotion.
Suppose you don’t have a catalog yet. In that case, you could create one by heading over to Facebook’s Catalog Manager and selecting the “E-Commerce catalog” options if your business is real estate, travel, or auto that best suits you.
To know more about creating a catalog, check Facebook’s Catalog setup in the help section. Being a small business owner, you have to use your valuable time wisely, as setting up Instagram shopping takes top priority to run a successful business.
When your Instagram profile and catalog are connected, move on to sign up for shopping on the Instagram app. First, you have to go to your profile, click “Settings,” then tap “Business,” and press “Shopping.” The next step is to wait until it is submitted.
When you submit your account for Instagram shopping review, it takes some days to get approved. When Instagram approves, it will notify you to complete Shopping settings on your account and start tagging products to different posts.
You can tag five products per photo or video post and twenty products on carousel posts. Suppose you have products in your catalog tagged in old posts; you could consider retagging them to drive more sales.
Tagging products in Instagram stories is possible to tag one product on a single story. However, if there are multiple products you want to tempt followers to check and make purchases, create additional stories. Besides, you can customize tags with different texts and colors.
#2. Engage your Followers with Organic and Paid Posts
So, now you have an Instagram Shopping account, you have to engage your followers other than just shopping for products. Creating Instagram ads is a powerful way to build reach, but you can gain trust and set up a community of loyal followers with organic posts.
One of the best ways to have followers involved is by posting user-generated content that will increase product visibility and allow you to get automatic Instagram likes monthly, drive potential customers to make a purchase, and build trust in your brand.
To get started, head over to some of your loyal customers, ask them to review your product and share images on Instagram by tagging to your business account. You can then reshare to your profile; this way, you can cheer your customer, stay engaged with the community, appear trustworthy on followers’ minds, and drive views.
Since it’s free content, it helps you manage expectations leaving a positive impact on followers. On the other hand, you can invite people to “tag us to get featured” to obtain more and more user-generated content.
Paid promotion is an excellent method to widen your reach. Although organic reach is limited in Instagram ads, you can spend some dollars to attract the target audience depending on demographics, interests, etc.
#3. Determine Instagram Success
You put in a lot of effort posting content and tagging people or brands; make sure you measure your accomplishment. Head over to your Instagram business account, click on your profile, and the “Insights” tab to know your analytics, including likes, purchases, comments, and shares.
When you understand better how your posts and stories are performing, you can accumulate details on what kind of posts and products are sought-after by the audience, what to promote now and then, and what inventory to stock.
Additionally, Instagram insights let you understand how people interact with your posts, about followers’ details, like age, gender, location. You can also see the activity with the paid promotion depending on reach, impressions, and more.
#4. Keep Your Finger on the Pulse
Instagram is continuously evolving like any other social media platform. Some changes are minor, whereas some significant changes are incredibly beneficial to advertisers and business holders.
Let’s take a look at these essential changes that fall on e-commerce. First, Instagram Checkout launched on March 19, 2021, yet it is in a closed beta program for fewer established brands. Moreover, these are available only in organic posts, but we can say without a doubt that they will soon be available in ad format, as happened with other betas.
Checkouts are highly profitable for Instagram and business holders. Posts do look organic, and it keeps followers shopping directly from the app without having them move to your eCommerce website. That makes shopping faster and easier for followers. In addition, Instagram charges a fee on selling products for business people rather than for customers, encouraging them to shop more, resulting in high conversion rates.
#5. Branded Content
Branded Content works well in ads; it is not available on Instagram yet but on Facebook. It lets you widen product visibility and trust customers who use posts from others and tag you.
To look into it further, let’s say you own a small business and partner with a giant company that is well established and trusted by people. If they post about your product on a special promotion and tag your business, it appears on the Branded Content page.
You can then share this tagged post and promote it to potential customers. With proven success on clients and brands with Facebook Branded Content, we hope to soon be available on Instagram.
Wrap Up
Once you have connected your Facebook and Instagram business accounts and created a catalog, strategize your posts and paid promotion efforts to launch when you are ready. When you post organic and paid content, you tend to generate more sales, increase profits, and engage better. So, stay creative and make the best use of opportunities on Instagram to establish your business.
Author Bio
Julia Frank is a Social Media Strategist and a Content Writer at Instalikes who has a great passion for writing on the latest trends and technology. When she is not busy with work, she reads many books and travels long distances.
