Here’s How to Leverage Instagram for Ecommerce

Instagram can be a highly effective platform for ecommerce entrepreneurs seeking to leverage social media to drive traffic and sales – no matter where you’re located.

When utilized effectively, Instagram can offer some incredible results for ecommerce businesses. However, if your Instagram strategy lacks focus or emphasizes spammy tactics, it can damage your business, not only on the platform but for your reputation as a whole.

The fact is that if you play your cards right when it comes to the strategy that you implement for your Instagram ecommerce store, you significantly increase your chances of success as an ecommerce entrepreneur.

Keen to transform your Instagram presence into a sales machine? Here’s how to leverage Instagram for maximizing your ecommerce store’s success.

Stay on top of maintaining your following

When it comes to successfully leveraging Instagram for ecommerce, a key aspect of your strategy should be to ensure that you maintain and grow your organic audience. To do this, regularly engaging with the community is crucial.

A great way to maintain and grow your following, is by collaborating with other Instagram accounts. By teaming up with people and brands in your ecosystem, particularly influencer accounts, you can increase your account’s reach and following, which is a key step for ecommerce success.

Another way to maintain and grow your following is to hold regular competitions on your Instagram page. When you host a competition, make sure to stipulate in the rules that to enter, your followers must tag a specified number of friends who don’t already follow your account in their contest entry posts.

Perfect your sales infrastructure

With an effective Instagram ecommerce strategy in place, your brand will be able to reach a larger audience and increase sales significantly. However, knowing how to set yourself up for success from a tech infrastructure perspective is not always so straightforward.

A few of the top ecommerce platforms make it possible to add product tags to your posts, so that from a user experience perspective, tapping on the tags opens up an additional layer of content on top of the images, which can link directly to product pages. No more “link in bio” confusion.

But to ensure that the product links work well, you’ll need to sync your SKU management system and inventory solution with Instagram. The best multi-channel direct sales strategies require you to maintain multiple social commerce presences – not just Instagram but also Pinterest and Facebook – as well as marketplace activity, shopping engine integrations and owned content properties. To keep it all synced with your dynamic product availability data and to streamline orders and fulfillment, you’ll want to opt for a headless commerce solution.

Create a holistic posting strategy

The key to Instagram success is to create an all-encompassing strategy that incorporates a few social media channels, all interconnecting with each other. When it comes to successfully marketing an Instagram ecommerce store, it’s essential that you combine various social media channels to ensure that you are increasing your reach and also maintaining your following while building your presences holistically.

Got a head start on Snapchat, but your Instagram profile is lacking? Consider promoting links to your Instagram account from your Snapchat stories. Not sure you can post regularly? Schedule content in advance. Few social media transgressions are worse than a rarely updated Instagram account – or any social profile, for that matter. If you want to achieve ecommerce success, you need to be pumping out regular content. On Instagram, this generally means at least two posts per day.

Always ensure that your content is authentic, interesting and of value to your followers. Don’t just focus on selling – be quirky and create posts that will capture your followers’ attention. Quality is also key, since the higher the quality of your content, the better engagement you will get. Always ensure that the content you are putting out is relevant to your ecommerce brand positioning and followers’ lifestyle aspirations. If it’s not relevant, it won’t be of interest. Focus on why your products are worth buying – what makes them special?

Wrapping up

With the above tips in mind, you’ll be in great shape to start building an audience on Instagram. Post methodically and regularly, providing value and attracting more followers. This holistically about your multiple social presences and how they can help increase reach for one another, and team up with others in your space to boost things further. And with the right commerce engine tech in place, the product availability, content, ordering and fulfillment aspects of all will be streamlined and synced.