Instagram Marketing: The New Land For eCommerce Marketers

Apart from Facebook, Instagram is also a fertile land to market your printing products. With over 1B users worldwide, you can reach more potential customers and bring up your brand to a higher level.

Instagram nowadays isn’t just a social channels for photos lover, or for branding purpose only since it has been updated to adapt with the commerce trends and behaviors of most online users. In this article, let’s dig in how you can build your brand and boost up your business results with Instagram marketing.

Step 1: Create an Instagram Business Account 

A Personal and A Business Instagram Account

What’s the difference between a personal account and a business account? To answer this question, not only a business account has all official and legal settings for business, an Instagram business account also allows you to:

• Gather information of your visitors (age, gender, location)
• Add up call-to-action buttons for your business (Call, Message, or Email contact)
• Add tags and display prices of products on your post (using Instagram Shopping

Source: Internet

You can learn more how to switch and set up your Instagram Business in here. 

Tips while Creating Instagram Business Account

#1. Have a high quality profile picture

Your business profile picture is the first thing that your visitors will be impressed and interacted with. Therefore, it’s essential to create an unique and catchy, however minimalist at the same time. 

Regularly, most worldwide companies will set their logo as profile picture on Instagram. If you don’t have a logo yet, make sure your profile picture is high-quality and related to the products or to the message that your business channel is aiming to deliver.

One more thing, your profile picture on Instagram should sync with other channels’ identity. It means that your Facebook page, Instagram account and other social channels should share the same profile picture, so that your visitors can identify instantly the moment they see it.

#2. Create a bio for your account

This bio description of Instagram limits you in 150 characters. Although that you can use this bio to describe your business and delivers, because of the limit, you need to make it short.

A sharp and determined description to summarize who are you, what you do and what you can bring is a good to go. Your bio should represent your store’s unique selling points that you can offer your customers. For example, “Custom design. Personalize your own.”

A short description of your business vision, core values that you’re aiming to deliver is also a good idea. The fact that, your customers will feel more impressed if they notice about the values you’re bringing to them or to society.

A practical example of an impressive bio that you can look after from Everlane - “Exceptional quality. Ethical factories. Radically transparent.”

#3. Add your store site as account website

Once you create your Instagram business account, you should set out one of the ultimate goals is to increase your store’s conversion rate by redirecting your visitors to webstore. For an Instagram business account, you can easily show your store URL under the bio description.

By placing the link right on top of your profile, it will catch more attention from your visitors to click on and see the website themselves. Furthermore, attach your store site to Instagram will help you to track and analyze the proficiency of this channel more precisely and efficiently.

#4. Add contact info

Last thing to do for your Instagram account getting fully setup is adding contact information. Contact info will allow you to interact with your customers better by leaving a way to text, to call or to send email. These contact information will be displayed in the form of buttons on your profile. Visitors can easily choose a way to contact and Instagram will redirect to a correspondent function or application.

For example, if visitor clicks on “Message” button, Instagram will open direct message page. On the other hand, if visitor clicks on “Email address” button, Instagram will redirect to an email application on mobile with the correct email address of business in recipient field.

Step 2: Build a Proficient Content Plan

For business, there are 4 types of content that you can consider to add in your content plan. Let’s take a look at these 4 content types that you can refer to. 

Aspirational Content

A way that you can sell your products on Instagram is “selling” lifestyle or the purpose that your product aims to deliver to customers. For example, if you’re selling tumblers, instead of posting product images everyday, you can stimulate visitors to buy that product by putting on a visionary of going on a snowboarding trip.

Because tumbler is used mostly by snowboarder. You can put up an image of snowboarder carrying your tumbler, which it can get your visitors to get more excited than an ordinary product image.

Well, that’s only a way to shape your visitors' imagination. The point is you need to create a positive feeling when your visitor sees the post. Because only then, your visitor has an urge to purchase that product, which is a desire created by dreams. There’s a tip before every post, ask yourself if you want to become the person, or if you want to own the object in that media.

Let’s see an example from Away - a company that’s selling suitcase. This post of Away definitely shows an appropriate content that represented their products and purpose toward their target audience.

Source: Instagram

Once you identify the purpose of content toward your viewers, you can position your content goals and then create appropriate aspirational content for your Instagram account.

Motivational Content

Motivational content is a potential type of content. Because not only it can make viewers feeling better after seeing, it also represents how the brand looks after and motivates viewers in a positive way. So, how to create motivational content? I would suggest that you can become a narrator who’s going to tell your audience real stories about real people.

For example, if your product focuses on family niche, tell your audience stories about ordinary people and their family happiness, how to bring joy to family members, etc. Stimulate your audience to dream about that life within your story, and educate them that your product is a criteria to lead them to that happy visionary.

If you need an example, Nike is doing a very good job with their motivational content. Take a look at this post, would you like to purchase Nike shoes or apparel after reading this?

Source: Instagram

User-generated Content

With outstanding features like hashtags, or reposting/sharing, Instagram is helping you to use your followers/customers’ images as user-generated content. You can use customer’s image regularly to improve your brand image and credibility.

Read more about how to build user-generated content is effective for every on-demand marketing strategy.

Entertaining Content

You can give your profile a humorous vibe by posting memes, or entertaining content that can make people laugh. Just one note, these kind of posts needs to relate to your business or brand. These content aims to increase the engagement of followers and other visitors on Instagram to your profile. Also, it brings up a new vibe for your brand, by allowing your customers to feel a friendliness from your side.

Source: Instagram

Step 3: Create Caption & Utilize Hashtag

Caption

After confirming the content method that you consider to be suitable with your business, you need some criterion to adjust before creating caption for your posts:

• On top of caption, place the most important information that you want to deliver
• Add call-to-action sentences to increase engagement, e.g. “Double tap if you agree”, “Like if you feel relatable”, “Tag someone who would…”, …
• Use emoji to make post more friendly
• Pay attention to the length of your posts. Along with short caption, you should also have long length of caption as motivational stories
• Use quotes or popular topics
• Utilize hashtag system

You can track and analyze efficiency of your post with different caption by using Insights section of Instagram.

Hashtag 

Hashtag is not only a way to attract more visitors to follow your Instagram profile, but also a good opportunity to connect with customers. It helps to ease the process of searching and looking up content that customer desires to view.

Source: Instagram

Instead of adding most popular hashtags on Instagram, you should use the hashtags that contain the topic related to your target audience, or your goals. The smaller the range of your hashtag targets in, the better you can reach to relevant audience. Also, you should create an unique hashtag for your brand as well, it can help your customers to sort out what they want to look for more quickly.

Instagram currently limits 30 hashtags for each post. However, to assure your post’s aesthetics, you should only add up to 10 hashtags per post. Otherwise, you can add hashtag in comment section of that post as well. Instagram users are able to find post as normal even if hashtags are in comment section.

Last Check-up, Create Daily Stories 

Instagram Stories is definitely a game changer for this social channel. Since the interface and featured functions are so well designed, everyone loves to create story. This feature of Instagram is even more popular than the original function of posting image on profile account. Up until now, more than 500 millions of users use Instagram Stories daily. 

Tools to Create Attractive Stories for POD Products

• Poll sticker
• Emoji slider
• Questions and Quiz using Q&A
• Adding links (product URL)
• Product tags

Recommendations to Support Using Instagram

• Caption & Content ideas: Captiona
• Create aesthetic caption: LingoJam
• Create stories: Unfold, Prequel
• Arrange images before posting: Unum
• Schedule post: Later, Hootsuite, Planable

Marketing print-on-demand on Instagram is a good way to help customers to shop products online and remarketing efficiently. If you haven’t had plans to promote your products on Instagram yet, why don’t you give it a try?

If you have any request on blog topic, don't hesitate to suggest Teeinblue Product Personalizer in the comment section below.

RELEVANT ARTICLES

How to Build an Organic Marketing Strategy for Your Print-on-demand Stores

7 Marketing Activities To Increase Conversion Rate with Lowest Cost

5 Tips to Achieve the Highest Profits in the Print-on-demand Summer Sale