Looking for ways to sell more of your products and services on Instagram? According to Instagram, 90% of people follow at least one business on their platform making it an ideal place to look for new customers. Merely creating a brand account on Instagram isn’t enough to pull more sales, you have to create a presence and awareness about the brand itself. The key to making more sales is to gain more followers which ultimately can be cultivated into customers. Here are some tips that you can use to grow your brand page on Instagram.
#1. Developing a Brand Aesthetic
One of the most important things on Instagram is to stand out amongst the crowd. In order to do that you need to decide on an aesthetic for the brand to give it a more distinguishable and consistent look. Here are some ways to develop a brand aesthetic.
# Pick a Color Scheme: Notice that every successful brand page on Instagram has a defined color scheme that is reflected on their every post and story. Pick colors which best represent your products and brand, having consistent colors help to make the brand more recognizable.
# Choose your caption style: Decide on how you want to address your audience and how familiar you want to sound with them. Use appropriate emojis if suitable. Use creative and effective captions to draw attention to the post.
# Develop a signature style for visuals: Make sure that any picture or visuals you use on your page for advertising campaigns follow an appealing theme to solidify your presence against your rivals. Having a recognizable style for visuals help people to connect the brand with the product and draws more attention.
#2. Create a Presence
Share your company’s motto and philosophy with the followers to get them behind your message, people are more likely to share a post if they feel connected to the underlying message.It is imperative that you use every feature available to maximize your reach, increase followers and subsequently gain more customers. Every Instagram feature that you come across has an intended use and can be used to your advantage if used correctly. Put out content on every Instagram venue, doing so ensures that your brand is represented on every front.
#3. Engage with your Followers.
Creating engagement with your followers helps to create a community around your brand. Having a community ensures longevity.
#Posts: Regularly post content on your timeline but don’t overload it as your followers might find it annoying if promotional posts occupy most of their newsfeed and can be a motivation for them to unfollow. Have a consistent upload schedule as the algorithm rewards consistency.
#Instagram Stories: Stories are a great way to engage with your followers and can be used to understand your customers and based on their responses to the stories you can get a more nuanced understanding about your relationship to your customers/followers and where your brand stands in comparison to others. Stories can also be used to fill the gap between posts. Post creative and engaging stories that the followers will reply to. Use fonts, colors, visuals in accordance with your brand aesthetic but remember that the key is to get valuable responses from your followers through stories.
#Stories Highlights: Compile your previous stories into a story highlight where you can put together similar stories that fit a particular theme or were from the same campaign. Not every single story needs to be compiled in a story highlight, only the ones that stand out or the ones that might be interesting for new followers to look at and could serve as a testimony of your products and provide legitimacy.
#4. Provide an Optimal Shopping Experience
Shopping online is often considered bothersome, especially when those purchases are not from conventional stores, ensuring a simple and pleasant shopping experience is extremely important not only to expand your customer base but to retain existing customers as well. People are far more likely to purchase products from you again if they deem their first visit to be a pleasant one. Here are some things that you can do to provide your customers with a better shopping experience:
# Contact info: Make sure that you put your contact info including your website, headquarter, phone number, twitter etc. in your bio so that people have multiple ways to contact you and it also makes the page look more established and authentic.
# Tag products: Upload all of your product catalog on Instagram through Shopify or other Shopping carts and tag every product that you post on your timeline so that people can easily see the pricing and product details, therefore, saving them another trip to an external website.
#Customer service: Have some sort of a system in place that addresses any grievances or queries that your customers might have, trust is another key element that helps to retain customers so ensuring that your customers’ voices are heard is also very important.
#5. Buy Ads to Promote Products
Organically growing a page is possible but the idea should only be pursued for a limited time, Social Media is inherently disadvantageous to new players and it gets really difficult overtime to increase sales organically. Once you already have a somewhat established page, you’d want to invest in some ads. Ads provide a wider reach and have the potential to attract new buyers to your page which allows you to make sales that otherwise wouldn’t be possible. Ads are the only way you can momentarily gain an upper hand against your competition, you don’t need to promote every post but the start of a new product line or posts announcing discounts are generally considered good for promotion.
Conclusion
Instagram might be the store but you’re still the seller and the success of your brand is entirely your responsibility. Success of your store heavily relies on followers but it’s really important that you craft a brand image that appeals and caters to your target audience, a million followers means nothing if only a small percentage of those followers actually try to engage with the page. Develop a unique voice and present your message and company philosophy to your audience. Prioritize customer satisfaction and aim to garner a loyal customer base. Good products when paired with good promotional content often result in phenomenal success.
