Wednesday 1 October 2014

Use Instagram to Promote Your Products

Are you using social networking to reach new customers?

Have you ever tried using Instagram?

What was once a simple picture sharing app is currently a key sales channel.

In this post you'll learn the best way to use Instagram to gain brand recognition and reach new customers.


Establish a sizable Community Base

Thirteen percent have Instagram accounts and over fifty percent of the top 100 brands of the world are on Instagram. Your customers (and potential customers) are likely there as well.

Below I share a few ways you can locate or attract those people and add them to your existing fan base.

1. Include Audience-Specific Hashtags
Hashtags help people find you on Instagram.


Hashtags are a method to group ideas, notions or conversations. They make it easy for people to locate others who are posting about issues they are interested in.

You can effectively reach new folks interested in your products, by including the appropriate hashtags in your upgrades.

To find the most useful hashtags for the updates, it is possible to make use of a free online service or Websta. These tools provide a listing of popular hashtags based on your own keywords.

Use those lists to produce the top 10-20 hashtags that connect to your own company, brand and merchandises and place them in a note on your smartphone. This way it is possible to refer to them where you are posting from.

2. Apply the proper Filters


Many people post away and don't think about engagement--we merely use what we think looks good is affected by Instagram filters.

TrackMaven lately published a study that found photos with no filter, the Mayfair filter or the Inkwell filter wound up with opinions and more likes.

Naturally, everyone's audience is slightly different. I would suggest experimenting with various filters and using a Instagram direction tool to assist you to see which one is most popular along with your community.

3.Post at Peak Times

As with all social networks, understanding when your community is probably to participate helps you choose the best time to post. IconoSquare has an optimization report that identifies the best times for you yourself to update according to your previous posting involvement and history.

The report shows black circles representing the times you're currently posting and light-gray circles symbolizing the degree of interaction those posts receive. The greatest light-grey circles represent the best times for one to post based on your followers' involvement.

The example above is taken from the Shopify Instagram account. You can note the best posting times in this particular instance are Friday at 9pm and Monday at 9am, astonishingly.

4. Participate With Adversaries' Followers

Anyone following your competitor's Instagram account is someone you want to speak to. You would like to inform them about your (better) site, merchandise or service, right?

Both your number increases of followers and qualified leads.

There are several tools that can help you to find your competitors' followers. For instance, use JustUnfollow to search for your own competitors' Instagram accounts by name and it gives you a list of everyone. With that list in hand, start participating with your potential customers that are new --follow them and like or comment on among their pictures.

5. Work With Popular Instagrammers

One of the best methods to develop your Instagram community would be to request a heavy hitter in your market to feature your product. Unlike the previous tactics, this one typically features an advertising cost associated with it-- sending products or either payment for review--but the consequences may be dramatic.

Yumbox paid Instagrammer and a well known food blogger to post a picture of a food-filled Yumbox along with a link back. That single post doubled traffic that was spiked and the company's Instagram following to the their web site.

To obtain the largest accounts in your niche, use the search function and type in hashtags key words and company names of Instagram. When you follow and find a large account, Instagram will give a list of users that are similar you'll be able to follow to you.

Assess their account profile when you are prepared to connect with someone. In most cases you will find a way to tell pretty quickly whether an account accepts sponsored posts or product reviews. Lots of people include a note that says they're willing to work with brands (e.g., "For business inquiries, please email...").

The price of sponsored posts or featured reviews depends on a number of variables like niche and audience size. Generally, the price is comparatively low compared to other online advertising alternatives and these ventures usually lead to increased participation.
Instagram's engagement rate is one among the social networks that are best of all. Its picture-centric nature lends itself to showcasing and selling products.

When you have established a large targeted audience and gained trust and loyalty, it's time to convert browsers to buyers. Here are three ways that you can begin.

1. Accentuate Scarcity

Marketers and retailers consistently practice this principle by indicating that products or discounted costs will only endure for a limited time.

Fox & Fawn, a ny retailer of vintage clothes, uses an innovative method of increasing involvement and sales with the deficiency tactic.

The shop regularly posts several pictures per day showing their current inventory. There is usually a restricted stock since things are classic. Followers have to leave a remark to reserve the thing, when they see something they like. Afterward the user calls in with their credit card information and Instagram name to complete the purchase.

Beverly Hames of Fawn & Fox says that 20-40% of daily sales now come from their Instagram audience.

2. Limelight New Products

Packer Shoes has created a healthy Instagram audience of 54,000 followers and often emphasizes new and exclusive products to drive more sales.

Owner Michael Packer says, "We can literally put something up on Instagram and not two seconds later, the telephone is ringing off the hook."

3. Highlight Social Proof

Social proof is a powerful psychological occurrence where people assume others' actions reflect the appropriate behavior for certain position. For instance, in case your friends or family recommend an item, you are more likely to choose that product over another.

Almost 63% of consumers say they're far more likely to purchase from a website if it has some form of social proof like merchandise ratings and reviews. Product reviews are 12 times more trusted than product descriptions from producers.

Online retailer BlackMilk does an extraordinary job of providing social proof by motivating customers on special hashtags being used by Instagram to post pictures. Those pictures are pulled by blackMilk into their site so clients can see how popular there is a product.

One particular set of leggings in their shop has over 160 pages of user-generated pictures. When someone visits the site, those pictures are strong visual social proof that encourages them to buy the item.

BlackMilk founder Cameron Parker had this to say concerning the Instagram social proof attempts of the business:

"[Customers are] really proud of showing off their individuality of the way that they style them, and stuff like this. So it wasn't the versions that were selling our products--it was the hundreds of pages of selfies from girls around the world, different shapes and sizes."

Over to You

Be purposeful about how you present your products on Instagram and assemble your crowd. The end result will be a targeted marketing channel that delivers a healthy stream of revenue.

What do you believe? Would you use Instagram as a sales channel? What tactics have worked best for converting fans to customers?

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