A 2021 Guide to Instagram Marketing for E-Commerce Brands

If you’re looking to develop an Instagram marketing strategy for your e-commerce brand, read on to learn why Instagram is a great platform and how you can ace your IG marketing efforts.

Instagram is an excellent platform for e-commerce brands seeking more conversions. There are more than 1,000,000,000 (yeah, that’s a billion) monthly active users on Instagram. That’s a considerable number which means there are enormous opportunities for brands looking to market and sell their products on Instagram. 

looking to market and sell their products on Instagram.

In this post, we’ll dive into how Instagram is changing online shopping, share some hot tips on how to use Instagram for your e-commerce business. Finally, we’ll discuss the importance of influencer marketing on Instagram and how Incense can help.


How Instagram is Changing Shopping Experiences

In the blink of an eye, Instagram moved into the world of online shopping, and some would argue that they’re dominating it. With the addition of Instagram Shop, it’s now easier than ever for users to find and purchase products directly from Instagram. This is excellent news for brands looking to adopt a social media strategy to drive more conversions. Every month, there are 130 million people who tap on an Instagram shopping post. Shoppable Instagram posts are a game-changer for businesses. They’re an easy and effective way to showcase your products on Instagram and drive sales. Instagram Checkout makes it incredibly easy for users to purchase products without leaving the Instagram app. What’s the significant change here? Ease of use! Instagram has become an extremely streamlined way for brands to advertise their products and for consumers to purchase them.


The 4 Best Instagram Marketing Strategy Tips for E-Commerce Businesses


As you probably know by now, your e-commerce brand should be using Instagram as a virtual storefront. To help get you started, here are some of the best tips we know...

  1. Create Content for Your Profile to Boost Organic Traffic

If you want people to buy your products on Instagram, they’re going to have to see them first! Paying for ads can be a solid move, but luckily Instagram offers several other ways to display your products. You can tag products in feed posts, stories, Reels, and you can even have a virtual storefront on your profile. To make sure your products get seen, we recommend mainly relying on organic traffic. To get a lot of organic traffic, you’re going to need to post high-quality content regularly. We highly recommend user-generated content featuring influencers, but we’ll dive into that more later in this article. If you haven’t already, start posting content regularly, and don’t forget to use hashtags.

  • Run Giveaways

Who loves getting free stuff? That’s a silly question because everyone loves free stuff. You’ve probably seen or heard of giveaways on Instagram, which are precisely what they sound like. It’s when a brand offers to give away a product for free to a randomly chosen user. To enter a giveaway, users usually have to like the giveaway post, tag a friend or two in the comments, and sometimes repost it. This is an excellent strategy for getting your brand’s name recognized on Instagram. It looks like your brand will be giving something away for free, but you’re getting exposure in return. That exposure can lead to more followers and more sales. A word to the wise… it’s good to be generous to your fans and customers, but your giveaways don’t have to be extravagant. Start with something small and go from there. For example, if you’re a clothing brand, give away a t-shirt instead of a $500 shopping spree. People love free stuff and will be happy to get an excellent product from a giveaway, even if it’s not a super expensive one.

  • 3    Run Paid Ads With Different Strategies

Now we come to paid ads. Paid ads are nothing new on social media, and that’s a good sign. Ads have stuck around on the internet for so long because they work. Sometimes brands run ads with no variation and then claim that ads don’t work for them. You have to mix things up a bit and try different advertising strategies. You can get creative with your Instagram ad campaigns with small changes like A/B testing separate copy or more significant changes like showcasing other products entirely. If you think something is your most appealing product, you may be surprised to find that your audience begs to differ. Some brands may feel scared entering into the world of paid advertising because they’re afraid of losing money, but if your content is excellent, you’ll see a high ROAS.



  • 4 ‍     Use Influencer Marketing 

We want to touch upon influencer marketing before we share some tips about it in the next section. To be blatant, influencer marketing is crucial to getting more exposure on Instagram and getting more conversions. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why influencer marketing works. People want to buy products that they see influencers use. When a consumer follows an influencer that they respect and trust, they’re going to take the influencer’s word on what products they should buy. To optimize your Instagram influencer marketing strategy, it’s best to think of it in terms of three pillars; community, content, and commerce. Influencers start as a part of your marketing team (community), have the potential to become your entire creative department (range), and with the advancements being made to social media shopping, they can become your sales team (commerce).


4 Keys to Successful Influencer Marketing

These days, influencers are an integral part of the sales funnel for e-commerce businesses. Between 2016 and 2020, the number of influencer posts on Instagram doubled to reach 1.5 million seats worldwide. If you’re reading this, you probably understand the importance of influencer marketing. If you want your brand to create a tremendous influencer-led effort, these four factors should be present...


1.Establish your Social Channels

There are several great social media platforms for e-commerce brands looking to carry out a social commerce strategy. We’re big fans of Facebook and Instagram, but we recommend that brands start with Instagram. If you’re going for the gold, which is brand awareness, engagement, and sales, Instagram is likely to be your best bet due to the features we mentioned earlier.

  1. Identify Ideal Influencers

There are tons and tons of influencers out there, but you shouldn’t use any random one. You’ll need to do some research to separate the wheat from the chaff. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to do that. Relying on Google and other social search functions to find influencers isn’t the best strategy.

2.Use Micro-Influencers

When your e-commerce company uses influencers for Instagram content, you don’t always need super famous, heavy-hitter influencers. Micro-influencers are niche social figures who have follower counts below 25k. If you’re not convinced about using micro-influencers for your social commerce strategy, keep this in mind… Expert Voice has found that micro-influencers are generally perceived as more credible, believable, knowledgeable, and better at explaining how products work when compared to regular influencers.

 3.Trust the Influencer

If you want high-quality influencer content, trust the influencers you work with. Frequently, brands attempt to control the content output of influencers by scripting and other regulatory behaviors. The truth is that those kinds of behaviors inhibit the creativity of the influencer. Brands hire influencers because of their creative prowess, and to get the highest-quality content possible, and It’s best to let influencers create the type of content that earned them their reputation (and followers) in the first place.



Time To Get Started

We hope this guide will help take your Instagram marketing strategy to the next level. Something we want to emphasize is the importance of influencer marketing. We care about influencer marketing because our platform helps brands find and partner up with influencers to work with. We have a community of 35k content creators who can produce high-performing user-generated content for e-commerce businesses. UGC like product reviews and testimonials are the best way to build trust and interest that help sell your products. Buzzsocial is the perfect place to work with influencers that make content that builds trust and helps brands reach their sales goals.

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