Instagram is an incredibly popular and potentially hugely powerful marketing tool. Did you know that Instagram has 1 billion active users? That’s 1/7th of the population! Moreover, Instagram is extremely effective when it comes to promoting products and brands that have any kind of visual appeal. This will allow you to create an account filled with pictures of people using your products or services, or living the lifestyle that you are promoting. That can be highly motivating and encouraging for your followers, and thereby ultimately encourage them to make a purchase.
But how do you go about turning those views into sales?
This is where things can get a little trickier, and the problem here primarily lies with the fact that Instagram doesn’t let you place live links in your descriptions. You can include the URL sure, but your users won’t be able to simply click that link in order to be taken to the store page. And what this means, is that they likely won’t make the effort to go there – and you can’t elegantly convert those views into sales.
So what can you do? What some marketers will do, is to add the buy link in their bios. The text that is used as the image description can then point to that link (link in bio!) and this way, interested viewers can follow it. This still isn’t perfect however, and what many creators will end up doing, is changing that link practically every day as they update their page with new offers. A better option then would be to link to a storefront, and then to simply move the hottest items to a more prominent position in the store as they are promoted on Instagram.
Better yet though, would be to link directly to the product. Thankfully there are a few ways to do this now. One is by using an Instagram story, which is an image that appears for a short duration of time. If you have 10,000 followers OR a verified account, then you can use this in order to link directly to any items you like – the user just has to swipe upward.
Otherwise, you might be able to use ‘Shopping on Instagram’. This relatively new tool allows images to directly link to buy pages through tags. It’s not available for everyone, and you will need your business to be approved first. But if you can manage it, this has huge potential for sales.
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