Ecommerce Instagram Marketing: Learn, Launch And Earn

Orji-Oko Uzor

Introduction

Nearly every marketing activity now takes place online. It might be tough to differentiate between the different kinds of digital marketing people use today, well, that’s the reason for this article “Ecommerce Instagram marketing: learn, start and earn”. You may know a lot about Facebook marketing, or probably you are an expert on ecommerce marketing for Twitter, but in the case of Instagram, that type of social cred doesn’t mean squat.

Statistics

Well, Instagram is nothing like most other social networks. Research has it that a whopping 70% of its 300 million monthly users reside outside of USA and many of them fall between the ages of 16 and 24. If this is your perfect target demographic, please just grab a glass of wine and get comfortable now. Because you are about to understand everything you need to get started on this very mobile-intensive social network. If you want to target a mobile audience of international guys and girls in their late teens to early thirties.

You are in the right place! Instagram is popular with men as it is with women, although it was previously more female focused than male. And users are more likely to access this platform from a mobile app. Things are moving quickly, and the social audience might be somewhat unforgiving. So your mission is to learn and understand everything you possibly will about ecommerce Instagram marketing before you even create an account and post your first image.

What is ecommerce?

Ecommerce marketing is the process of driving awareness and action toward a business that sells its product or service online or electronically. Often ecommerce marketers use social media, digital content, search engines, and email campaigns to attract more visitors and facilitate online buying.

Ecommerce advertising

Ecommerce advertising falls beneath the umbrella of ecommerce marketing — and when it’s used in tandem. You will have the ability to effectively reach more of your audience members to boost conversions and increase brand awareness.

As we mentioned in our definition above, ecommerce marketing is all about one driving awareness and action towards your product or service. Meanwhile, ecommerce advertising includes the strategies through which you can actually promote your product. In terms of ecommerce marketing and selling, these ads might come in various form of display ads, banner ads, or rich media ads. The major takeaway here is that ecommerce advertising is a more effective method to implement. While you take your to develop your ecommerce Instagram marketing strategy to focus more on your product or service promotion.

Types of ecommerce marketing

To be able to give you a sense of what an ecommerce marketing strategy looks like. Here are some common marketing platforms and how you will use them to build an online store.

Social media marketing

Brands, publishers, contractors, and growing businesses all launch pages on today’s most popular social platforms. To be able to connect with their audience and post content that the audience is interested in. As an ecommerce marketer, you need to do the same thing. But the campaigns you will run might look a bit different, and not every social network is a good platform for your business needs.

Things needed

Ecommerce websites are very visual, you must show off the product. After all your success on social media platforms depends on your use of imagery to drive more attention and traffic to your product pages. However, Instagram is a perfect platform for ecommerce businesses. Because it will enable you to post sharp product photography and expand your product’s reach beyond its buying page. Then you need to take your social media posts a step further by creating shoppable content. Which is content that will enable visitors to buy right away. This include anything from strategically placed display ads within a social feed to additional tags that will take users directly to a shopping cart. These methods will help you end any friction that might happen during the buying process.

Content marketing

When you hear the phrase “content marketing” your mind might go to blogging and video marketing content. That is meant to improve your website’s ranking in search engines and answer related questions in your industry. But when you sell a product online, do you need articles and videos to generate transactions? You sure do.

How do I start my ecommerce business?

Choosing a product

Finding a product to sell

The first step to build an ecommerce business is to know what products you need to sell online for free direct to consumer. This is the most challenging part of starting a new online business.

Evaluating your idea

Once you have an idea of a product in mind. The question is how do you know if it will sell?

Obtaining your product

After you must have landed on a strong product idea, your next step is to figure out where and how you will obtain your products.

Research and prepare

Research your competition

Now you have found your product, you must have evaluated its potential, and sourced a supplier. But before getting into that, there’s a need for a thoroughly research on your competition. So you will know what you’re up against and how you will differentiate your business from theirs.

Writing a business plan

Now your competitive research is completed as, it’s time to write your business plan. A business plan is a roadmap that helps bring your ideas and thoughts together. A business plan is vital in determining what to prioritize and how to effect e wasively reach new customers.

Setting up your business

Naming your business

Part from figuring out what to sell, another challenging decision is to determine your business or brand name and to choose an appropriate and available domain name.

Creating a logo

After you must have selected a memorable name and registered a corresponding domain. It’s time to craft a simple logo.

Understanding search engine optimization (SEO)

You are almost ready to start building your online store. However, before you jump into it, first you need to understand the basics of search engine optimization. So you will properly structure your website and pages for Google and other search engines.

Building your store

By now you must have understood what search engines means. It’s now time to build your store. There are many important elements to consider.

Choosing your sales channels

One of the perfect ways to reach your new customers is to choose sales channels where they already buy. The right combination of sales channels will solely depend on your products and your target customers.

Preparing to launch

As you prepare to launch your new business, there are different shipping and fulfillment elements you must prepare for.

Post launch

Acquiring your first customer

Now that you’ve launched your ecommerce store, the hard work of marketing your products starts. Many new store owners will consider selling their physical products in person. The rest of digital marketing will then rest on doing one thing well: driving targeted traffic.

Marketing your store

By now you must have likely made a few sales under your belt. Now it’s time to get serious and focused on your business.

Strategies used to refine your Instagram marketing for ecommerce

Going live

Always remember that Instagram is a social platform. The platform is not only meant to post your offers. It also provides an opportunity for you to engage with your audience in a two-way communication. Interacting with your followers will help to build trust, which will convert to future revenue. One way that you will authentically communicate with your followers is to broadcaste live video with Instagram Live. When you “go live”, your story will be prominently featured for your followers. You will use Instagram Live as an opportunity to promote your products, educate your followers, tell them your story to increase your brand awareness.

An AMA (Ask me anything) session is one popular way to go live and attract the audience. It’s equally common to do a live stream to discuss industry news related to your industry and niche. You might even invite other brands or Instagram personalities to be part of your Instagram Live.

Choosing the right influencers

On Instagram, Influencer marketing has been a big thing. When you work with influencers, it’s very important to find ones that will match your brand. When it’s done right, influencers will do the following:

  • Increase your brand awareness
  • Generate more new business leads
  • Increase your number of followers

When you pick an influencer, don’t just be carried away by the number of their followers. You need to equally consider engagement like the number of comments, quality of comment, and views per post.

How to identify a bottled
Instagram account

When an IG account follows 3,000+ people but only has 340 followers with very low engagement on their posts. It’s likely a botted account. Lack of brand alignment will equally lead to low ROI on your influencer marketing efforts. For instance, if your ecommerce store sells makeup products, consider an influencer who is well known to be a beauty tips expert. Their personality will highlight what your products do and provide customer recommendations will carry weight.

Contests and giveaways

Social media contests and giveaways will really give your brand a boost in popularity. People ove free gifts. Contests and giveaways are among the perfect ways to attract the attention of leads and move them down in your sales funnel.

They provide the following benefits:

  • Grow your following – You will ask people to like or comment on your post in order to be able to enter the contest
  • Raise your brand awareness
  • Capture their email addresses: when your offer is enticing, people will freely give you their contact details. Like their email or phone number to qualify.
  • Make sure that what you will give away is really something your followers want.

User-generated content (UGC)

When people use your products in the real world and post it on Instagram. They should share their posts with your followers. Sure, you will take staged photos of your product and post them yourself. These images won’t carry strong weight as the social proof provided by user-generated content (UGC). Posting UGC, you show that your product or service are solving people’s problems.

Post regularly on Instagram

One of the major benefits of being on Instagram is to let people know that you are an active brand that’s open to communicate with its audience. Posting on a regular basis will keep your audience to think about you and your products. According to a Union Metrics study, major brands do post on average of 1.5 times daily. A good benchmark is to target to post at least one to three times daily. This level of engagement will help you build and be able to sustain long-term relationships. What’s more important is that you are actually sticking to a regular posting schedule. When you stop posting entirely, your profile’s growth will flatten immediately and likely you will lose followers overtime.

Ways to succeed in Instagram marketing for ecommerce

Though Instagram is quite different from other social platforms in many ways, the basic principles to get a successful start will still apply. Before you start to post, pay good attention to what users, especially those in your target demographic do react to. Also pay attention to what other brands do post. Look at what is successful and what is not. This will give you an idea of what may or may not work for your brand.

Staff

Social networking, when it’s done well, takes time. Probably you’re like most entrepreneurs, time is not something you have in abundance. So, instead to give a half-hearted effort, decide which part of the process will be outsourced and make it happen immediately. Maybe you need to be involved in the strategy and review phases, but you will leave the social monitoring, posting and reporting up to another person. It’s all narrows down to your comfort level, but know that many entrepreneurs cannot successfully focus on all elements of an Instagram marketing campaign while they run a business. So be prepared to trust someone else with some of the responsibility.

Money

Depending on your method and level of involvement, you may not even need to invest much to get started with this ecommerce Instagram marketing. To create a budget, think about who you are going to hire and whether any images will taken by a professional photographer. In many cases, a quick iPhone or Android shot will work just fine. It’s more about authenticity and personality than it is about being corporate.

Time

Social media marketing will take time. Probably you don’t have enough time, then hire someone to handle this for you, still with your direction. But understand that it is more than just labor intensive, it will take months to build an audience and be able to gain trust on any social network, so be patient

Software

As you get to know Instagram better, you will be glad to understand that some parts of posting will be automated. Apps like Instatag will help you to find the right tags to boost followers and likes. Instafollow is great to find relevant users to follow, and Pic Effect Studio will add more of a creative flair to your images than the standard Instagram filters.

Creativity

You brand need to be extra creative on Instagram for a good number of reasons, and this creativity is not limited to finding the right images to post. Your entire method must be tackled with a creative mind. Maybe create a contest for users to upload and tag images, or maybe you create somewhat like a game surrounding your brand images, to find an element in the photo or something similar. No matter what you decide, you must know that to post images of your products or staff won’t be enough. You need to think outside the box and come up with posts worthy of sharing to your followers.

Get started with Instagram marketing for ecommerce

Create a strategy

Before you start to post on Instagram, you need to have a strategy.

Set goals

First, start by setting some general goals. What do you really need to accomplish from your presence on this platform?

Set objectives

Once you fully know and understand your major goal, drill a bit deeper and set some particular objectives. If your goal is to increase your brand awareness, how do you know when you have achieved this? Will it translate to a certain number of followers, likes and comments? If so, define this number alongside with a time frame to be able to achieve it in your strategy. You might fall short, and but that’s okay, it’s better to have goals and strive for them than to be unsure whether you are just wasting your time.

Target audience

You already know your customer pretty well, right? You should equally know their age, geographic region and other interests. Find them on Instagram, and find out what they like and others that like them.

Type of content

Next, is to figure out what type of images you will post. For instance, your brand may have three kinds of updates: Product, people (staff) and customers (ideally, using your products). Feel free to get creative and expand upon these kinds or choose post kinds that are a better fit for your brand.

Post frequently

Then, determine how often you will be posting. This mustn’t be set in stone, but you need to have a minimum number of posts per week or day. This way, your account will be active. It’ll equally help when it comes to scheduling posts in advance.

Track performance

In order to be able to determine whether you are meeting your goals and objectives, you will need to find a way to measure performance. Like how many likes, visits and comments are do your posts get? Which kinds of posts are the most popular. How many are your current followers? Is the number growing or shrinking?

 

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