IG Blog Series #3: 8 IG Tips to Strengthen Your Ecommerce Presence
Using Instagram for business is a balance between being a storefront, pushing your product, and showcasing yourself to build brand loyalty. All with the end goal of attaining a customer for life.
In Part 1 of my Instagram series, I showed you how to format your profile to be more business friendly. In Part 2, I discussed how Instagram Stories is key piece to utilize in growing your business. Today, I will be presenting to you the last insert of the Instagram blog series. Building off the first two blogs, I want to close it off with sharing some tips to make your ecommerce presence complete on Instagram.
8 Tips
Tip 1: Optimize Your Profile Bio
I mentioned in Part 1, when setting up your account to make sure that you use this effectively to communicate your business. To write a strong bio that grabs your audience’s attention, you must first answer what you want to accomplish in your bio. Here are couple of ideas you may want to include:
- Convey what your business does
- Provide your customers with your company’s information such as contact method, store hours, etc…
- Showcase your brand/company’s personality
- Highlight your latest offering such as product launch or promotions
- Include a custom and relevant #hashtag to track the conversation.
- Allow the customer to take action such as clicking to your website or current promotional offering.
Tip 2: Content Calendar
Create a content calendar to keep yourself organized and structured. Remember to constantly engage with your audiences and keep them looking forward to your posts. A suggestion could be to have a theme to some of your weekly posts, such as Throwback Thursday or Motivational Monday. Overall, should be aligned to your business and brand.
This will also help you identify which posts your want to put paid spend behind to boost and not to overlap when you posts organically.
Tip 3: Balance of Product & Personality
It’s important to find a balance between pushing products and showcasing your brand’s personality. Audiences will be disengaged and drop off if you constantly push product images and make no effort to engage with them. Make sure to put content that your company is doing, such as your community outreach or giving a behind the scenes look into something, on display. It should align with your brand values and giving audiences exclusive content that they can’t easily find.
Tip 4: Contests & Influencers
Who doesn’t love entering contests and getting free stuff? Contests are effective ways to increase engagement and interactions for your brand, which in return make your profile more visible and build customer loyalty. Another method is to combine contests with social influencers as audiences are very loyal to the influencers they follow. They see them as a trusted individual. Associating your brand with the right influencer to champion the brand can help build that trust with existing and potential customers. Consider aligning with influencers who align with your brand values and compliment your tone and style. Possible ideas could be to ask influencers to run contests, unbox your product, or do an account takeover.
Tip 5: Retargeting
Retargeting is important in any ecommerce marketing strategy. This grants you the opportunity to drive potential customers further down the purchase funnel. Retarget known site visitors with items they have looked at or abandoned in their cart. It will give them a reminder that they did not purchase the item(s) yet, as well as help keep your acquisition costs down since you are leveraging an interested consumer.
Tip 6: Pop Culture Trends
One thing that helps build relevancy and get noticed by your audiences is posting around Pop Culture Trends. People respond well and associate better with brands who are viewed as current and trendy, especially with the Gen Z and Millennial group. Make sure if you are going to associate with Pop Culture Trends, you watch out for any Trademark content and trends that may have a negative impact to your brand. These posts should be fun, timely and positive. Examples: Oscars, Superbowl, Viral Event
Tip 7: Features That Convert for You
I always advise that companies should always be testing and find what works for them. Testing various features that fit your business is key to continuing growth for your business and sales. Find what works and what doesn’t, learn from what doesn’t work and see if you can improve on it. The worst fear is wondering what if versus knowing that you tried and it didn’t work.
Tip 8: Longer Captions
Just because Instagram is an image first platform, doesn’t mean you have to shy away from longer captions. Longer captions are nice to build brand visibility, make a deeper connection, share a story worth reading. They are longer than a paragraph but broken up in chunks with spaces and bullets.
This tip isn’t to say that you should switch to long captions and ignore short ones. as short captions still receive the best responses. It’s more to say that you shouldn’t be afraid to use longer captions. Keep in mind and consider when it is good to utilize them such as:
- Time of day, most people have more time to read a post in the evening.
- What type of content you want to communicate
- Can your post be communicated in short form versus long form?
Final Thoughts
The key takeaway, here, is to experiment and find what works for your business and brand. Always make sure you are keeping your audience engaged and keep them wanting more. As Instagram is primarily image dominant, it is an important piece in your ecommerce strategy. It is the perfect channel to showcase your product and build a loyal consumer base.