These days, digital marketing and trading is a very viable paths for businesses to take. With more and more people using the internet year by year, cyberspace is becoming a thriving market to tap into. In particular, social media is an effective place to drive audiences to your brand and make sales. One of the best platforms you can engage with is Instagram.
Lots of businesses are using social media to drive sales and engage with their target audiences nowadays. One example is TechQuarters, which provides managed IT services London companies rely on for all their tech needs. They incorporate social media engagement to help generate leads and drive sales in their organization – and you can do the same. Below is a checklist of some of the ways to help generate sales using Instagram.
- Eye-catching Imagery
Instagram is a visual-based social media platform; you scroll through image after image, occasionally with a video or a graphic-based post. In order to draw in potential customers, you need to be publishing posts that are so eye-catching that users stop scrolling to look at them. You can engineer this by researching what interests your target audiences have – i.e. travel and culture, food and drink, cars, gadgets, etc. Get the most out of each image by following the rules of photography to capture great photos – and you can even enhance the photos you take with apps like Canva or Adobe Lighthouse (which has a free-to-use version for mobile).
- Run Competitions
Engagement is the key to getting more sales; if audiences aren’t engaging with your brand, they won’t have any incentive to give you their business. A great way of driving engagement on Instagram is to run competitions. These competitions usually get users to like, comment & follow in order to enter the competition; or they have to tag a friend, or participants generate content and tag your business – user-generated content is very valuable because it inspires trust when audiences see peers representing your brand.
- Video Marketing
On average, video posts receive about twice as much engagement as any other kind of post on Instagram. Video marketing is a very effective way of engaging audiences – in general people prefer to take in information in video format, rather than entirely through reading content. To create good and engaging videos, keep your content short and snappy, and make sure they are living within the first few seconds to ensure they grab people’s attention. Also, ensure that your videos have captions because, by default, Instagram videos are muted.
- Use Stories for Exclusive Content
With Instagram, you either have feed posts or stories. Stories only last 24-hours and are generally used for less curated, spontaneous content. Of course, there is value in planning story posts as well, but most importantly, it should be unique from the content in your feed posts. There is the option to share feed posts in your story, and many businesses do that, but if you do that too often it may feel like you are just recycling the content. Instead, try to create exclusive content for stories, to incentivize audiences to engage with both your feed and your stories.
- Engage with Commenters
Engaging audiences is not only about interesting content. As a business, you should be directly engaging with audiences on social media. Responding to comments is very important. First of all, if you have people commenting on your posts, it means you have created content that is capturing people’s imaginations, which is a great feat. By replying to your audience’s comments, and opening a dialogue with them, you are building meaningful relationships with potential customers, who will begin to feel loyal to your brand.
