Expert Tips For Selling Your Brand’s Products On Instagram

Today, social media marketing is one of the best and most cost-effective strategies used by brands looking to connect with and sell to their target audiences.

But today’s consumers are leerier than ever when it comes to buying from online brands.

Not only are modern consumers hesitant to spend money on companies that they’ve never heard of or seen before, but there’s also some evidence to say that today’s consumers don’t often pay attention to ads if they know they’re paid for or sponsored in any way.

Many would argue that this shift in consumer buying habits was long overdue.

But for businesses trying to market themselves in 2021, this shift has left them struggling to find new ways to connect with and sell products or services to their increasingly reluctant online audiences.

Fortunately, inbound marketing is designed to help you with just that!

In the following article, we’re exploring how you can use the basic principles of inbound marketing to sell your brand’s products or services on social media platforms like Instagram.

Don’t Be Pushy

While the world of outbound marketing consists of paid ads that essentially tell consumers to BUY THIS PRODUCT, inbound marketing takes a slightly different approach to attract and convert new customers.

Rather than creating content that pushes your products, services, deals, and promotions, the idea behind inbound marketing is to create content that will directly address the interests and concerns of your target audience by providing them with the information and education they’re already looking for online.

Think about inbound marketing as handing out professional business cards rather than investing in sponsored ads.

So, even if your goal is to sell your products or services, your content should focus on providing valuable information and knowledge to your target audience and answering their questions rather than pushing your products.

You can still use your content to promote your business in a positive light, just in a slightly more indirect way than advertising what you have got in stock.

Creating and sharing valuable information or content works in two ways:

By providing information that showcases your knowledge and expertise on the given subject matter, in turn, establishing your business as a reliable source of information consumers can trust, and by indirectly exposing your followers to the products or services you have available, ideally positioning them as the solution that your ideal customers were already after.

Think About The Bigger Pictures

Don’t forget that Instagram is known for being a highly visual, image-heavy social media platform, where its users often prefer to scroll through high-quality images and view short videos, rather than immersing themselves in longer articles or posts, as you’d find on LinkedIn.

Therefore, if you want to sell successfully on Instagram, do your best to share content that includes high-quality, high-resolution images of your products.

Or, if your business provides a service, you might want to consider creating information carousel posts, where you can create informational posts, and your followers can swipe through individual slides that are all part of the same post. 

Either way, make sure to learn about and use all the tools you have on Instagram that are at your disposal, including filters and other image editing tools, which can add that perfect, professional touch to your content.

Try Different Content Formats

Rather than simply being a platform where its users can publish highly filtered images, Instagram has become a place where all sorts of content creators and admirers can come together with other like-minded individuals.

Today, businesses can post photos, videos, stories, live Instagram feeds using IGTV, create information slideshows and carousels, and more!

Therefore, it’s essential to experiment with different types of content and different formats to find what works best for both your business and your target demographic.

Thanks to the many content formats available on Instagram alongside all the other neat features like Instagram Shopping, it’s now easier than ever for businesses to sell products on Instagram.

Before you can sell effectively, you’ll also need to ensure that you’ve optimized your business account and have linked to your online store or set up your store in Instagram Shopping.

But even then, you’ll still need to dedicate a considerable amount of time and effort to creating content that caters to the specific needs of your target audience.

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Recommended readings:

Social Media Marketing Demystified

Social Media Marketing Checklist

Are Your Products or Services Selling Properly on Social Media?