Selling on Instagram: Complete Guide to Social Selling

In fact, Instagram is in one of its best moments. It has more than 30 million active users in Italy, surpassing its big sister Facebook. So, if you're thinking about selling through this social network, this is a good idea. In this guide, we’ll show you how to sell on Instagram using all the fundamental and proven techniques for success. Instagram has long been more than just a network for uploading selfies and lifestyle photos, it has become a platform with huge potential for companies looking to increase sales, expand their reach, and strengthen their brands. In fact, 3 million advertisers advertise on Instagram every month, and according to a study by Socialbakers, 85% of social network users said they have discovered new products on Instagram. It’s clear: selling on Instagram is a unique growth opportunity for your business.

Why sell on Instagram?

We showed you why selling on Instagram is important for almost every business.

According to a study by the Social Media Family, the data from this social network speaks for itself: about 85% of Instagram users actively follow brands.

210 million users access one or more business accounts every day.

55% of Instagram users follow a brand, the highest percentage of any social media platform. Instagram's engagement rate is 2.5%, compared to Facebook's 0.23%. 35% of the most popular stories are produced by companies. If we objectively analyze all the data from the study, we can guess that users are interested - and very interested - in the content produced by the brand, in particular the video formats (which we will talk about in this guide).

Tips to optimize your business profile

To start selling on Instagram, you need to check your business profile first. Here are some quick tips to optimize it: Add your logo as a profile picture. If you haven't already, you can hire a design service on wixs, or create one using dedicated APPs. Write a description of your company on your resume. A well thought out resume should describe who you are and your core distinguishing values in a clear, short and concise manner. Also include a link to your e-commerce in your resume. If you want to target different landing pages, since Instagram only allows you to add a link, you can use a tool like Linktree, it allows you to combine multiple URLs on one page. Publish valuable and elegant content with all the tools the platform offers you. Create stories, use videos, reels, and try the formula that works best for your audience.

Techniques of direct marketing on Instagram:

It is increasingly important to find successful products for your dropshipping store and optimize them to sell them through other channels such as social networks. One of the most important actions to define a social selling strategy is through demographics (gender, age, purchasing power, level of education, work, etc.) and their interests (hobbies, consumption, tastes, preferences, etc.) Once you’ve identified and segmented our target audience, it’s time to find and test the products that are most interesting to that audience. Here we will show you how to choose the winning products and test them on Instagram to maximize the sales of your business.

What products to sell on Instagram?

Winning products are items that have high sales potential compared to other products in the same category or industry. To be clear: it is the best-selling product in a particular niche. These products are generally available for a limited period of time or are subject to seasonality. For example, it’s easy to see that fans have the potential to be the winning product this summer. However, it’s important to always keep an eye on trending items for sale on your online store, but... how do you find items for sale on Instagram?

A) Choose one or more niches where you want to start. Everyone sells award-winning products on Instagram, so if you start with a niche you really like, it’s easier to grasp and understand.

B) Verify the real size of the niche market. Please check that there is sufficient demand. Pay attention to your competitors. Analyze and research your competitors, their best-selling products, their social media ads, top-rated items, and more. This way, you can take a first look at the success of your product.

C) Analyze the ads you see on social networks. The more ads you see, the more ads the algorithm will show you. So stay tuned, interact with ads, save them, and analyze what types of products are being promoted, what brands are doing, format, content, and more

D) Take a look at @shop's Instagram account. This is the Instagram team that publishes popular product profiles and emerging brands around the world. You’re sure to find ideas and inspiration for winning products.

How to test products on Instagram

Identifying the products that are successful, of course, it is important to validate them. Before you start explaining how to test products on Instagram, it is important that you fully understand the performance of these products and, for this reason, your best friend is Google Trends. With this tool you can see the progress of your search for products or related terms by filtering by specific times and places. For example: you can look for search trends throughout the year, in Spain, rubber bands for sports. Also, you can and should look for other related terms such as exercise boards or weight training boards. This way, you’ll get a more accurate picture of the product trends you’ll test, the months with the highest spend, related product trends, and more.

Once a product has been validated and trends identified, you need to verify that it really works for your target audience. For this, we will use Instagram ads: prepare product sheets for your online store and products to be tested. Prepare your Instagram profile by following our instructions in our guide. Create business managers and advertising accounts (set pixels, events, etc.). Starts a transformation task to validate the data. Analyze the results and make decisions

Advertising on Instagram

Advertising on Instagram is one of the most effective selling strategies for online stores, especially when it comes to direct selling.

As we said, the best way to check if we have a really successful product is to test it, Instagram advertising is one of our allies.

First, the first thing to do is to understand and examine how advertising works on this social network, what formats are available to us, etc.

To create a campaign, the first thing you need to do is determine its goal: engagement, consideration, or conversion. And, in one of them, you can choose a more specific goal.

What do you think is the best option to test your product? Obviously, conversion activities.

After you’ve set up your entire campaign: Add budgets, segments, and more. The choice of ad content is important. Although testing is required, all trends and results point to the video. What resolutions and weights are suitable for video ads on Instagram? Video ads may appear in different proportions, but Instagram recommends the following. In the summary section:

Resolution: 1080 × 1080 pixels.

Size: up to 250 MB In stories:

Resolution: 1080 × 1920 pixels.

MP4 and MOV formats

Size: up to 4GB

Remember that each clip lasts 15 seconds

Shopping on Instagram

You may already be familiar with shopping on Instagram. It's an Instagram tool that allows brands to tag their store's products in publications: in feeds, stories, reels, streams, and even mentions. This way, when users click on the tab, they can view the product information and go directly to the product page of your online store. beware! The latest Instagram update allowed some users to tag the brand’s products in their posts. That’s why it’s more important than ever to keep your catalog up to date and in sync with Instagram. How to set up Instagram Shopping on your profile? It's easy, just set up your Instagram store step by step

A) Use catalogs on your business manager: You can create new catalogs or use existing catalogs to shop on Instagram.

B) Link it to your Instagram profile: on Facebook, go to Directory Manager and choose the one you want to use. Go to Use Cases > Other Ways to Use the Catalog and select Buy on Instagram. Finally, go to "Link your Instagram business profile" and select "Link Account".

C) Add an item to the catalog: Make sure it is fully up to date and contains all the minimum fields required by Instagram (name, description, category, price, etc.).

D) Make sure you comply with all of Meta's EU regulations and trade policies. Otherwise, your product may be rejected and not appear on labels or advertisements.

Instagram Shopping is a very powerful tool to increase your sales on Instagram. So you’ll get better results if you update your catalog with relevant information and images. Obviously, remove from your e-commerce all products that are already out of stock.

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