There is no denying the importance of having an online ecommerce channel these days. Because of the pandemic, e-commerce shopping has accelerated by four years in just 12 months, above the predicted trend of online shopping.
In today’s article, Foundation, a performance marketing agency for the beauty/skincare industry, share how to attract customers to your ecommerce platform using Instagram.
Why Instagram?
Instagram has become one of the most downloaded apps in the world with over 1 billion users globally logging on to scroll through their feed every day. And in 2019, a study revealed luxury beauty brands performed best on the platform, generating more engagement per post on Instagram compared to other social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
Over 80% of Instagram users actively search for products and over 130 million people click directly through shopping posts. These numbers make it clear that there’s huge potential for brands old and emerging to get their products in front of potential new audiences.
How to Get Eyes on Your Instagram Content?
Show Your Personality
Creating an Instagram community for your business is one of the best ways to gain brand loyalty, boost engagement, and stay connected to your customers. A community is something your audience feels part of — it’s so much more than being a one-time customer or a disengaged follower. Community is about shared interests and meaningful connections.
To build your community, your boutique needs to hone-in on its personality. What are your brand values? What are your USPs? And get ready to make it personal. By doing this, you’ll attract an audience of like-minded people who are more likely to connect (and shop!) with you.
Utilise Hashtags
Hashtags are a huge part of the platform. There were over 1 million people using the #meme every day in 2020. That’s a lot of memes!
This is the most common and easiest way to make your content more discoverable. By using relevant hashtags, your content will appear on the page for that hashtag; think of hashtags like you might think of keywords for a search engine, all confined to Instagram.
You can also tap into and take advantage of trending topics, for example, if your perfume boutique claims to have bottled the ‘scent for summer’ and #summer2021 is trending – there’s your angle!
Use Influencers
With the rise of Instagram, a new type of super-user, known as an ‘influencer’ has emerged, sharing their idealistic lives, careers, and homes with an eager following whilst making huge amounts of money from sponsored posts.
Many brands actively use influencers to increase their potential audience reach, sending out free products or gifting PR event tickets in return for exposure across the influencer’s account to their thousands (or millions) of followers.
Using influencers to act as brand advocates who share your brand values and reach out to an audience similar to your consumers can be a quick win on Instagram.
Create Reels
Instagram reels allows users to create engaging, fun, and short videos using a catalogue of music and user-generated media on Instagram. These reels are just 15-seconds long, but can be multi-clip videos that have sound, effects, and music added to them.
You can find Instagram Reels at the forefront of Instagram — taking centre stage of the main navigation bar which is a significant push to have users browse and share reels more often. You definitely want to be taking advantage of this.
Thinking about how you would interact with your customers in real life is a good place to start. The advice, tips, recommendations, and small talk you’d share naturally are all important parts of your brand personality that you can bring to Instagram. The hard part is trying to get creative!
Run Paid Ads
Paid advertising on Instagram can be another effective way for your business to connect with your potential customers and achieve objectives such as: sending traffic to your website, increasing your website conversions, etc.
It’s also important to note that the engagement rate on Instagram is higher than the engagement rate on any other social media platform, especially for purchasing purposes. As long as your product is visually engaging, you could drive purchases which are beneficial for your ROI.
Really Take Your Instagram Advertising to the Next Level
Performance marketing agency Foundation, are specialists in the digital advertising world and their mission is to help ambitious brands to grow.
For more advice, visit their website or get in touch to speak with a digital consultant.
