How to sell on Instagram?

 by Lisa W. - February 17th, 2021 | Last Updated on May 10th, 2021

You can sell on Instagram using the app’s newly incorporated shoppable posts feature. Along with it, you have plenty of advantageous features available on Instagram for business accounts, which you can use to boost Instagram sales.

Instagram is an avenue for the dropshipping business that a lot of dropshippers fail to consider. The site has 1 billion active users and more than 1 million advertisers, so it’s foolish not to start using it to sell. Especially when the app has started allowing users to directly link customers to your site from the posts. Instead of the link in Instagram stories or the boring link in bio option, this is much more effective.

Let’s take a look at some of the ways dropshipping Instagram can be made the best use of.

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Table of Contents

1 . Picking a Product or Niche

Before you can get started on getting sales, you need to understand how Instagram as a platform works. For one, it’s an app made for sharing photos. As a result, Instagram users are extremely visual people. Products with extremely strong aesthetic appeal have a higher chance of stopping people in their tracks compared to functional but not pretty items. A hammer won’t interest people, but a notebook with adorable doodles on the cover will.

Stuff like apparel, makeup, phone cases, and stickers belong among the most trending products on Instagram. If you already have items that you sell on dropshipping stores, then don’t worry. Even if those don’t belong among trending products, you can get people’s attention as long as you manage to create a good story and narrative around them.

For example, instead of posting photos of a toy for pets, a picture of a cat playing with the said toy will garner more attention. Your content has to be engaging. It has to make people stop in their tracks as they are scrolling through the Instagram homepage or looking at the recommendations in the discover category.

2. Business Account On Instagram

A business account on Instagram is pretty much like having a digital business card; only you can interact on a deeper level with your customer. As an account holder, you will get access to better marketing tools. Instagram also becomes more aware of your account and that you are here to sell a product or service. They're more likely to recommend your items to the targeted audience, especially if you make use of their paid services.

Unlike the personal account, a business account lets you add your contact information, website, phone number, and business address. The Instagram Insight section allows you to see how your posts are being received and what kind of demographic is showing more interest. You can also pay to promote certain posts, letting you expand your audience.

If you already have a personal account and if it’s a well-received one, you can switch it to a business account from the settings. Otherwise, you can set up a new account and connect it to a Facebook business page. On your Facebook business page, you will also have to connect your Facebook account to the Shopify shop of yours. You can then turn on the feature inside the Shopping section in the Business settings of your Instagram account.

3. Connect Your Product List To Instagram Business Account

Once you have set up your business account, it is now in the hands of Instagram to review it to see if they will make shoppable available for you. It can take a couple of hours or days before Instagram approves of it and once they do, you will receive a notification.

Now, you want to connect your product list to Instagram. To do this, you have to go to the shopping section again and choose the Products category from there. From here, there is an option that lets you select your product catalog.

4. Tag Product Link Directly On Your Post

Once you’ve completed the previous steps, this is the easiest part. First, you upload a post like you usually do, preferably, a post about the product you are linking to. As you now have the shoppable feature turned on, the caption section will now have an option for you to tag the products. Write the product name and select the one you want to tag. Once you click done, you will notice that when you click on the image, it links directly to your website where the product is hosted.

5. Influencers

Influencers are a big part of Instagram advertising these days. If you can become an influencer yourself, even better. If not, compared to paid advertising of your post, the right Influencer can actually bring more traffic to your website.

You can ask an Instagram star to promote your product on their page as well as write a post tagging the influencer and talk about how they approve of the product.

Don’t forget to use lots of hashtags. It’s a good idea to use a mixture of trending hashtags and moderately popular ones. If the hashtags are too popular, your posts might get lost in the mix. A hashtag with moderate popularity where your post will stay on the top for some time will bring in more customers. Your storyline also has to be engaging, and the pictures should make people want to buy your product. Aesthetics is your greatest friend on Instagram.
Final Thoughts
Simply having a website and ranking one on Google searches isn’t enough to get sales these days. You have to make use of all the options available to you. Whether it’s Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, if the site enables business promotions, you should make the best use of it.

Now, sites like Instagram also ask to be paid in return for the promotion, and if you can avail that, great. If not, you have to use the free tools to the best of your abilities until the paid tools become easier for you to dish out cash for.