Online stores on Instagram are a place where an audience interested in buying unique, exclusive products comes. You don’t need to rent a space to start your own business on Instagram. All you need to do is create a business account for the store, work on its “packaging,” and promote it.
Instagram Business: How to Get Started?
First of all, choose a niche based on your interests. What products can you offer? After you’ve come up with it, analyze the competitive environment. Knowing the market will help you determine your further strategy, understand the target audience, and think about how to communicate with them. Be honest and open about your advantages, talk about the cost of materials, shipping, additional expenses.
Answer the following question: what do competitors do to attract a new audience and retain the old one? Try to estimate how much money they spend on content marketing? What types of content and formats do they use in their posts?
To understand if your product is relevant, there are special services on the Internet, such as Google Trends, that allow you to analyze the popularity of queries on the Internet.
Create a detailed portrait of your target audience: age, gender, interests, city they live in, their income, life values. It would be useful to know what fears these people have. This will help create content tailored to them, knowing the points that require special clarification.
Choosing a Niche: What Products are Popular?
Keep in mind that demand for certain goods is constantly changing, interest increases, then fades. On Instagram, we focus on exclusive, not consumer goods (creative furniture, designer clothing and accessories, handmade gifts, etc.)
Popular niches for a product business on Instagram:
- style and fashion: clothing, accessories, jewelry, lingerie
- beauty: Cosmetics, beauty gadgets, beauty services, perfumery
- children’s products: clothing, educational toys, furniture
- fitness: Workout clothes, proper nutrition
- lifestyle: travel goods, home decor, eco-products
If your product is of high quality and unique in itself, success is guaranteed.
Branding and Identity: How to Create a Profile?
The task of branding is to shape the image and perception of your store, products, and services.
Nickname. It should be short, memorable, easy to perceive and reproduce, as well as unique. It’s better to prefer associations, abbreviations, interesting combinations, rather than writing a dull @odyah_kiev
Avatar. Choose contrasting, memorable, easy-to-understand images. It’s good if you have a corporate logo. Avoid small fonts, and consider using a circular format. The user should not strain to look at your avatar. Avoid stock photos, other logos, and images from Google. It’s better to use online photo editors or hire a designer for design work.
Profile description (header). In the name field, it’s customary to write what you offer to your audience (example “cocktails and cakes – Chernivtsi city”). Here are your keywords that users can find in search. The profile description allows for 180 characters. Remember, this text is for the cold audience that has just subscribed to your account.
- who are you?
- what do you do?
- why should I follow you?
Your task is to motivate the user to scroll down, tell them about your services, stimulate interest. Also, the person should easily find contact with you, be it a phone number, messenger, or personal website.
Visual Content. Remember that Instagram is primarily a visual social network. People won’t click on a post if they’re not visually interested. Make your account lively, define a primary and secondary color.
Use a similar background or some feature that ties all your photos together. Whenever possible, stick to the photo editing style and main profile colors. This will help in specialized apps for feed planning.
The products in the photos should look as they do in real life, so heavy filters are strictly prohibited.
Naturalness and simplicity are long-lasting trends. Minimalism is a style where the person takes center stage. People are most often drawn to faces and bodies. If you want to attract a buyer, take a photo of your product with a face if it’s relevant in your niche.
Thematic Stories (Highlights). To convey more detailed information to your customer, you can use thematic stories. They are displayed below the description. You can add prices, information about promotions, delivery conditions, or reviews. If you put them in the same style as the profile, they will look even more attractive.
How to manage a profile?
A well-designed profile is half the battle. The next step is content.
Content Marketing. Establish the basic rules of communication with subscribers for yourself. To interest the modern user, avoid aggressive promotion of products. Modern ethics sell “from person to person”. People are interested in knowing the story, benefit, or emotion behind the content they read.
The text of the posts should be engaging, useful, or lead to a sale. You can inform subscribers how to interact with your product, publish reviews, tell the brand story, provide product care tips, run contests, ask questions, and communicate with the audience.
If a product is shown in a photo, the price should be easily visible to the user.
Publications should be made regularly, and for this, you can use a content plan and several applications. The optimal posting frequency is 3-4 posts per week.
Stories – a very good and free tool that has surpassed posts in popularity. They work as reminders and, therefore, the brand becomes recognizable. In stories, you can post information about new arrivals, promotions, video reviews of products.
Consistency plays a big role in this format. Since the display time is only 24 hours, users are interested in not missing anything important and viewing the content. It’s better to post them three to four times a day.
Types of Content. Content on Instagram can be divided into selling, informational, and entertaining. Each of them has its function. There are many variations, and they need to be optimized for your target audience. Let’s analyze each in detail:
Informational Content
This is the type of content that builds trust with the target audience. Subscribers see that you are a professional in your field. Here can be posts about the success of your company, publications about the brand’s life, the process of creating a product, posts that reveal product features (popular questions, comparisons of your product with competitors’ products, statistics, etc.).
Example https://www.instagram.com/p/Cg84zq0lunW/
Entertaining Content
These are emotional, lively posts that engage the audience. Such content attracts subscribers and increases their loyalty. Entertaining posts should be easy to read. Contests, giveaways, motivational posts, interesting info-events, interviews with celebrities or micro-celebrities.
Example https://www.instagram.com/p/Cg2BaSUtKZ9/
Sales Content
There are no exceptions: selling content should be as interesting and lively as the rest of the content. This type of content should not make up more than 25-30% of the posts. Posts with a product/service, important details, user-generated content with your product (UGC), reviews, promotions, and discount information – everything should be adapted to your target audience’s preferences. Here you can call to action: “buy the product, write to direct”, “how to get a 5% discount” etc.
Example – https://www.instagram.com/p/ChXPBJGLexK/
How much money do you need to start an Instagram business?
Developing your business requires funds for advertising, collaborations with bloggers, as well as having people and services that facilitate internal processes: content marketers, SMM specialists, copywriters, designers, CRM system for turnover accounting, etc.
If you do everything right, you will be able to sell the product and make a profit from it in 2-3 months.
Author: Vladyslava Rykova, Head of MAVR Marketing Agency