The Instagram Shopping feature is one of its innumerable features that’s powerful enough to boost both your followers as well as your sales most significantly. However, if you want to see the radical changes in both, you will first need to know how exactly you should use this feature.
Instagram, is the most popular social media platform with its total number of active users now reached 1 billion, and most of them use this platform daily.
- This provides marketers all over the world with an excellent opportunity to showcase their brand and product to an even larger audience.
- It has also enabled them to tap into the hidden potential of the platform when it comes to targeted advertising.
All in all, with such a huge each and potential, Instagram is the platform that helps the brands to grow, and grow exponentially.
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Potential of Instagram
Over the years, in fact, business brands from all over the world have directed the major part of their attention towards the massive potential of the Instagram Shopping feature in order to boost their growth in the customer base and in turn, their revenue.
For example:
- If you are an owner of a restaurant, you will see a significant rise in orders for home delivery and physical visits to your joint when you post visually pleasing images of your dishes.
- You will also be able to attract a flood of traffic to your stores if you keep your audience updated about your latest creations.
Ideally, it all depends on how exactly you get followers for Instagram and encourage them to visit your site.
Instagram stories feature
The feature called “Instagram Stories” will help you a lot in this regard. Since its launch in August 2016, this feature has been used by a lot of businesses and is presently one of the most significant tools that helps the businesses to get a lot of Instagram followers.
In fact, according to the industry experts, those business brands that are serious about making a strong impact and a better online presence can make higher profits if they make the most advantage of this update to Instagram Stories released on June 12, 2018.
- This added shopping component will help the businesses to provide a higher shopping experience to their users.
- This tool will also eliminate the need of the users to leave the app to make any purchase making their buying journey much easier and convenient.
In fact, and in simple words, this is actually a game-changing update and one of the most important features of Instagram that will literally turn your Stories into sales.
Instagram Stories made simple
Previously, using Instagram Stories was a little bit difficult, especially when the prime intention was to generate more sales.
- All that the creators could do was to add a clickable link to their Instagram Story, which viewers could access by “swiping up” on an Instagram Story and clicking on the link.
- The marketers tried to do everything within their capacity to create more engaging Instagram Stories in order to captivate their audience, grab their attention and keep them glued to their site for as long as possible.
Ideally, everything depended on doing everything right and Instagram Stories then, within its power, was a great way to drive a lot of organic and targeted traffic toward the website of the businesses.
However, there were some issues with it such as:
- When a user clicked on the link, it took them out of the Instagram app and
- It took them to a website in a different web browser application.
This meant that the marketers needed to put in more effort simply to generate a more persuasive website. They also had to create a better and more effective sales funnel.
The issues were somewhere else as well. The marketers only had a couple of seconds to gain the attention of the people, a feat that can only be achieved with effortless user experience. If it was low, then the customers will be less interested in buying a product and the marketers will lose a sale.
The benefits of Instagram Shopping feature
With the use of the Instagram Stories shopping feature, this issue was effectively and successfully resolved and marketers had a better opportunity to make a sale. This ensured that they used Instagram to the fullest extent for the benefit of their business.
- With the use of this newest update to the Instagram Stories, the marketers are now really able to change things by simply putting a shopping linking their Instagram Stories. This enabled the customers to buy any product directly from the app without having to leave it.
- What is more significant is the fact that all these can be enjoyed for free and marketers can now avail the opportunity to promote and sell their items far more easily and directly.
However, as of now, you will not be able to enjoy this benefit of selling a product if you do so through a third-party retailer, still, the help that you will gain from the shopping feature cannot be ignored and skipped.
Availability of the feature
Though this feature is yet to support affiliate marketing at present, right from its launch, it provided a lot of help to the larger brands immediately and then to the smaller brands as well within a couple of months after its launch.
Any Instagram user having a business account that is connected to a Facebook shop can now easily enable product tagging to boost their sales bottom line.
This can be done by following a specific strategy that involves maximizing a particular celebrity endorsement. Celebrities are loved and adored by people and when such a popular figure takes a “selfie” video to promote a particular product, it will encourage everybody to buy it in real-time.
In addition to that, you can also use visual testimonials for your business promotion as these are also considered to be a highly productive marketing tool.
To summarize, Instagram shopping feature is a welcome addition to the features’ list that will help marketers immensely.
This is a guest post by Walter Moore. Walter Moore is a notable management consultant and digital marketing expert. He is an experienced digital marketer and has helped e-commerce businesses in all niches gain with his effective marketing strategies and guidance.