How To Use Instagram for Business To Get More Sales

Do you want to know how to use Instagram for business? Deploying the best social media strategy is tricky without experience. However, with the tips and strategies in this article, you can increase your chances of success. 

We’ll give you direction on how to use different types of content to ensure you capture the entire IG audience. Also, we will help you understand how to start using Instagram for business if you have a tight budget.

Don’t forget to read to the end of the article for additional help growing your Instagram account. The professional services here at Plixi can target any audience to increase your follower count.

How To Use Instagram for Small Business

Are you interested in learning how to use Instagram for small businesses? In this section, we’ll cover some of the top reasons why small businesses can take advantage of Instagram. It offers many cost-effective strategies for generating sales when on a low budget. 

• Sign up for a business profile: You’ll need to start by registering for an Instagram business account. This ensures that you receive a number of important perks. This includes product hashtags and advanced analytics in the form of Instagram Insights. 
• Create DM templates: You can use Instagram DM templates to contact customers. For example, you can share product offers and general promotions. This is an inexpensive way to start selling on Instagram. 
• Product hashtags: Familiarize yourself with how product hashtags work. These are only available with IG business accounts and can help drive traffic to product pages. Research the highest-traffic hashtags in your industry and add them to your list. 
• Choose a marketing channel: As a small business, you may not have the funds to tackle every marketing channel you come across. However, there are plenty to choose from that offer a good return on investment. For example, you can use Instagram influencer marketing by contacting other content creators. 
• Product pages: Did you know that you can create dedicated product pages on Instagram? This is ideal for small businesses that don’t have a website for selling products. Selling on Instagram can be the better choice for small businesses without a reputation. That’s because IG users are more likely to trust an IG product page compared to an unknown website. 

Best Practices To Use Instagram for Business

Now, let’s focus on the best practices for using Instagram to grow your business. We’ll reveal a wide range of tips that you can implement to beat the competition. You can increase your Instagram growth rate with the following ten strategies.

Identity Your Target Audience

It’s important to identify your target audience on Instagram so you can craft the best strategy. Note that your audience on social media platforms will differ from other marketing channels. Notably, the way they want to consume content is different, so you’ll need to adapt.

The type of things you need to find out about your audience includes:

• What are their interests?
• What type of products do they want to buy?
• What time of the day do they consume content?
• How much money are they willing to spend on purchases?
• What type of Instagram content do they consume?

This is just a fraction of the questions you can ask to learn more about the target audience. You can also ask niche-specific questions to uncover more insights that will help get more sales on Instagram.

How To Use Instagram Stories for Business

Are you wondering how to use Instagram Stories for business? Instagram Stories allows you to share videos and photos with your audience for up to 24 hours. Afterward, Instagram deletes the posts automatically.

You can use Stories to share time-sensitive content that will go out of date quickly. This can include industry-related news. In fact, being a source of news for your audience means they will keep coming back to your content.

Also, you can share product updates and promotional messages with Instagram Stories. It’s a content form that many businesses use to great effect, so consider adding it to your arsenal.

Instagram Business Chat

It’s important to take advantage of Instagram business chat to communicate with your potential customers. Creating Instagram DM templates is the best place to start. This means you can organize your business chat and avoid getting overwhelmed as you scale.

Here is a summary of the different reasons to use business chat for Instagram:

• Customer support: You can contact your customers via Insta DMs to help address a problem. For example, if you notice unhappy customers in post comments, you can take the conversation to a DM. Also, some customers may reach out and send you a DM first. It’s handy to have templates so you can speed up the customer support service. Make sure the response time is fast to avoid frustrating customers. 
• Promotional messages: You can increase the awareness of your promotions by sending private messages. It’s a form of social media marketing that works wonders with a systemic approach. Make sure to target users so the marketing message is genuinely interesting. You can also include a clickable link in your marketing messages to increase conversion. 
• Account updates: Are you changing how you release content, or are you adding product pages? Share these updates by sending messages. This may increase the chances that your most important customers see your company’s news.

How To Use Business Suite for Instagram

Are you wondering how to use Business Suite for Instagram? Business Suite is a Meta product available for Facebook and Instagram accounts. The tool offers built-in social media engagement tools. These will help businesses grow their Instagram account to new heights. 

Also, there is an Ads Reporting feature where you can view the success of your IG marketing campaigns. Keep an eye on this tool to view the performance of your IG advertisements.

Follow Social Media Trends

Social media is a rapidly changing marketing channel. What worked just a year ago may no longer be an effective marketing strategy. Therefore, you need to evolve your social media marketing strategy constantly. This means paying attention to trends and using the insights to develop your approach.

Here are a few ideas to consider when looking for social media trends:

• New hashtags: Pay attention to any new type of hashtags that are used by brands on Instagram. Adding these to your hashtag strategy may unlock new sources of traffic and revenue. 
• Viral content: Capitalize on viral content by creating your version. You don’t need to copy the viral content since that’s in bad taste. After all, Instagram users don’t want to follow copycat creators. Instead, take inspiration from the viral content you come across and turn it into something unique. This will get you more views since users may want to see a unique take on a viral trend. 
• Develop new products: Do you feel that a new trend is here to stay for a while? Then, consider creating a range of products that target users who view the trend. For example, you can create a range of shirts or other custom products related to the new social media trend. 
• Speed: It’s important to achieve a first-mover advantage when capitalizing on social media trends. That’s because you may be the first brand in your specific niche to reveal the trend to the target audience. This makes it easier to sell products while your competitors are left catching up.

Use Every Content Type

Do you want to reach your entire target market on Instagram? Then, your content calendar must include every IG content type that’s available. This ensures you target users who only consume one content type on Instagram.

For example, some users only log on to look at Instagram Reels. Therefore, you must create reels to target these users. Consider hiring a social media manager if this seems overwhelming. They have the experience and skills to come up with a comprehensive marketing plan that includes:

• Instagram Reels
• Instagram Stories
• Instagram Highlights
• Instagram Carousel posts
• Regular Instagram Posts

How To Use Instagram Ads for Business

Are you trying to figure out how to use Instagram ads for business? You can skyrocket your sales when using the right Instagram Ads strategies. However, you’ll need a decent budget to ensure you don’t run out of funds.

Take the time to review the strategies outlined in this section to ensure you hit the ground running. 

Test With a Small Budget

It’s important to test your ads on a small budget before you throw a lot of money at them. Getting proof of concept ensures you can increase the ROI of your marketing campaigns. Then, you can increase the budget, and that will lead to growth. 

Hire a Social Media Agency

Consider hiring a social media marketing agency to increase your chances of making money with Instagram ads. They understand how to make the most of your funds to craft well-optimized campaigns. Here are a few ideas to consider when picking the best social media marketing agency for your business:

• Proven track record: Ideally, you’d pick a marketing agency that consistently gets results for their customers. You’ll need to do background research to figure out the quality of a marketing agency. 
• Supported platforms: Choose a social media marketing agency that supports every platform that you’re using. This includes Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and more. This means you can launch a comprehensive strategy for your business. 
• Price: Shop around to find an agency that offers good value for money. This ensures that you can get a return on your investment. However, in some cases, you get what you pay for. Hence, focus on a mixture of the price and agency performance. 
• Communication: Choose an agency that offers excellent communication. This includes pricing you with updates on your IG account performance. Therefore, the agency should support multiple types of communication and have a fast response time. Ideally, you will receive a dedicated account agent for communication. 
• Availability: Some marketing agencies don’t have the resources to handle new clients, yet they continue to acquire them. You need to avoid these since your Instagram account marketing will not be a priority.

Disruption Marketing

The truth is that Instagram users don’t log on to buy products. They are primarily there to consume content in a casual manner. Therefore, the problem is how to turn casual viewers into buyers. You can do this with disruption marketing. As the name suggests, this entails causing users to stop and look at your ad because it has captured their attention.

For example, when Instagram users scroll through reels, ads appear between the content. Users will skip the advertisement if it’s boring, bland, or similar to other ones. Hence, you need to focus on standing out from the crowd. 

Typically, you want to focus on creating advertisements that capture attention within the first few seconds. You’ll need to test and monitor analytics to figure out the type of posts that can help you achieve this.

How To Use Hashtags on Instagram for Business

Do you want to know how to use hashtags on Instagram for business? Hashtags are one of the best ways to market products on Instagram. Therefore, you must figure out how to use them to full effect to beat the competition.

Use Brand Hashtags

Make sure to use branded hashtags that are unique to your brand. These will include the name of your brand and help users understand where the products are from. Also, it gives your customers an easy way to search for your products by using your branded hashtags.

You can come up with a wide range of branded hashtags. However, use analytics data to determine the most popular ones. You can also spy on the competition to look at their strategies. This ensures that you can quickly upgrade your IG-branded hashtag game.

Seasonal and Holiday Hashtags

Do you sell seasonal or holiday-type products? Then, consider adding seasonal hashtags to your captions to take advantage of the period. You can link this to a seasonal promotional period. Create enough marketing hype for the seasonal trends, and you can dramatically increase your sales. 

Instagram is a great social media platform to market seasonal products. That’s because you can show off seasonal products with beautifully crafted pictures and videos. Some of the top seasonal selling periods you can consider include Christmas, Halloween, and Easter. 

Niche Specific Hashtags

Similarly to how long-tail keywords work with SEO, you can target night-specific hashtags. These will be hashtags that your customers search for but are not used by most competitors. Therefore, the competition for these hashtags is low, giving you a high chance of winning. 

Also, it’s important to create content for specific niches. This ensures there’s a synergy between your hashtags and the content. There is a wide range of niches on Instagram, so there’s endless content to produce.

Research the Hashtags

It’s important to research hashtags before using them. This ensures you understand the right use cases and add them to the relevant content. With that thought in mind, here are the top ideas to consider when researching Instagram hashtags:

• Instagram analytics: You can check the most popular hashtags on your account with Instagram analytics. Therefore, you can figure out the best-performing hashtags. This ensures you can increase the use of hashtags that lead to the most sales. 
• Competitor research: Look at the top competitors in your niche for their hashtag strategies. This ensures you can increase your chances of uncovering the most popular hashtags for your business. 
• New niches: You may have the option to sell existing products in new niches. You can use hashtags associated with these other niches to target different audiences. This increases the scope of your business marketing on Instagram.

Is Instagram Marketing Worth It for Businesses?

Instagram marketing is a great source of low-cost customers when you apply the right strategies. The tips in this article are not a complete guide but a great starting point for any business.

By now, you should have a good idea of how to use Instagram for business. However, it’s important to develop unique strategies to stay ahead of the curve. This ensures you can get more attention and convert that into paying customers. 

Are you looking for additional strategies to grow your Instagram business? Then, use the professional services here at Plixi. We specialize in helping users target the right audience with a mix of Instagram influencers and our in-house algorithm. So what are you waiting for? Start growing and gaining Instagram followers today.