How to Sell On Instagram: 3 Different Strategies for Content Creators
Learn 3 different strategies to sell on Instagram. Everything content creators need to know to sell digital products on Instagram.
Social media has become the easiest way to reach the right audience and target your marketing efforts. For most brands, Instagram is one of the most important networks to be on. If that’s your case, it’s a good idea to learn how to sell on Instagram.
In 2021, Instagram had 1.21 billion monthly active users, or just over one quarter of internet users in the world. That’s a huge reach!
In addition to its massive user base, Instagram has Instagram Shopping and Instagram Ads which offer great features to optimize your business’ results.
In this post, we’ll go over three different strategies to use Instagram to increase your sales.
How to sell on Instagram as a digital creator
Nowadays, marketing takes place largely online. This is especially true for creators and businesses selling digital products.
Instagram has become an essential social media platform where businesses now focus part of their marketing efforts. Promoting your digital product is no different.
As long as it makes sense for your buyer persona, Instagram is a platform you should definitely be on to promote your digital products.
As a platform reliant on visuals, it may not be clear right away how to use Instagram to sell your products. But rest assured, Instagram can be an extremely useful tool for selling digital products.
As a digital creator, above all else, you should see Instagram as a way to give people a taste of what you’re selling, provide valuable content, and build authority. With that accomplished, you can begin thinking of how to use Instagram to directly sell your digital products.
In our first strategy, we’ll discuss the importance of crafting quality content and how to sell organically on Instagram.
VIDEO: Instagram Marketing: How to Sell on Instagram? | Hotmart Tips
Strategy 1: Sell organically on Instagram
The best way to use Instagram to sell doesn’t actually involve selling on Instagram. This may seem counterintuitive considering that this is a blog post about how to sell on Instagram, but it’ll make sense, just bear with us!
Let’s take a look at how you can use Instagram to sell organically.
Provide valuable content
Instagram is a platform for sharing and viewing content. People open up Instagram when they want to be entertained, informed, or want to learn something new.
People don’t open up Instagram when they want to buy something.
So, as a creator, your primary focus on Instagram needs to be on creating relevant content that users find valuable. By sharing content, followers will start to get an idea of who you are as a creator and what they can expect if they buy one of your products.
To sell, you need to be seen. Sharing quality content on Instagram is what gets you seen.
Build your authority
No matter the niche, there are countless digital products for consumers to choose from. Standing out and convincing people to buy from you is no easy task.
If you want to sell digital products, you need to be an authority in your field.
How can you build authority? By following the previous step and regularly posting valuable content. When followers see your content regularly, with time, they’ll trust you more.
For example, imagine you sell online training programs. It doesn’t matter how great your programs are, if people don’t know who you are, they won’t buy from you.
You need to regularly post workout videos on reels, share training and diet tips in your stories, and answer follower questions. That way, your followers will see that you really know what you’re talking about.
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Promote your digital product
Once you’ve built authority and your followers trust you, you can use Instagram to start promoting your products.
Give your followers details about your digital product: the transformation it provides, where they can purchase it, how much it costs, benefits, etc.
You don’t even necessarily need to actively promote your products.
Many creators never mention the products they sell on Instagram. Instead, they just post useful content and link to their products in their bio.
Of course, you can be a little more active. For example, in a carousel post giving some kind of tip, you can use the last image to promote your digital product.
Just be careful not to overdo it!
Don’t be a pushy salesperson
If you do decide to actively promote your products on Instagram, make sure your promotional posts only make up a small percentage of your overall content strategy.
Remember, users don’t browse Instagram to be sold to. You don’t want to come off as pushy or desperate.
If all your posts are trying to sell something, people will lose interest and stop following you. Instead, keep posting relevant content and occasionally remind your followers of what you have to sell.
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Strategy 2: Sell on Instagram with Instagram Ads
It’s important to stress that no matter what your strategy for selling on Instagram, it needs to include content creation. Having said that, Instagram has native tools that can help you sell on the platform.
The first of those tools is Instagram Ads. As the name suggests, Instagram Ads allows businesses to promote paid advertisements on Instagram. Instagram lets you run ads in different formats: photos, videos, carousels, stories, and on the explore page.
Keep in mind that Instagram Ads is an advertising tool. As such, there are different ways you can use it to increase your sales.
When setting up a campaign on Instagram Ads, you can choose from 6 different campaign objectives: awareness, traffic, engagement, leads, app promotion, sales.
With the exception of app promotion, we’ll briefly go over how each of these different campaign objectives can be used to sell on Instagram or to indirectly increase your sales.
Awareness
This objective is focused on reaching the largest number of people and creating brand awareness.
This is a great option if you’re new to the market and still don’t have a lot of authority to sell your digital product.
You can use an awareness strategy to get people talking about you and check out your content. Then, you can follow the first strategy we outlined and promote your products organically.
Traffic
Here, the objective is to send traffic to a specific page. This could be your Instagram shop (more about that in strategy 3), your product page, your sales page, or wherever like.
A traffic campaign could allow you to take advantage of the audience on Instagram without having to be present on the platform. You can run an ad that captures people’s attention and sends them to an external sales page.
If you opt for this kind of strategy, you should be confident in your sales page’s ability to convert!
Engagement
An engagement campaign lets you target people who are likely to engage with your brand.
Like an awareness campaign, this is an option you could use in an organic sales strategy on Instagram. This objective could also be used to get people to start a conversation with your brand.
Once the conversion is started, you can get these people into your sales funnel.
Leads
Whether it’s by signing up for a newsletter or rich material, this objective lets you collect leads for your business.
Once you’ve collected a solid lead base, you can use tools like email marketing to convert them and make sales.
Sales
If you want to know how to sell on Instagram, this is probably your best option!
With the sales campaign objective, Instagram can help you target people who are likely to purchase a digital product.
Once again, if you’re sending users to an external landing page, make sure that it is optimized for conversions.
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Strategy 3: Sell on Instagram with Instagram Shopping
The third and final strategy to sell on Instagram is to take advantage of Instagram Shopping, “a set of features that allow people to easily shop your brand’s photos and videos all across Instagram.”
Instagram Shopping allows you to add product tags to your photos and videos; you can learn everything about Instagram Shopping here.
Instagram Shopping is also a strategy that can be used in combination with the other two strategies we’ve listed. For example, you can create ads with product tags.
In general, this means photos and videos of physical products, but in the case of digital products you might need to be a little more creative to create
How to promote digital products on Instagram
It’s easy to imagine promoting physical products on Instagram, but what about digital products? Let’s go over some content ideas for how to advertise digital products on Instagram.
Preview your content
The easiest way to promote your digital product on Instagram is to provide a sample of some of your content. After all, why make new content exclusively for Instagram if you recycle content from your product?
If you’re selling an online course, for example, you can post short snippets of your video lessons. Similarly, if you’re selling membership to an exclusive community, you can preview some of the content that members have access to.
Highlight social proof
Customer testimonials are a great idea to help you sell on Instagram.
You could post a short video from a customer highlighting what they enjoyed about your digital product or what results it helped them achieve. You could also create a carousel with multiple customer testimonials.
Sales pitch
You can create posts similar to traditional print or video ads, with the express aim of promoting and selling your product. The focus here would be on informing audiences of the benefits of your digital product, the results they can expect, the content, etc.
Whether you’re telling a customer’s story in a short video or sharing customer testimonials in a carousel, remember to keep your content engaging in some way. Otherwise it might feel like a late-night infomercial that people will scroll past in seconds.
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Make sure selling on Instagram makes sense for you
As long as it makes sense for your niche, target audience, and overall marketing strategy, Instagram is a great platform to promote your digital products.
Best of all is that you can use Instagram to promote your products for free, or take advantage of paid features to advertise and increase your reach.
If you’d like to learn more about using paid traffic, check out our complete guide for creators and affiliates.
