Definitive Guide to Driving Sales with Instagram Marketing

There is no doubt; Instagram marketing is a powerful addition to almost every eCommerce strategy. And with an average engagement rate of 0.67%, it’s only growing.

The trick is building a high-performing, well-optimized Instagram marketing strategy centered around the best possible ROAS for your store brand. This guide to winning at Instagram shows you how to do just that. We will cover:

1. Why Market on Instagram?
2. The Power and Benefits of Instagram Marketing
3. Best Types of Instagram Ads and Posts 
4. How to Build an Instagram Marketing Strategy the Right Way
5. Five Instagram eCommerce Strategies, Hacks, and Best Practices to Drive Business Growth and Engagement

Let’s jump in!

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Why Market on Instagram?

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With around one billion active users, 150 million of which are in the United States alone, there is no denying that Instagram has a far reach. And with strong reach comes a lot of brand engagement. Take a look at some top IG user stats from leading Instagram marketing reports and studies:

And what do these digital marketing stats spell out for eCommerce marketers? 

Instagram marketing allows online retailers to widen their reach in niche-specific segments, giving them access and reach to high-intent potential shoppers. And when combined with the right Instagram ads and shopping? Sales! Aise, for example, increased their conversion rates by as much as 30% by combining product tags with the power of Instagram marketing.

Ultimately, no online store marketing strategy is complete without Instagram. And the payoff? More sales for less spend — when done correctly.  

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The Power and Benefits of Instagram Marketing

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How does Instagram marketing benefit your brand? It helps eCommerce brands: 

• Build brand awareness and equity 
• Increase store traffic
• Provide additional data and insights 
• Boost UGC (user-generated content) collections 
• Drive conversions 

Let’s take a closer look at each, diving into vital Instagram marketing stats and/or strategy examples. 

Instagram Marketing Builds Brand Awareness and Equity 

When you take the potential reach and the visual (image and video) design of Instagram, you get brand awareness on steroids. Why? Because when you factor in the engagement potential, Instagram gives you the chance to boost equity while building awareness and trust. 

Dezi is a brand that proves just how powerful this is. They were able to sell 3,000 pairs of sunglasses exclusively on Instagram within the first 48 hours of their product launch, 94% of which were first-time shoppers. 

How? 

By combining the influential power of their founder and CEO, Desi Perkins, with awareness targeting ads, the company was able to amplify promotion and build new connections with her loyal fanbase while establishing brand equity in a very short period of time. 

Instagram Marketing Increases Store Traffic 

It’s not a question of whether online retailers can drive traffic with Instagram. It’s a matter of quantity and quality of the traffic. The right Instagram marketing strategy can drive clicks to your store. 

According to marketing and traffic studies, more traffic is driven from Facebook (and with it, Instagram) than most other social media networks. 

The secret is using the right Instagram ad type. Grove Collaborative, for example, saw a 2.1X higher click-through rate using Instagram Stories ads than other placements. Additionally, 37% of their new store customers came from ads in Instagram Stories.

Instagram Marketing Provides Additional Data and Insights 

Because of its reach potential and unique Facebook ad targeting, Instagram marketing insights can be very informative. 

From results demographics and audience engagement insights to niche-specific trends, Instagram offers valuable native metrics. eCommerce marketers can use this additional data and insights to not only drive Instagram results but boost other important eCommerce ads and strategies. 

Here are some ways you can use Instagram marketing data and insights: 

1. Identify content types/themes/visuals your audience is interested or disinterested in for content marketing strategies across other channels.
2. Get a breakdown of where impressions are coming from. “Search & Explore,” for example, will give you the keywords Instagram used to search for your content. Keywords that can be used in other digital marketing. 
3. Pinpoint engagement patterns to see the days and times your specific audience is more likely to engage. This can be used to update or optimize content and ad schedules. 

Instagram Marketing Boosts UGC Collection 

Instagram is a crucial building block to an online retailer’s UGC collection strategy. Not only does Instagram marketing give you insights into audience preferences, which can be used to boost campaigns, but the platform encourages user engagement.  

Leading online fashion brand, Aerie, is no stranger to the potential of UGC campaigns on Instagram. Vowing to stop retouching model photos, they launched a campaign to donate $1 per sale to the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA). 

 

Let’s take a closer look.

Step #1: Redefine Your Instagram Marketing Goals

The first step in optimizing any marketing strategy is to review and reassess your business goals regularly. Yes, we want to sell products, but it’s essential to dig deeper into that by redefining your KPIs. Redefining your Instagram goals will ensure you can better: 

• Align Instagram activity with your store’s overall marketing strategy 
• Improve ROAS 
• Manage your Instagram advertising budgets 

Is your brand’s most pressing need launching a new product, reaching new customers (brand awareness), growing your fanbase, pushing product sales, or all of the above? Your needs will set your goals, which in turn should drive your Instagram marketing strategy. Hootsuite suggests marketers consider these four things when redefining goals: 

1. Attainability. Use historical performance to set attainable goals. 
2. Relevancy. Set Instagram marketing goals that fit into your bigger brand picture.
3. Measurability. Marketing goals should be measurable. 
4. Specificity. Make marketing goals as precise as possible.

Step #2: Expand and Redefine Audiences

Once you have redefined your goals, you will want to review your target audiences. Your goals should define what you post and when you post it, as well as drive your Instagram PPC and influencer strategies. 

Let’s say your Instagram marketing goal for the quarter is to reach new customers. You will want to find similar audiences or research new Instagram niches for which you can create ad campaigns. You can do this by: 

1. Reviewing your current buyer personas 
2. Looking to your closest competitors for follow demographics and engagement 
3. Reviewing growing Instagram trends 
4. Deep diving into your Instagram analytics  

Step #3: Optimize Your Profile

Your brand’s Instagram bio and account play a key role in attracting shoppers and improving SEO. While your bio should tell potential customers what you offer or stand for, it should also be optimized with your primary keywords and current hashtags to boost traffic.

When it comes to optimizing your account for your shoppers, looks and feel matter. A good example is EnvyStylz, who uses a robust multi-channel strategy, including Instagram, to increase their sales by 470%. Their profile matches their brand tone and look, and their bio speaks directly to their shoppers. 

Simply put, your profile is a piece of your Instagram marketing strategy. Here are some tips on optimizing your profile to get you started: 

1. Keep your bio short but informative 
2. Include a CTA and a keyword 
3. Stick to an aesthetic across post content 
4. Create highlights to showcase the best Stories content 
5. A/B test bio tweaks to find the best combination

Step #4: Analyze Your Competitors

Another critical part of a high-performing Instagram marketing strategy is competitor analysis. This helps you stay on trends, gauge your performance against industry and/or niche benchmarks, and identify new marketing opportunities. 

You can do this by following these two steps: 

1. Identifying your Instagram competitors by searching “suggested for you” sections, hashtag trends, and accounts
2. Reviewing your competitor’s engagement, content performance, and follower data 

You can also use tools like Supermetrics to sort Instagram data. You can access a template here. 

Step #5: Rethink Your Instagram Content Strategy

A big part of your marketing plan is your content strategy. Not just your Instagram ads, but your organic posts as well. Yes, organic content marketing and PPC strategies may be run separately, but they and your relevant teams should be perfectly in sync. 

While your organic content helps you attract new shoppers and followers while establishing a brand identity, your ads expand reach and sell products. 

Just like an organic content marketing strategy, when it comes to Instagram ads, you want to combine a variety of ads to attract and move new potential customers through your sales funnel. And you don’t have to be a mega online retailer to dominate with a content combination. 

Let’s take a look at one example from Glamnetic. Their success came from combining DIY videos for Facebook and Instagram with social media influencer marketing, and continuously testing and tweaking their Instagram content and marketing to maintain consistent growth. 

Some of the content formats Ann McFerran, co-founder and CEO of Glamnetic, used include: Direct Messaging (DM), Instagram influencer marketing, and uniquely designed, brand-specific augmented reality (AR) filters.

And the results? They were able to double their revenue, month over month. Specific growth stats include: 

• 10.5% lift in purchase conversions
• 1.5X lift in ROAS
• 6.4X lift in action intent

Step #6: Grow Follower Base and Turn Them into Customers

Another important part of your Instagram marketing strategy is follower building. The larger your follower base is, the more chances you have to engage your designed target audience and turn them into shoppers, and then loyal customers. 

How? The trick is quality over quantity. You want engaged followers that you can retarget. Here are some tips to get you started: 

1. Dive into new content types (Such as Reels) 
2. Boost followers with loyalty programs 
3. Avoid fake followers 
4. Be constant with your organic content 
5. Post content your followers want  
6. Encourage UGC, brand partnering, and brand advocates  
7. Go niche with your hashtagging 
8. Engage back with comments 
9. Invest in influencer marketing 
10. Test Instagram Live Shopping 
11. Cross-promote content
12. Optimize your Instagram account

Step #7: Boost Results with Optimized Ads

Lastly, let’s talk about Instagram ads. You can optimize your Instagram profile as much as you want, but without high-performing campaigns, no one will see it — or your products. Ultimately, you need a variety of campaigns that target all buying stages. Including: 

• Awareness 
• Interest 
• Desire 
• Action 
• Loyalty

“The Original Light Beer,” Miller Lite, for example, used Stories ads as part of their Instagram marketing to drive awareness of the branded products they sell in their merchandise shop. They then combined Dynamic ads for broad audiences and influencer campaigns packaged as video and photo ads on Stories and in Feed to increase add-to-cart conversions by 2.5X. 

However, it’s not just Instagram post variety to consider. Instagram ads should work seamlessly with your other PPC channels and campaigns to ensure that your marketing strategy works in unison. 

You can do this manually, or automatically by harnessing the power of AI so that you are triggering the right ads to the right audience, at the right time, to increase conversion potential.

Automate Instagram Marketing

 

Now for some expert hacks to optimize your Instagram marketing strategy. 

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5 Instagram eCommerce Strategies, Hacks, and Best Practices to Drive Business Growth and Engagement

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Now that you have the foundation of a winning Instagram marketing strategy, here are five hacks you can use to boost performance. 

1. Go All In with Authenticity 

We know there is a lot of competition out there, and it’s vital to be able to make scroll-stopping Instagram content. 

The truth is that the only way you can stand out is to be as authentic to your store brand as possible. Why? Because being authentic doesn’t just help you build trust; it also ensures that you are creating original content. You don’t want to focus on white-background product shots for your content marketing. Instead, you want to use human, fun, in-the-moment style and/or storytelling to promote your product and brand. 

Ultimately, you want to talk to your audience with every piece of Instagram marketing content in a language that they understand while being able to outshine content in your user’s feeds. To get you started, here are some Instagram post ideas to help you focus your marketing on authenticity:

• Live content 
• Product photos and videos that convey a feeling 
• Co-branding 
• Instagram contests/giveaways
• Reel product Q&As and brand vlogs 
• Behind-the-scenes content and selfies, and other “sneak peek” Instagram posts
• User-generated content highlights
• Community project and brand event announcements 
• Partnerships with unique influencers 
• Interactive content
• Product and niche tutorial videos 
• Lifestyle product photos and videos (products in action) with tags 

2. Automate, Automate, Automate 

As your brand and Instagram marketing strategy grows, you will need to automate as much as possible to optimize in real-time. This is not only vital to compete, but a must in terms of marketing team productivity. 

There are a variety of ways you can automate your Instagram marketing with the help of built-in features and third-party automation tools, apps, and services.

3. Test Stickers and Buttons in Stories  

Stories and Reel stickers aren’t just a way to make your brand content more interactive to push content engagement. When used strategically, they can also be used to drive business sales. For instance, Next Games marketers saw 40% more app installs when they added polling stickers to their Stories ads for a new game launch. 

During the pandemic, Instagram launched its Food Orders and Gift Card stickers and button features as a way for shoppers and customers to support businesses during the lockdown. They have now become a popular choice for eCommerce Instagram marketing. 

1. Shoppable tags: Shoppable tag stickers take users to product information pages and are a must for eCommerce marketing. 
2. Countdown stickers: Countdown stickers are a great way to engage followers and customers before a product or promotion launch. 
3. Location stickers: Use location stickers to highlight location-specific launches and sales. 
4. Mention stickers: Drive UGC, customer engagement, and co-branding marketing by using Instagram mention stickers in Stories content. 
5. Hashtag stickers: Instagram Hashtag stickers help you reach new potential customers while reinforcing brand messaging.
6. Quiz stickers: Quiz stickers are another interactive Stories or Reels feature that helps brands engage directly with customers and potential shoppers. 
7. Emoji slider: Available on Stories and Reels, the emoji slider enables users to engage with the content by expressing how it makes them feel.
8. Poll stickers: Add poll stickers to Stories ads and posts as well as Reels to make marketing more interactive.

4. Up Your UGC Game 

To be successful with any social media marketing, brands should be focused on providing value, not selling products. This is something GaryVee covers a lot in his video content and marketing seminars and believes “99%” of people are eliminated from social success because they have selfish creative content.” 

So how do you implement that ethos in your Instagram marketing strategy? The trick is creating content that is helpful, not pushy. You want to show them how a product answers a problem they have, not tell them to buy it. 

To create high-value, quality Instagram content, brands should:   

• Tell a story or solve a problem 
• Have a deep understanding of your audience 
• Continuously track and measure performance 
• Create a content marketing strategy that includes a wide range of content types 
• Engage back with users, followers, and customers 

A brand that is excellent at all of the above is the multimillion-dollar clothing brand Beautiful Disaster. In fact, their whole brand is built around providing value to their customers through their community. They do this by leveraging all their marketing platforms to be able to create valuable, meaningful content that people can connect with.

5. Stop Making Selfish Content 

To be successful with any social media marketing, brands should be focused on providing value, not selling products. This is something GaryVee covers a lot in his video content and marketing seminars and believes “99%” of people are eliminated from social success because they have selfish creative content.” 

So how do you implement that ethos in your Instagram marketing strategy? The trick is creating content that is helpful, not pushy. You want to show them how a product answers a problem they have, not tell them to buy it. 

To create high-value, quality Instagram content, brands should:   

• Tell a story or solve a problem 
• Have a deep understanding of your audience 
• Continuously track and measure performance 
• Create a content marketing strategy that includes a wide range of content types 
• Engage back with users, followers, and customers 

A brand that is excellent at all of the above is the multimillion-dollar clothing brand Beautiful Disaster. In fact, their whole brand is built around providing value to their customers through their community. They do this by leveraging all their marketing platforms to be able to create valuable, meaningful content that people can connect with.

You can read more about how this brand uses authentic, real connections to grow their eCommerce brand in our success story interview, Exclusive Look at Multimillion-Dollar Clothing Brand’s Success Secrets to Drive $5 Million in Annual Revenue.

Final Thoughts: Tailor Your Instagram Marketing to Your Specific Store, Product, and Market 

The biggest part of creating a winning Instagram marketing strategy for your online store is ensuring it is built, tweaked, and optimized for your specific brand. This is vital if you want to be able to drive results and boost ROAS with Instagram. 

Whether you go all-in with Reels, or decide on a carousel over a video ad is going to be determined by your specific brand. Every step of your Instagram content marketing strategy, promotional plan, or live commerce should be tested, tweaked, and tested again until it’s optimized for your market. You can do this by: 

• Looking consciously at performance metrics 
• Re-evaluating every edit, change, or new content type 
• Testing

And then doing it all over again! 

Still have Instagram marketing questions or want some help with other social media ads? Post your questions in the comments below! 

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