How to market your physical products using instagram

Apr 28, 2017 by
How to market your physical products using instagram

In case you hadn’t noticed, Instagram is pretty popular at the moment! The platform has over 600 million monthly active users and is a potential goldmine if you’re promoting physical products.

As we’ve seen, people love consuming visual content, and because people use Instagram in their leisure time, they aren’t expecting to be marketed to which means you can catch them by surprise!

Utilise influencers

Getting people who have a large Instagram following to promote your product is a great way to drive sales. Check out influence.co and browse the categories available. You can find influencers who, for a fee, will promote your product or brand using their page.

If you proceed down this route, envision the types of people who would be browsing the profiles of each influencer and assess whether they would be in your audience’s core demographic. Check out the profiles of the people commenting on their images and ask yourself whether they would like your product. It’s no use paying an influencer to promote your product if their followers won’t resonate with it.

Legendary marketer and entrepreneur Neil Patel is very aware of the marketing potential of Instagram. Specifically, he concluded that many men browse Instagram to look at pictures of attractive women, so by paying these women to promote his products he was able to market to the hordes of men browsing their pictures! However, he did receive some significant criticism for objectifying women, for which he wholeheartedly apologised.

Hashtag in the sandImplement hashtags

By including hashtags in your posts, you will be able to connect to people interested in the specific subject of the hashtag – whether or not they’re already following you. Check out the Search and Explore feature to see which hashtags are popular for your niche, and then use a handful of them to promote your product.

Make your customers feel included

Building a community around your brand is a great way to ensure you stay in business for the long haul. For this reason, many businesses run competitions to build a greater sense of rapport with their customer base.

Instagram is particularly useful for this purpose, because competition winners can be posted on the brand’s account – so they can soak up praise and admiration (which makes them feel more connected to your brand).

For example, beard-care company Badass Beard Care constantly post pictures of their customers on their Instagram page. They also tag the customers in their posts so everyone else can tell them how awesome they are. This works particularly well within the beard products niche, because afterall, who doesn’t enjoy looking at men with outrageous or elaborately crafted facial hair?

Seek stylistic integrity

A brand’s Instagram page should have stylistic integrity. It’s immediately off-putting if your page looks like a mismatch of colours, tones, and photo qualities. For a good example of stylistic integrity, check out American Express. All of their shots compliment one another and have similar, neutral and muted tones.

Although not everyone has the budget to pay a professional photographer every time you want to upload something to Instagram, consider whether or not each post looks appropriate in terms of the identity of your brand before you upload.

Consider paid advertising

Similar to Facebook advertising, you can now run sponsored posts to targeted demographics on Instagram. Set up your audience using Facebook’s Power Editor, create a selection of adverts, choose your budget and get started! It’s recommended that you run your ads at a low cost and split test the results. You don’t want to pump a large amount of money into an ad before it’s proven to convert at a low level first.

Oftentimes, the best Instagram ads don’t look like blatant adverts. Instead, they look like organic content and seamlessly blend into the user’s experience. Lisa Kalmer Williams, writing for Agora Pulse states:

Think selling on Instagram is like selling on other social channels. Because Instagram is a real-time, visual network, it sets it apart from its social media brothers and sisters. And it also means that you need to lead your sale with an eye-catching image. Take the time you need to get the photo right. That means selecting a photo that is square in shape, easy to identify, and void of distracting lighting issues.

Paid Instagram ads can easily be tracked and measured, so if you have a specific budget, you don’t have to worry about going overboard on poorly performing ads. As with Facebook ads, you’re unlikely to hit a winner with your first ad, so keep tweaking and innovating based on the feedback/data until you do. Best of luck!

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