Instagram: eCommerce Marketing Made Simple

Social Media, for better or worse, is effectively mandatory for cultivating a solid audience or fanbase in 2021. For a budding Entrepreneur, marketing can be an incredibly expensive and mentally taxing affair – especially in the modern age where any kid with a phone can become a celebrity. It’s daunting and quite frankly terrifying to stare at a brand new blank Instagram page and think of all of the possibilities. While I can’t tell you what to post or when, luckily for you I can certainly give you a nudge in the right direction! I’ve broken it down into its most basic 3 Components:

1. Consistency & Variety

This step is one I see overlooked very often by new businesses, but it’s undoubtedly the single most crucial part of building trust with your audience. Consistency doesn’t just mean daily or weekly etc, it refers to your general ethic. Are you posting in regular intervals? Is the content always to a similar set standard? Consistency is relevant to the precedent that you set, and you’ll want to make sure that you consider both your availability for work and the timeline of your audience (eg. if your target market is teenagers, you won’t want to post at 9am when they’re just starting school).

It’s a similar story for the variety of Content that you post. Your brand may only need a single type of image to succeed, but you’re more than likely going to need between 3 – 5 different kinds of images to spark the kind of interest you’re looking for. If you’re not sure what type of content to post you’re best off looking at similar brands and seeing what they do and adapting it to fit your unique aesthetic qualities. In the end, even if you post utter rubbish – as long as you’re posting it consistently and over a long enough period of time – you will eventually see some form of growth. That being said, I absolutely would not advise that you post rubbish, which brings me onto my next point.

2. Value & Quality

The modern marketing strategy usually involves providing the public with a large amount of valuable content for free in exchange for years of devotion. What’s valuable to your audience is unique to your audience, so you’ll certainly need to understand the kind of people you’re targeting and what value means to them. Many businesses often use giveaways as a foundation for providing value and this has certainly been proven to work. It’s very important that you don’t skimp on the quality of your content, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to spend a lot of money. You really have to think about the perceived value of your content – how people will view your brand once you have enough content of a certain type. The use of Instagram for marketing usually comes down to how powerful the tools can be without spending a single penny, so as long as you’re respecting your audience, they’ll be sure to give back in the long term!

3. Interactions & Personability

Leading into this from the last point, you’ll really want to be as friendly and approachable as possible. Just because people know that you’re there to sell them things doesn’t mean you can’t have good conversations! Look at it this way – you get to have pleasant conversations with people and they’ll become increasingly likely to buy things from you! If you’re very smart with how you spend your time on Instagram too, you’ll be able to handpick people as potential customers by using the extensive location tools and refining your searches based on interests. Many people have spawned careers with this alone – it’s impossible to overestimate how powerful this is in a dedicated hand.

If you take anything from this though, it should be that change will NOT take place overnight - it’s unlikely to even be 6 months to a year before you’re where you want to be. I also want to make it perfectly clear that these are absolutely the bare basics on Instagram marketing for those that have either never attempted it or struggled to no avail (which is very easy to do!). I encourage you, if you're interested in the topic, to do more research in your own time. YouTube has many good videos on it, and always remember that Google is your friend!

That being said, if you follow all of these steps and keep them up, you will be well on your way to Insta Domination! Good luck!