If you’re not already familiar with Instagram, then as a brand, you need to add it to your to-do-list straight away. Instagram is the hub for influencer marketing, and whether you’re working with influencers or not, it’s a great platform for getting your brand noticed with striking pictures. Keep reading to hear about how one of the newest features, Instagram Shopping, is helping brands to reach their business goals.
What is Instagram Shopping?
Instagram has released many updates over the years, with new features being particularly beneficial for brands and influencers to utilize. Instagram Shopping is the platform’s e-commerce area, allowing users to browse and purchase products in-app.
Not only is this a great way for brands to reach customers through a new channel, but it allows small businesses to set up a shop here, without having a brick-and-mortar store. If you don’t already have it set up, then you’ll need to do a little reading on how to use Instagram Shopping. But, it’s pretty easy to do and reaps so many benefits for your business.
Instagram Shopping for your brand
To get started, you need to connect your Instagram account to a Facebook account, and also make sure that it’s a ‘business’ or ‘creator’ profile. This guide from Instagram will be a great help.
An amazing thing about Instagram Shopping is that it means customers don’t even have to leave the app to make a purchase. In fact, 130 million users click on shopping posts every month, and that’s only increasing. If we think about how much time we spend browsing through products on Instagram that we would love to buy, but don’t bother searching up the brand’s website.
Well, this feature solves that problem. Customers are naturally directed straight to your product page, where they can head straight to the checkout. There’s no need to “click here” to take users away from the app to your website, it’s now all right on one platform.
The key to ensuring that users do actually become customers is by making your Instagram photos stand out. We recommend using influencers to help with this, but it’s important to remember that even your own content must be eye-catching. You want the user to do more than just browse.
We have a few tips to make sure you are creating the best posts:
1. Be creative.
2. Include user-generated content.
3. Be authentic.
How Instagram influencers can help
But what you really came here to hear about is how Instagram influencers can help with this. Well, one of the best features that both Instagram influencers and brands can equally benefit from is Instagram Shopping. As an influencer, all that is required is for the brand to accept you to tag their products in your content. After this, it’s a fairly simple process by clicking ‘tag business partner’ and selecting from the brand’s product catalogue.
When your brand has a product catalogue set up and ready to go, you are able to authorize influencers that you want to tag your products. So, you’ll want to find influencers that can work well with your brand and make use of this feature. This means that when influencers post their usual style of content, they can be tagging products in their posts for their followers to easily access.
This feature encourages what Instagram users like to see – authenticity. A branded partnership can blend in well with the typical content of an influencer, without seeming like a forced advertisement. But, this is where we go back to our previous tips – they apply for influencer content too. Followers like to know that they can trust the recommendations of the influencers they follow. So, it’s important that you allow influencers to be creative with their own content, knowing what their audience usually likes to see and fitting in with this.
Finding Instagram influencers
When it comes to finding influencers that will align perfectly with your brand, an influencer marketing platform becomes your new best friend! With a platform like Heepsy, you can specify your search with dedicated filters for example by location, language, or category. You can see an example of this below.
What you’ll want to do is ensure that your brand has defined goals ahead of your influencer search. This will guarantee that you are definitely searching for the right person. By understanding the objectives of your campaign, as well as your target audience, you can make sure that you are reaching an audience that will be interested in your product. To do this, you should analyse influencer profiles thoroughly, so that you know they are a good match. With Heepsy, you can look at influencer profile insights such as audience demographics, engagement rates, follower growth rates, and more.
Let’s have a look at an example of how Heepsy data can help.
We can see above that this influencer’s audience is primarily located in Germany, with interests in content from the categories of mommy, dog owner, fashion, and lifestyle. Whilst there are followers from different locations and categories, they are a small number. So, if your brand is aiming to target a local audience in Spain, of the DIY and Crafts category, then we can see that your product would not be best suited to this audience.
There are many more metrics to be analysed, in order to assess the suitability of an influencer to your brand, and we would recommend checking it out at Heepsy!
Conclusion
The key takeaway from this, whether you choose to use an influencer marketing platform or not, is the importance of finding the right influencers for your brand. Instagram Shopping is an amazing tool to be utilised by businesses of all sizes and has particularly helped start-ups to grow.
As Instagram really is the leading platform for posting attention-grabbing snaps, we can definitely say that it is worth thinking about incorporating an influencer campaign into your marketing strategy.
