- How Halo Luxe Uses Instagram To Increase Salesforce
- How Halo Luxe Uses Instagram To Increase Sales As A
- How Halo Luxe Uses Instagram To Increase Sales On Amazon
- How Halo Luxe Uses Instagram To Increase Sales Tax
- Instagram is a great tool for staying connected to friends, family, and followers through photos. For small business owners, Instagram can also be a valuable tool for reaching customers and marketing products and services. Below, you’ll find eight tips for using Instagram to increase sales and pursue continued growth!
- Your storefront closely matches your Instagram feed. Have2Have.It uses conversion tracking, provides advanced analytics and offers email capture information. Also, you can schedule posts to Instagram and connect multiple products to a single image. This platform can drive traffic to your site and increase sales, and it boasts a 70% click.
- As the Goop post points out, the A-listers clamoring for threading face-lifts have to travel to Asia and Europe for the procedure, during which a doctor uses thread to pull up sagging skin.
You already know that brands can leverage user-generated photos from Instagram to engage consumers. Today we will measure that engagement and connect it to ecommerce sales.
With Instagram, marketers have access to a huge audience of 100 million active users snapping over 40 million photos per day and posting 1000 comments per second. Instagram is more than a place for selfies and cat pictures. Consumers are photographing and discussing brands every day:
15.9k Followers, 479 Following, 949 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Halo Luxe (@haloluxe). How to Increase Your Sales Using Instagram Social media has evolved into a treasure trove for marketers who know how to harvest fans and customers. Here are some ways to market to different.
- #Starbucks – 2.6 million photos
- #Nike – 12.7 million photos
- #Michaelkors – 1 million photos
- #Chanel – 2.4 million photos
- #Audi – 1 million photos
Brands of all sizes are becoming keenly aware of the large marketing opportunity with Instagram’s massive audience. However, some brands remain hesitant to add another social platform into the mix because of the often cited problem with social media marketing…
Highly Measurable but Difficult to Link to Sales
Social media marketing gets a bad rap because, in many cases, it’s not easy to connect one’s effort or expenditure to sales or revenues. In fact, according to a white paper published by Adobe, 88% of surveyed marketers didn’t feel they could accurately measure ROI from social media marketing.
Sure, most marketing platforms can track likes, follows, shares, etc., but it usually ends there. Linking those metrics to incremental revenue remains more art than science. And if you ask 10 different people the value of a new follower, you’ll get 10 different answers.
Marketers are hungry for tools that not only help with social media marketing, promotions, and campaigns but that also provide a measurable and causal link to what really matters – sales! The problem has been that social media marketing shares some similarities with traditional advertising:
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half – John Wanamaker
The good news is that new tools, platforms, and services emerge every day attempting to bridge the gap between social media marketing expense and revenue. Whether you use an end-to-end SaaS platform, cobble together various services, or tap directly into Instagram’s API, if you follow the steps outlined below to leverage user-generated content from Instagram, you’ll be on your way to increasing your ecommerce sales.
Have a look at the following diagram that breaks down the overall strategy into simple steps:
- Launch a campaign or contest to aggregate, curate, and display user photos onto a microsite or Facebook page tab (engage consumers)
- Identify your products and link photos, from microsite or Facebook page tab to ecommerce product pages (increase traffic and click-throughs)
- Embed customer photos directly onto product pages (demonstrate social proof)
Encourage Fan Participation – Launch a Campaign or Contest
If you’re not Nike or Starbucks with millions of hashtagged photos of your brand already on Instagram, you’ll likely need to launch a campaign or photo contest to get your audience jazzed about sharing brand relevant photos you can aggregate, curate, and display.
Let’s say you are a clothing brand and you’re planning an online end of summer sale. You could launch an Instagram contest around a theme of “Capture your favorite summer moments in XYZ for a chance to win a $500 online shopping spree.” Great! It’s pretty straightforward, and you can expect to get some content to leverage.
While I could devote an entire post to effectively launching and promoting user-generated photo campaigns, I’ll leave you with a few tips to get you started:
Choose an appropriate campaign hashtag
Since you’ll be aggregating content through a hashtag, make it easy for consumers to share photos with your brand by choosing a hashtag that balances uniqueness with simplicity.
Also, you’ll definitely want to avoid blending too many words into one hashtag. Instead, focus on making it memorable and brandable.
And please look for hidden words if you combine multiple words… You don’t want to end up like Susan Boyle with her new album launch party #SusanAlbumParty. Take another look… Maybe this will help you see it – #SusAnalBumParty. True story.
Choose a theme
Get your fans to focus on your brand by giving them a specific theme to capture (that includes your products). If the theme is too broad, you’ll end up with a lot of mish-mash and unrelated photos. If the theme is too narrow, it will discourage people from participating because it will be too difficult to snap an appropriate photo. Keep it simple and think of ways fans can easily capture photos of themselves, relatives, and/or friends using your products in fun ways.
Display your gallery
The first step you’ll need to take if you want to leverage fan photos is to give the photos a place to live online. I’ve seen many brands launch photo contests through Instagram and not provide a gallery anywhere for people to view submissions. This is a terrible waste of effort, time, and resources.
Depending on your objectives, you’ll want to host a microsite for entries or display them in a Facebook page tab. Make sure whatever content aggregation tool or service you use gives you the ability to moderate photos. The last thing you want to do is pull hashtagged photos straight from Instagram’s API without moderation.
Once you’ve figured out how you’re going to engage your audience, you’re ready for the next steps where the real value is created. Aggregating user-generated content has little value if you don’t leverage it.
Link Photos to Your Product Pages
So you’ve launched a campaign, your fans are submitting boatloads of brand relevant photographs, and you’ve given all this content a place to live online. That’s a great start but have a look at the campaign example below.
If I’m a consumer viewing photos on this contest page and I fall in love with the sweater worn by the girl in the picture, I would have to manually navigate to the brand’s ecommerce site and spend 20 minutes trying to find the product.
If someone is interested in making a purchase, not only is this scenario not ideal, it could alienate a potential customer who cannot find the product in your store or discovers that it’s no longer available.
The easiest solution here is to identify your products in fan photos and link them directly to your ecommerce pages from your microsite or Facebook page tab gallery so consumers can go directly to your store to complete the purchase. (See below.)
Normally, social promotions, contests, and photo campaigns are a great way to drive engagement but do little for online purchases. By taking an extra step to identify/link your products to your ecommerce pages, you can help bridge the gap between your platform that provides fans with a fun way to interact with your brand and your social promotion that helps drive additional web traffic and revenues.
Since you can easily monitor the traffic and conversions from these links, begin to look for purchasing patterns to see which photos are a) driving the most traffic and b) resulting in the highest number of new sales. With this information, you can decide to more prominently feature certain photos in your contest gallery or take it to the next level and embed these photos directly onto your product pages.
Put Customer Photos on Your Ecommerce Site
So far we’ve seen how you can launch a campaign to drive traffic to product pages. Now we’ll see how to use customer photos from Instagram to increase conversions. First, a word about a psychological concept called “social proof,” which was made famous by Robert Cialdini, a noted psychologist and the author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.
Social proof is the simple but powerful concept that people tend toward conformity, especially when feelings of uncertainty are high. Basically, we’re sheep. We tend to like what other people like and mimic the behavior of the groups we want to be a part of.
Normally, when consumers visit a product page, they are immediately shown professionally produced photographs of products, and, in the case of fashion, often on models that don’t look anything like them. What would happen if we could show real customers using your products on your product pages? In some cases, conversions have been shown to increase up to 30%.
Showing real customer photos on your ecommerce pages serves two purposes. First, seeing real people using your products helps build consumer confidence about your products. Second, it helps demonstrate social proof by showing your products are desired by others, precisely at a time when a customer may be feeling uncertain about making a purchase.
Try it yourself with an A/B test. Serve up two versions of the same product page, one with embedded customer photos from Instagram and one without, and you should see a noticeable increase in conversions from product pages with customer photos.
There are two best practices of putting real customer photos on your product pages:
- Match the product page with the product in customer photos
- Place complementary photos of other products and have those thumbnails link internally to other ecommerce pages
While anecdotal, the first option probably is going to have the highest impact on conversions, while the second option will help with product discovery for visitors already on your site.
A Few Words of Caution
If you’re interested in implementing any kind of marketing to leverage user photos from Instagram, you’ll need to ensure compliance with Instagram’s TOS. This means not saving any photos but displaying them from the Instagram URL, so if a consumer removes their photo or marks it private, it will be reflected wherever you might be showing their photo.
Finally, make your intentions clear to your audience. If your intention is to use fan photos on your ecommerce pages, get your customers excited about the opportunity. Encourage them to share their best photos with your brand for a chance to be featured on your product pages. You’ll find your fans love to associate with your brand as long as they know what you’re up to and they are participating willingly.
Conclusion
Instagram is no longer a niche social platform. In fact, 68% of the Interbrand Top 100 brands are on Instagram. And as more jump on board, brands will be looking for new ways to tap into their audiences and harness the marketing potential of Instagram. Establishing a presence on Instagram is one thing, but tapping into user content to power your ecommerce sales is a whole other challenge.
Now, as you were reading this article, you might have been thinking, “Great, I love these ideas, but how am I supposed to do all of this without making a major investment?” Luckily, there are affordable platforms, tools, and services out there that can help your brand get started with any of the above ideas.
About the Author: Michael Zsigmond is the founder of Fanbase Media, a Vancouver based B2B SaaS startup that helps brands leverage user-generated content from consumers on mobile and Instagram. You can learn more about Fanbase’s marketing platform at www.getfanba.se.
I can feel my heartbeat pounding and sweat dripping from my temple. My breath heavy as I walk over to the elevator. It’s a trip up to the third floor for weight lifting. No stairs for me today; intervals were enough to drain my leg muscles but sprint training isn’t the only exercise I have to do.
The elevator is slow and I have a few minutes. What’s the first thing I open? Facebook? Snapchat? Twitter? No, I open Instagram. What are my friends doing today? What makeup tutorial should I copy for my date tonight? All will be answered on Instagram. It’s fast, too. Unlike Twitter, I don’t have to worry about being caught up for long. If your store is doing it right, I’ll see you, too. If you make it easy for me, I might even make a purchase in that elevator.
So how do you make sure that I’m seeing you in that elevator? Here are some best practices of Instagram for retail:
How to Gain the Most Followers:
1. Create a Brand Story
Instagram was created so the users can connect with the people and things they’re interested in. As you know, your brand is more than just the objects that it sells – Instagram is a great place to showcase that. Show the lifestyle your brand embodies on Instagram by sharing photos of more than just your products. These types of photos will help you appeal to potential customers who may not have initially been interested in looking at a photo of your product, and helps show your customers where you fit in their lives.
There’s another benefit to sharing photos of things other than your products, too: Everybody’s feed on Instagram is personalized. Instagram’s new update has made it even more difficult to show something someone doesn’t like by updating the timeline style from chronological to best comes first. This means if you show what your brand embodies you’re more likely to get more likes and start appearing in more followers’ feeds.
2. Remember Instagram Was Made For Connection.
Show your products being made and the inside of the shops. Show what your CEO is doing. Your customer wants to get to know the people behind your company. You can use this strategy to show what the company stands for. For example, say your company likes to donate or do good deeds, show these acts of charity your company is doing or who they are giving to.
Young consumers, in particular, like to feel like they’re giving back. Just look at how successful Toms is. This tip is certainly similar to the first tip. The difference is that tip #1 is about showing the lifestyle you’re a part of, while this tip is about giving a human face to your brand.
3. Join in on Big Events
Like Fashion Week or the World Cup. Post something which ties your company to it. For instance, on Kentucky Derby Day, a hat shop could share a photo of your employees wearing ridiculous hats to #DerbyDay. The end goal here is more about connecting with the wider world, and showing your followers where you fit in.
4. Grow your base by using the foundation that’s already there.
IE your fans! Mobilize them by having them post the items they’ve purchased from you. When their friends see your clothes on their feed, they will want to know what’s up and if your feed is interesting they’ll want to follow you. It helps to give your brand credibility. Peer Reviews matters.
A great way to employ your fans is to set up promotional Instagram contests. Ask customers to post photos of the products they’ve purchased from you to a certain hashtag and tag your store – then you choose a winner for an awesome prize.
5. Hashtags and Location tags are a Must-Do.
Your feed will receive more views if you use these especially if they are relevant hashtags and locations. Try looking for a hashtag that has 500-1000 posts in it. It needs to have enough posts that you know people are looking at that hashtag feed but not enough that your post will be lost in a sea of posts.
Hashtags are great because it makes everyone potential customers not just people who have heard of you. For example, someone from India who has never met me nor knows someone who knows me has the ability to find me by simply looking at a specific hashtag feed with my post on it.
Don’t be afraid to break hashtags down. For instance, if you have #bohostyle don’t be afraid to also use the hashtags #boho and #style. It’s ok if it looks repetitive. Additionally, don’t be afraid to mix generic hashtags with specifics hashtags. Basically, as a clothing retailer, you may want to use the generic #style to get maximum views, but also use #beachdress, which gets less views, but all those views will be from people who definitely care about the beach dress you posted.
How Halo Luxe Uses Instagram To Increase Salesforce
Now tolocation tags. Location is important for brick and mortars to use. When you offer location it means that people near you who are looking at their location feed (which shows all the posts from places nearby the person) can find you. Location tagging may inspire a customer grabbing coffee next door to drop in and grab that item they just saw. And at the very least, it puts your location into customers’ heads for next time.
6. Make your profile consistent and as close to your store name as possible.
That way, if a fan is looking for you on Instagram, it’s easy to find you, and once they find you on Instagram they can find you on Twitter or Facebook if you use the same usernames/photo/bio.
How Do I Get Them to Buy?
7. Post About your Flash Sales and Other Company Events.
Flash sales are a huge way to bring in customers and Instagram offers you the perfect platform to post about it. Whenever you are having a sale, especially a flash sale, send the word out by posting about it. See below for rules on how to link properly to the flash sale.
How Halo Luxe Uses Instagram To Increase Sales As A
8. Sign Up for Instagram’s Ads.
You will need a Facebook to create these ads, because Facebook owns Instagram. The good news is, they’re very cheap! In Facebook, you can choose the pictures and copy you want displayed. You can also choose your targeting. Remember to target as specifically as possible for best results. This is a link to their tutorial. These ads very simple and easy to create, even for a beginner.
9. Learn How to Get Around the No-Link Rule.
How Halo Luxe Uses Instagram To Increase Sales On Amazon
Unfortunately, Instagram has a rule that prevents anyone from putting an active link in their captions. It’s sad, I know. But fortunately, there are a couple of ways around this.
One way is to put the link in the caption anyone, so that people can copy and paste it into their browser. In the same vein, you could post the style number of the item in the caption, for people to search for on their store. Another currently popular method is to post the most recent photo’s link your store bio on your profile.
However, no Instagrammer is going to want to spend seconds, let alone minutes, surfing through your store to find the product, no matter how pretty. With Instagrammers you need to catch their attention and give them what they want in the quickest way possible. And undoubtedly, the easiest way currently to give an Instagrammer your product’s information is using an app that dms or emails a link for the product to them if they comment or like the post. Soldsie and Like2Buy are two of these apps.
How Halo Luxe Uses Instagram To Increase Sales Tax
Now for Etiquette (Follow the Rules Or Be Unfollowed):
10. No posting back to back and no posting the same thing over and over again.
Basically the only rule. Instagrammers don’t want you to be the only one on our feed. If you do this it means the Instagrammer has to travel through endless miles of you to get to see her friends or the next tutorial, which is most users’ main goal for Instagram. My friend unfollowed KYLIE JENNER simply because she posted too much of the same thing. If Kylie can be unfollowed because of that so can you.
You can post more than one picture in a day. IF you do though, they have to be spaced out by hours. Whatever you decide, though, make sure you post at least one photo a day, or you’ll be forgotten!
11. Learn the Best Times to Post.
Ultimately, you’ll have to do some testing to decide what times of day work best for your particular company, but here are some general guidelines from a recent study:
- Wednesday at 5pm is found to be the best time to post over all.
- The worst times to post are typically 9am and 6pm, with the best general times being 5pm and 2am.
- However, Monday at 5pm is not a good time to post. Try 7pm on Monday.
Overall, you will have to play around and see what works for your audience. And remember that your audience’s 5pms maybe very different, depending on what locations they live in.
More?
What’s worked for you on Instagram? Do you have any tips on using Instagram for retail? Please share you ideas of how retailers can make the most Instagram!
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