5 Secrets of Instagram Marketing for New Ecommerce Stores

Instagram is one of the most effective and scalable ways to reach potential customers when trying to start your eCommerce business.

This post is going to give you 5 of the best tips and secrets which you can implement today to leverage Instagram as best as possible and grow your business.

Why does Instagram matter? With over 1 billion active users and super high engagement rates, the potential reach for your business is huge. It’s a great way to unlock new customers and grow your revenue.

Without delay, here are the four tips we’re going to be detailing below:

1. Don’t reinvent the wheel
2. Use the distribution of other accounts
3. Run contests and promotions
4. Use Geofilters
5. Use Instagram Reels

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

If you’re just starting out, it’s tempting to try to get creative and come up with your own unique approach on Instagram.

While it’s important to always be pushing yourself to do new things and innovate, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

There are so many different types of eCommerce businesses – and many different ways of marketing on Instagram.

Take a look at your favorite brands, and also competitors, and see how they’re using Instagram. They’ve likely got teams of people designing and curating their social media marketing. Use that to your advantage, and try to follow their lead. It’s better to copy a small aspect of a business that’s working than to create something from scratch.

Here are some tips for best practises to implement on Instagram that most large businesses use:

1. Make sure you have a Business Profile
2. Use hashtags
3. Create a coherent style
4. Post regularly

Use the Distribution of Other Accounts

One of the best ways to leverage the Instagram platform in the early days of starting your eCommerce business is to use the distribution of other accounts.

What you’re looking to do is to break into an audience that’s already interested in your product.

To do this, you need to find accounts related to your niche and then like and comment on their content.

A lot of people use tools like ManageFlitter to help them search for related accounts, and then they go through and follow, like and comment on their content.

This is a good strategy, but it’s risky if you aren’t careful. You might get reported by other Instagram users who complain about you spamming their content.

It’s best to use this strategy in the beginning, but then you should scale it up using the other strategies outlined in this post.

Run a Contest or Promotion

Everyone loves free stuff. If you’re trying to build a following on Instagram, there’s a good chance that you’re going to want to try running a contest or a promotion.

If you’ve ever seen people screenshotting or sharing brands’ posts on their stories, that is a contest at work. The engagement rates on Instagram giveaways is also super high.

Here’s a few examples:

1. Giveaway

You can give away a free product to people who comment on your post. A good way to make this go viral is asking contestants to tag their friends. Their friends then enter, and so the flywheel builds momentum!

2. Photo Contest

This is a great way to get people to share your posts on their own Instagram stories.

You can ask them to repost your photo on their story and tag you.

3. Caption Contest: Ask your followers to comment with a funny caption for a photo, and whoever gets the most likes wins a prize.

Use Geofilters to Create Local Hype

Geofiltering is a great way to make your brand appear to be bigger than it is in the eyes of your potential customers.

If you’ve ever been constantly aware of a brand’s presence on Social Media they are likely a huge company with a lot of capital behind them, and they’re spending it creating a very broad awareness of their brand.

When you’re starting out your eCommerce business, there’s no ways you will be able to compete on that level.

What you can do, though, is focus your efforts on a very specific region. Usually, this will be a few suburbs that have a large density of your potential customers. Make sure your filtering is set very specifically to only target those customers.

To keep your content relevant (and make sure you are not irritating your customers by showing them the same ads over and over), make sure you rotate your Ad creatives constantly.

By niching-down and focusing your budget on a very small area, you will create “Hyper-local Hype”. Inevitably, people in that area in your target market will start talking amongst themselves, and your flywheel builds – again.

Once you have got this strategy nailed, and you’re successfully using it to bring in more customers and drive more revenue you can then scale it (using the same methodology) to other suburbs and regions, as your budget allows.

Use Instagram Reels

Reels is Instagram’s newest ‘main’ feature, released as a direct competitor to TikTok. It’s intended for short ‘viral-type’ videos that have high shareability.

Because Reels is new to the Instagram stable, they are placing emphasis on the content created there. Some Social Media Marketing specialists are hypothesizing that Reels videos are prioritized by the Instagram algorithm. Creating viral content on there could be a super lucrative channel for your eCom business.

Here are some tips for creating viral Instagram Reels:

1. Keep videos short
2. Use compelling, funny or interesting content
3. Use viral or trending sounds that follow TikTok and Reels trends. (They are the songs which you hear repeatedly on teenagers cellphones!)
4. Use hashtags

And there you have it – 5 secrets of successful Instagram marketing for small eCommerce stores. Hopefully you’re able to use them to grow your business successfully. Good luck!