If you’re a small business, you’re likely using Instagram as a way to generate leads and sales. There are so many great ways that you can use Instagram to turn your followers into clients and customers, so let’s dive in.

If you’d prefer to watch the video rather than read - we got you.

1. Talk about your product or service. More often than not, businesses who are selling on Instagram just aren’t talking about their product or their service enough, usually in fear of being too salesy. Don’t be afraid! While you need to make sure that you’re delivering value on Instagram (as we’ve discussed here on the channel quite a lot), you need to make it clear that you’re a business and that you have something great to offer the world. Talk about the benefits of what you’re offering and how it can positively affect the lives of your potential customers. Talk about how to use it or how to best integrate it into their lives. On the flip side, people can be overly promotional, and it’s a bit of a fine line. Treat carefully, deliver value and most of all, just let people know that you’re selling something.

2. Use automation. Getting people into the DMs is one of the key ways to win on Instagram, as we spoke about at length in the video below.

One of the best ways to do just that is via Manychat, the sponsor of this video! Manychat is an automation software that is officially approved by Instagram, it’s something we’ve been using for quite some time now, it’s made a massive difference for us on Instagram and we’re just scratching the surface. There are so many things that it can do to help you sell on Instagram. You can set up full Live Chat customer service and personalized recommendation flows, so whenever someone DMs you, it can take them through a journey that you’ve created to get to their goal. Whether it’s asking about a product or following up on an order, you can create flows that guide them through step-by-step to get to the end result. For example, when someone jumps in your DMs, you can have a series of buttons that would say “Are you looking for help with: Returns, Order Tracking, New Orders, or Something Else?” And each button would lead them down a different path. This way you can guarantee that your customers will get the help they need 24/7, and if they end up needing to speak to a human, that can be part of the flow, too. We leverage Manychat to drive sales for digital products in our shop by using calls-to-action in our posts that direct people to the relevant product based on the content. It’s such an incredible tool and essential to any business with an Instagram presence selling products or services online. If you want to try Manychat, hit this link and use the code HIGHSEASON for a free 30 days on their Pro plan so you can try all the features.

3. Use AI to help create your content. The content creation process is arguably the most time-consuming part of Instagram, which can be a lot when you’re also trying to run a business. Fortunately, there are some great tools to help you do this much more efficiently. You can use one of our faves, Canva’s Magic Studio, to help you create beautiful content that perfectly fits the sizes of the different formats, with the right copy on the photo or video and music. Check out the video below on how to create high-quality Instagram posts faster using Canva’s AI. 

You can do things like importing your own images or videos to have Canva create reels for you. You can also use their AI or ChatGPT to help with your sales-focused captions and promotional calendars, but you’ll want to be careful that you don’t just use whatever it pumps out. Always edit ChatGPT copy to sound more like your own tone and brand voice, as people can tell when it wasn’t a human who wrote it.

4. Leverage Stories. Instagram Stories has proven to be a key element of the platform in reaching as many of your followers as possible. While Stories doesn’t help you reach new people directly, by engaging your existing followers with Stories it tells the algorithm that you’re making engaging content and is more inclined to serve your in-feed content to more people. One great way to leverage Stories is to post a series of Stories with polls or quizzes via stickers, and then add a link sticker to lead directly to your website or landing page. Another way is to use Manychat to automate DMs whenever someone mentions you in their Story. For example, you can set it up so that any time someone mentions you in their Story, they’ll receive an automated DM with a coupon code, which also could be a time-limited coupon to encourage people to use it sooner. Be sure to always pin your promotional stories to your highlight — people look through them more than you think. Recreate your online store with Highlights as an easy way for people to review what you offer without leaving Instagram. you can do the same with your service-based offers as well.

5. Leverage influencers and creators. One great way to expand your reach and sell on Instagram is to work with influencers and creators. You can do this in a number of ways. You could pay them to post about your brand (and always make sure it’s a collaboration post). You can do an in-kind trade where they post in exchange for free products or services, also with a collab post. Check out the video below where we talked about working with influencers.

In both of these cases, always give them a coupon code or affiliate link with some sort of offer so you can track how well they performed. You can also have them “white list” posts, which means you can run partnership ads from their account rather than your brand’s account - which is essentially social proof and less “sales-y”. However you approach it, it increases your reach and therefore the chance of selling via Instagram.

6. Go Live. Instagram Live is something that they’re focused on right now, introducing features like third-party streaming, and it’s a great way to speak directly to your audience in real-time. If you have a product or service that is launching, you could run a Live session to answer questions, give a demonstration and even offer a coupon code or promotion. If you have an Instagram Shop (which you should have if you sell a product on a website), you can also tag products in the Live session so people can go directly to them and purchase on the spot. When you think of shopping channels or webinars - this is a classic way to create urgency.

7. Leverage social proof. One of the best ways to sell period is to show that other people, especially other influential people, are already buying. Any time a customer or client posts about your brand, make sure you’re sharing those posts to Stories, tag them and shout them out. That’s known as “user-generated content” or UGC. If you have any customer success stories or testimonials, those are also worth sharing both in-feed and in Stories. If you can demonstrate to people how your product or service can be used successfully via actual real-life examples, you’ll likely see leads and sales.

Now that we’ve covered the main ways you can sell on Instagram, here are a few quick wins that you can implement right now:

• Add a link in your bio. Instagram gives you up to 5 links, so make sure you use those, and you can also use services like linktr.ee to attractively present all of your social and product links.

• Set up an Instagram Shop. We’ve been talking about tagging products today, so make sure you set up an Instagram Shop so you can actually tag products so people can buy without leaving the platform.

• Of course, ads are always the way to guarantee that you’ll reach the audience you want to sell your product or services to. You can drive them directly to DMs for personalized sales like we broke down in the video below, or select sales-focused objectives to drive results — and if you’re newer to ads, you can leverage their AI through Meta Advantage Plus to get you warmed up.

And that’s it! There have never been so many ways to sell on Instagram, and most of them are very doable for anyone at any stage of their Instagram or business journey.

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