How to Sell on Instagram for a Small Business

Instagram offers businesses the ability to sell products, increase brand awareness, and connect influencers and ambassadors to their products/services.

What started out as a “pretty pictures” social media site has now become a full-fledged place to do business and in some cases an e-commerce platform.

Social media is a lifeline for businesses, here are the main advantages:

• Increase awareness at low cost

• Possibility to promote events

• Campaigns to increase site traffic or sales with targeted coverage through tools such as Instagram Ads or Facebook Ads

• Customer care via Meta messaging services

People use social media for an average of 28 minutes a day: how can you turn their "casual scrolling" into active shopping? Let's see it together in this article.

Shopping on Instagram

Let's get to the point. A fundamental step to increase your sales on Instagram is to enable your business profile for shopping.

To set up your business account for shopping on Instagram, there are 3 steps:

The first step is to make sure that your profile is eligible for shopping on IG : it must be a professional business or creator account. If it is not, convert your personal profile to an Instagram business account and verify that it meets the eligibility requirements:

• Your Instagram account must be in an available market to tag products. Click here to read the list of states , I anticipate that Italy is included.

• The company must sell physical goods

• The Instagram account must be a business page

• The company must comply with the community guidelines. Click here to read the policies

The second step is to connect your IG business profile to a Facebook page. This can be done through the Instagram app by selecting "Edit Profile" and then under Public Business Information, selecting "Page"

Finally, you need to set up a Business Manager account, which will allow you to set up your store later in Commerce Manager. Business Manager lets you manage your ad accounts, your pages, and the people who might work on them. And it’s completely free to use.

Once you have set up the tools, you can move on to populating your shop on IG. How? You need to use your shop catalog (it's called Facebook Shop but it's valid for Facebook and Instagram). Facebook Shops is a digital store where you can display and sell catalog items on Facebook and Instagram. In Sales Manager, you can configure and customize the shop, manage the catalog, create collections of featured items, view statistics and much more.

I therefore leave you with the complete Facebook guide for this last technical aspect.

5 Approaches to Selling on Instagram

Once you’ve got everything set up, it’s time to start selling. Here are five options for selling products on Instagram.

1. Curate your posts

Your Instagram profile says a lot about who you are and your products.

Think of your grill as your storefront: a curated collection of products that showcase your brand’s style.

Look at these profiles, attention to the quality of the photos is fundamental:

2. Use Instagram Shoppable Posts

What are they? You can recognize Instagram shoppable posts by the white shopping bag icon in the corner of an image. Aside from the shopping cart icon, photos and stories will appear to users as regular posts. Instagram shoppable posts are very effective because they appear to potential customers as part of their regular Instagram experience.

Instagram’s built-in e-commerce feature lets you tag products in your Instagram Stories, images, or Live videos and link them directly to your catalog.

When you create an Instagram post , you can add up to five products per image, or up to 20 for multi-image posts. Simply tap the products in the photo, then tag the products from your catalog. You can also share products to Instagram Stories , but you're limited to one product per story.

You can also showcase your products during a Live broadcast . Before you go live, tap the shopping bag icon on the left side of the screen and tag up to 30 products or a collection to highlight during your live broadcast.

3. Create product collections

If you’re looking to create a tailored store experience for your followers, you should consider using Collections for your business.

A collection is a group of 6 to 30 products selected based on a specific theme or color.

This will help shoppers find what they are looking for and hopefully make a purchase. With Collections, you can use your brand’s visuals and features.

Here's an example:

4. Use comments and direct messages

Wondering how to sell on Instagram without a website? Some

Small businesses rely on manual methods, including comments and direct messages (DMs).

To sell via comments, share photos of your products with “Comment to buy” instructions in the caption. For example, you might say “Comment ‘SOLD [your size]’ to buy” for an item of clothing. You’ll then need to follow up on each comment by sending a DM to arrange shipping and payment.

5. Use Shopping Campaigns

So far, we’ve only covered organic approaches to selling on Instagram. If your budget allows you to explore other areas, an effective way to increase the number of potential customers who engage with your shoppable content is through Instagram Shopping Ads.

We recommend combining the use of Instagram Shopping Ads and Custom Shopping Audiences to get your store in front of your target audience and increase sales.

For example, with Instagram Shopping Ads, you can create a campaign that takes people to your product detail page, which then directs them to your website where they can complete their purchase.

When it comes to targeting your campaigns: Test different audiences including custom audiences . Once you start running Shopping Ads, the number of people interacting with your products in your store will increase. This group of people will be added to your Custom Shopping audience.

You can then use Instagram Shopping ads combined with Custom Shopping Audiences to retarget people who have interacted with your shoppable content.

Your Instagram Approach Strategy

Here are some tips to improve your overall approach to the social platform.

• Create a unique style for your photos and stick to it Close your eyes and think about your favorite physical store. What colors do you see? What vibe do you feel? We’re willing to bet that you can identify your favorite stores and brands by their aesthetics alone. Create a distinctive style for your photos and stick to it.

• Use insights Use analytics (Instagram Insights) to track key metrics like engagement rates, post shares, and likes. Keep an eye on the post styles and products that catch people's attention so you can focus on what your audience is responding to.

• Encourage Engagement and Word of Mouth Try different engagement tactics that inspire people to share your account and products. You can encourage your audience to spread the word with prompts like, “Tag a friend who would totally rock this look!” Giveaways are a solid way to incentivize social sharing. In addition to liking and commenting on the post you want to enter, you can ask people to share the post on their Instagram Stories or tag friends in the comments. When people tag their friends, it often sets off a domino effect: the friend gets the notification and decides to enter, then tags more friends, and the chain continues.

• Collaborate with influencers (micro and/or macro) Influencers are a powerful marketing tool. While celebrity influencers can reach millions of users, micro-influencers (1,000-10,000 followers) are actually more effective. Micro-influencers have higher engagement rates than influencers with 10,000 or more followers. Customers enjoy buying products from people they feel they can trust, and it’s much easier to trust someone who doesn’t have an agent, stylist, and makeup crew at their disposal