Converting Followers Into Customers On Instagram

Instagram is a social media application that can also be used as a means of doing business for small companies. An album of pictures can be created on Instagram and serve as “marketing eye candy”. Instagram is a highly interactive medium of marketing that engages the audience with its visual channel. This great tool can turn your audience into paying customers.

Tell Your Story

The owner of Babies4Babies, a luxury brand for babies, Kate Marie Grinold Sigfusson, confirms that a major portion of customer conversions she gets is through Instagram and not any other social media channel has gotten her so many customers. Furthermore, she emphasizes that the followers on Instagram business account are not merely followers; instead they are of much more value to them. In her words, their followers on Instagram are their community. To find out how a relatively new Chicago based company that commenced in the month of January create a bulk of highly profitable social media audience on Instagram. The following are her trade secrets.

Most budding businesses perceive Instagram as a gallery of photographs. It is a site for posting pictures of your products or of how your business works but seldom do they use this platform to narrate their story to the audience. But Sigfusson used Instagram to tell her story. She was pregnant when she launched her luxury brand for babies. Taking advantage of the opportunity, she used Instagram to post pictures and information of her pregnancy. She used this platform to not just post pictures of her 40 weeks old pregnancy but she also posted her future plans of introducing a line of superior baby products such as the swaddles. Her Instagram page offers a chronicle of her journey all through her journey.

In the words of Sigfusson, sharing stories of mothers of newborn babies along with that of her own as a mother and also as an entrepreneur, has attached humanized characteristic to her brand. Furthermore, this has made the company more like a family than just a physical product. She further explains that all business must treat Instagram in the same way. Small businesses must show the audience the human aspect of their business by displaying pictures of orders being packed, facilitating customers, walking towards the post office, and dealing with other relevant troubles. Therefore, these small businesses can use snapshots and selfies to fill in their Instagram page with pictures that articulates your story and not only pictures.

Building a community

Posting your story will increase engagement. People who relate to your story will reach out to you, leave comments and ask questions regarding your company. When the comments pile up, this signals that you are on the right path. Simply posting regular updates is not how the conversion process will work. Involvement on social media must remain active since it is the most significant part where most audience is converted to actual customers. With every picture on Babies4Babies Instagram page, there is a long chain of comments. Some are relevant to the products, while others are only casual and friendly discussions between mothers and Sigfusson. This way a business can learn about his/her followers and understand what they need as customers. In Sigfusson’s view, these conversations are the founding stone of a well-knitted online community with mutual needs. Through this kind of online support, customers are forced into learning about the brand and ultimately to make a final purchase decision.

Network

Instagram does not only serve as a platform for interaction between companies and their potential customers. It is also ideal for networking. With the use of Instagram, you can follow people from your industry and keep a watchful eye on competing business activities. It may sound to you like a spying tool, but think of it in terms of an online business association. It enables easy conversation between peers coming from the same industry.

Sigfusson says that it is important to know what brands are performing successfully on Instagram, taking precedence from them, and partnering with them to learn. Furthermore, Sigfusson states that by following other similar businesses on Instagram, they established useful contacts and developed a professional working relationship with them that resulted in fruitful giveaways for brand awareness and exposure to collaborations in product designs.

Other Ways

In addition to the above mentioned, the following tips can also come in handy while considering branding via Instagram:

You can share high quality pictures even if there is no professional photographer available around you. To share good quality pictures, you can simply use the Instagram to post pictures from your phones or tablet devices and get rid of blurry crooked images from the website. Also, you can play around with pictures and edit them, as you like. Aviary is an example of such fun apps that can boost up the quality of the chosen image and also give it an arty look if you like. Moreover, you can spice up your page by uploading short videos also. Try to keep posting pieces of your story to retain viewers’ interest for long enough until they decide to make a purchase decision. Lastly, use hashtags as they allow posts to be seen in search results. This can be useful to guide new customers on what is trending and being discussed often.