8 Tips for Successfully Selling on Instagram in 2022

selling on Instagram

With reports indicating that customers are 60 times more likely to interact with a brand’s Instagram account than a Facebook account (and 140 times more likely than a Twitter account), there has never been a better time to start selling on Instagram.

8 Tips for Successfully Selling on Instagram

Regardless of your brand or product, here are 8 tips for successfully selling on Instagram:

1- Establish a signature look

How you present your content and product within your Instagram grid is very important.  A consistent appearance, such as the framing of your products and the coloring of your posts, lends to brand recognition and trust development.

If you want to emphasize a particular product or post or show it off in several ways, you can use tools like the Instagram Layout app to combine multiple images into a single image at different angles.

2- Make it easy for customers to place themselves into your product’s universe

As we mentioned above, your Instagram gallery is a great way to tell the story of your products.

Have a look at this gallery from Mark Bell Sling Shot’s Instagram:

selling on Instagram

Spaced between photos and videos of their products is content that tells the story of their customers. Looking at their profile, you know who their customers are, where they hang out, what they eat, and what they do.

By having a personal element to their channel, potential customers can more easily place themselves into the business culture.

3- Get creative with your product description

As much as you need to give a clear description of the product you’re selling, it is usually created that attracts the customer’s attention. This can be accomplished by adding something as simple as an emoji.

4- Use hashtags to increase product visibility

Instagram’s Search and Explore features assists in viewing the top Hashtags that will help your products get discovered more by potential customers. In social selling campaigns, 3-5 relevant hashtags are typically enough to attract potential customers.

It is also important to create your own branded hashtags and do a regular search to find out who is using them. This is an easy way to discover any user-generated content that you can potentially use on your own channel.

5- Make buying easy

Selling on Instagram has never been easier, so why shouldn’t buying on Instagram follow suit?

The easiest path to guide your customer from seeing a product on Instagram to buying it is Shoppable Instagram. 

Right from the app’s page:

  1. Connect your Instagram account to fetch images for your first gallery.
  2. We create your first gallery from your Instagram account by default, but you can create your own galleries using hashtags.
  3. Curate images and easily tag products on them using our dashboard.
  4. Embed the gallery on any wished page OR add your gallery’s link on your Instagram profile bio.
  5. Now you can see your best-performing Instagram images to see which ones get the most user attention and convert into sales in our analytics.

Here’s a visual demonstration of how Shoppable Instagram works:

shoppable instagram
Photo by YotBo

Another tool you can use is Have2Have—, which allows you to add a shoppable link to your Instagram bio. 

6- Use customer photos to build social proof

Customer photos create what is called social proof. Social proof is showing people that what you are saying or selling has been validated by real customers. It’s the equivalent of your friend vouching for a new FitBit or iPhone (“The new iPhone is awesome, man! You should get it too).

Canadian skincare company Body Lush is great at creating social proof. Look at this example:

selling Instagram

The example of user-generated content contains a normal person taking a selfie with the product on her face. The amateur quality lends to both a feeling of authenticity and a feeling for potential customers that normal people like them use the product.

Why do people like Netflix so much? No blatant advertisements, that’s why. When it doesn’t feel like an advertisement, people are much more likely to stop and engage.

7- Turn customer photos and reviews into engaging Instagram ads

Your customers create amazing content, and their followers love it, leaving hundreds of likes and comments. Why not show that to people outside of your followers?

Combine paid Instagram ads or even tools like AiGrow, and customer reviews to spread your social proof outside the confines of your immediate following.

People are more likely (4X more likely, Facebook says) to click on your ad if they see that other people already like and trust your product.

8- Partner with influencers

In a nutshell, Instagram influencers expand brand awareness and allow brands to target very niche audiences, often for a fraction of the price of more traditional advertising methods.

Check out our much more in-depth article on the topic of influencers to gain a better sense of how to find the right ones for your brand and how to develop a successful influencer campaign effectively.

Are you a business or brand that can lend some insight into successfully selling on Instagram? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below.