Increase your product sales with Instagram

I’m sure as you scroll through your Instagram feed, you are starting to see more and more of your favourite retail brands post content with little shopping bags in the corner of the picture. This is the future of online shopping and it’s called shoppable posts by Instagram.

With the online shopping industry growing day by day, social media platforms are catching on to this trend and are allowing businesses to leverage their social accounts to increase their reach and sales.

Despite this feature initially only being available for 20 brands in the US, Instagram has now allowed retailers with a Facebook shop (Shopify) to introduce shoppable posts.

In Australia alone, there are currently 9 million active users on Instagram and if your target audiences are on Instagram, this is an avenue worth exploring. B2B or B2C, this feature should be considered as part of your marketing and sales strategy.

So how does it work and how can it increase your sales?

Online shopping features

At first glance, you see a typical Instagram post however, if you tap the post, the individual product names and prices appear.

Instagram has become an incredibly influential social media platform, with 72% of users saying that they have decided to purchase a product by viewing it through Instagram. This is particularly relevant to the luxury shopper and item market.

A user can select the shopping tag and Instagram will take you to a new page where that individual item is displayed with additional purchasing information. Once the customer has decided to purchase the item, they select the ‘shop now’ button and will be taken straight to the retailer’s website shopping cart.

With this feature, Instagram has created a seamless shopping experience for customers and is driving additional purchases for retailers each day across the globe.

Data collection

Customer data is what drives retailers’ marketing strategies and how they target their audiences. This feature allows retailers to access analytics about their customers’ behaviour such as clicks to tags and product page views.

This data then gives retailers the ability to adapt their strategies to Instagram, determining the right products to display and how to display them.

So, what’s the catch?

This feature is currently only available to those businesses that use Shopify and have a product catalogue on their business’ Facebook page. Although this sales tool is restricted to

Shopify, the future of shopping on social media is evolving and we will continue to monitor the capabilities of Instagram over the next year.

If you fit the above criteria and are interested in promoting your products and increasing your sales through Instagram, give Elevate a call and see how we can develop your marketing strategy to incorporate shoppable posts by Instagram.