Level Up Your Instagram Game, Grow Your Community and Sell More!
Ready to take your Instagram game to the next level? Whether you're a business looking to connect with your audience or just want to stand out with stunning visuals and engaging content, this guide is for you. Discover actionable tips and strategies to boost your profile, create compelling posts, and grow a loyal following. From mastering the perfect hashtag strategy to refining your aesthetic, we’ve got everything you need to make your Instagram feed pop. Let’s level up your social media presence and make every post count!
01 — PLAN AHEAD
It’s important for your entire team stay ahead of your planning game to stay organized and prepared for the new month & season! Plan in advance for upcoming events and holidays to post about and the hashtags you’ll need to ace them.
02 — CREATE A PROMO CALENDAR / SCHEDULE
Download a PROMO CALENDAR, here’s a Google Sheet version we found on Google.
Click File > Make a Copy
Print out PROMO CALENDAR or share it with your team.
Map out at least 3-4 months in advance
Each month should include:
What content you’re going to post and on which days
The captions for each post
The hashtags you’re going to use to reach a new, relevant audience
Add important holidays and dates
Real or fake (#nationalproseccoday)
Add all campaigns, sales, promotions or giveaways for that month
Use a Shared Calendars between your entire team, that way everyone knows well in advance what will be posted each day.
At the end of each month review your posts and engagement (Instagram Insights). Learn and understand what kind of content is working for you and what’s not. Test and adjust accordingly for the next few months.
03 — USE SCHEDULING APPS
Here’s a list of Apps that help you plan, organize, and schedule your Instagram posts with ease:
04 — MAINTAIN CONSISTENCY
One study shows posting to Instagram every day is the key to higher engagement and growing your followers – both of which are essential to increasing product sales.
Posting daily at the optimal times is the key to success
If you are finding it difficult to create enough content for each day of the week, consider using a weekly schedule with themes for each day:
Sunday: ask a question
Monday: behind-the-scenes
Tuesday: product feature
Wednesday: quote
Thursday: new arrivals
Friday: flay lay / repost
Saturday: wildcard
05 — DIAL IN YOUR CAPTIONS
Using Instagram for more product sales goes beyond uploading a great photo or video. Your caption is just as important as your Instagram photo or video itself! With over 72% of Instagram users reporting that they have purchased something after they saw it on Instagram, it’s absolutely crucial that you know how to motivate your followers to buy your products. That customer base of over 500 million daily users is just too big to ignore!
Having a great Instagram photo or video does a great job stopping your audience from scrolling past, but it’s the caption which has the potential to draw them in even more – encouraging them to engage with your post and to get closer to a sale with a meaningful call to action. So while a picture may be worth 1,000 words, an engaging caption could be worth 1,000 dollars!
DEVELOP & MAINTAIN YOUR BRAND VOICE IN YOUR CAPTIONS
Think of your brand voice as the personality behind your communication with your audience. Developing your brand voice is key to building a connection with your audience so you can sell your products on Instagram.
Your brand voice might be funny, casual, sarcastic or even formal, but it should remain consistent.
A consistent brand voice will help develop an emotional connection with your audience, which is vital considering that customers who feel emotionally connected to a brand are four times more likely to buy from that brand and ten times more likely to shop a website on a mobile device.
CREATE SEVERAL DRAFTS OF YOUR CAPTIONS
When you create an Instagram post on the spot, your caption might not be the best it can be. Instagram captions should go through a couple drafts before being published to your feed, which means you don’t want to rush your caption copywriting!
Planning is key when creating captions that sell. By using Tailwind’s Instagram Scheduler you can plan out your captions ahead of time, and even save them as drafts while you are in the process of perfecting them! And just like any other piece of copy, you should carefully proofread your captions.
INCLUDE A CALL-TO-ACTION (CTA) IN YOUR CAPTIONS
If you don’t effectively direct your followers to take action, they likely won’t. Your caption CTA will likely direct viewers of your Instagram post to visit your checkout page, and hopefully get them to purchase your product! Some examples are CTA’s are:
“Visit the link in our bio to learn more.”
“ View our newest collection by clicking the link in our bio.”
“(your item) is on sale now. Link in bio!”
Your motivating call to action should be font-loaded and placed near the top of your caption. Instagram only displays the first three lines (or 125 characters) of captions before displaying the “read more” link in the feed. Your audience might not always click to “read more”, so include your CTA near the top.
Captions can be fun and inspiring, but if they’re going to help sell your products, your CTA needs to direct users to a place where they can purchase the products you sell.
Shoppable Posts: Utilizing shoppable Instagram posts is an intuitive way to tag your products and allow users to shop directly from Instagram. You can have more than one link per shoppable post, making it easy to promote multiple products to your audience!
WRITE CAPTIONS THAT TRIGGER EMOTIONS
Our emotions heavily influence what we buy. Tapping into your followers’ emotions through your caption can help increase sales and can be done so when we can evoke feelings of:
FEAR – Fear (or FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out) can drive your followers to purchase your product. 60% of millennials have made a purchase within 24 hours of feeling FOMO. Using fear or “FOMO” to drive sales doesn’t mean you are making your customers feel anxious, worried or any other harmful emotion. Simply stating that you have a limited quantity in stock or setting a time limit on when the item can be purchased is sufficient.
BELONGING – We all crave connection and want a sense of community. Speaking to your followers as if they are part of your tribe can help develop that sense of belongingness with your brand which will help you sell products.
TRUST – Seventy percent of consumers use online reviews to help them make a purchase. Rather than expecting your potential customers searching for product reviews on their own, why not highlight reviews in your captions? Adding customer testimonials to your captions can help you build trust between you and your audience. You can even re-post user-generated content to use as your photo – people love to see Instagrammers like them talking about your products!
INSPIRATION – A challenging aspect to e-commerce is that your potential buyer can’t hold the product in their hands before they buy. Use your captions to describe to your followers of how your product can help improve their life – or even to describe in detail what the product looks or feels like up close!
OPTIMIZE HASHTAG USAGE
When creating Instagram captions, you’d be selling yourself short (no pun intended!) if you only focused on the copy! The right hashtags will help you extend your reach, get your posts seen by more potential customers, and help grow your account.
Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags in your caption and finding those hashtags can be a challenge if you are manually searching for them for each and every Instagram post.
Using a Hashtag Finder helps you find hashtags that can expand your reach to new customers without needing to perform any research. Simply enter your initial hashtag, and they will begin to populate a list of hashtags.
Once you find a list of hashtags that works for you, create a reusable hashtag list – and save it in your Notes App or in your Instagram Scheduling App
USE EMOJIS
Using emojis in your caption can increase your engagement by nearly 43%! All that extra engagement can help your post reach more potential customers that you can then direct to your product page.
KEEP THE CONVERSATION GOING
After your post has published, don’t forget to reply to every comment or questions you receive. Companies who engage with customer service requests over social media report 20%-40% more revenue per customer.
Whether you are receiving positive or negative feedback, it is important to reply to each and every comment!
❝
It doesn’t matter if you have an Instagram account with a million followers or if you just created a new profile today, this is absolutely the advice I would give to anyone looking to build a more meaningful community on Instagram or online … The truth is, the way to win on social media is to actually be social The number of Instagram followers you have means nothing if you can’t build a community of like-minded people who care and engage. The only real way to do this from scratch is to become part of the conversation.
- Gary Vaynerchuck
06 — INSTAGRAM STORIES
Using Instagram stories is a fun and creative way to get more followers on Instagram! Stories have shorter lifespans than posts (only 24 hours), but they give your audience bite-sized content to engage with, and with over 250 million DAILY users on Instagram stories you will want to make sure you have a plan in place to use stories in a way your audience will love – and that will attract a brand new audience. Over the last year, Instagram has introduced to us a variety of different formats we can use with our stories. We can choose from: Still photos, Video (hands-free, too!), Boomerang, Live, Type, Superzoom, Rewind, Stop Motion, etc. With all the choices available, the possibilities to use stories creatively, and the ability to choose a format that feels right to you – we can all make stories work!
CREATE STORIES YOUR AUDIENCE WILL LOVE
Creating stories that your audience will love isn’t hard and you certainly don’t need to be a graphic designer to create visuals to engage your audience. Instagram’s own native story editing has lots of options for those who are looking to add filters to media, overlay text and emojis, add stickers and even draw.
You don’t need any fancy software to create stories, either. Both Canva and Adobe Spark have free plans and are easy for beginners to use. Don’t be afraid to get creative with your stories through animation and custom text!
HOW TO MAKE ENGAGING INSTAGRAM STORIES
Although you only have a 15-second time limit with a single video to engage your audience (and even less time with images), there are different ways you can get your viewers to stay on your stories for longer.
SPLIT VIDEOS UP: If 15 seconds isn’t long enough for your videos, apps like CutStory will be able to help you turn a longer video into shorter 15-second segments. Creating multiple segments from one video will keep your viewers clicking through your story so they can watch the entire video.
ASK A QUESTION: Speak directly to your audience and ask a question, encouraging them to direct message you with their answers! Opening up a conversation with your followers can help you get to know them better (and to help them know YOU better) so you can always create content they will love.
CREATE AN INSTAGRAM STORY POLL: Polls are another unique way to grow your account, engage your audience, and conduct some market research! When you create a poll, ask your followers on other social media platforms to watch your Instagram story and vote for their answer. This will bring your followers from different platforms to your Instagram account!
GO LIVE: Going live lets your audience to see what you are up to in real-time, is cost-effective (no need to edit any of your videos), and offers your viewers the ability to drop comments and likes on your live videos. While going live is still a relatively new way to use video, live video is expected to grow 15-fold from 2016-2021. If you go live on Instagram, some of your followers will receive a push notification alerting them that you are live. Your live video can also appear at the front of other stories which helps increase your brand awareness.
DRIVE VISITORS FROM INSTAGRAM STORIES —> TO YOUR PROFILE
After you’ve created engaging stories, your next task is trying to figure out how to get those viewers to click over to your profile and hit the follow button. Driving traffic from your Instagram stories to your profile is key to getting more followers on Instagram through your stories.
INCITE CURIOSITY: You can use your latest post on Instagram to your advantage and pique your viewer’s curiosity by hinting at your last post in your story.
INCLUDE A CALL-TO-ACTION (CTA): Another simple way to get viewers from your story to your profile where they can hit the follow button is by including a CTA such as “visit the link in our bio!”, or “leave your comments on our latest post”. Using a CTA that makes viewers head from your stories to your account will help turn non-followers into followers.
INFLUENCER STORY TAKEOVER: Participating in an Instagram account takeover is a really fun way to bring new people to your account. There are two ways you can do an account takeover:
You takeover someone’s account - you get in front of a new audience directly
Someone takes over your account - whoever is taking over your stories will likely bring some of their followers along for the ride.
DRIVE TRAFFIC FROM YOUR POST TO YOUR STORY
Because of the Instagram algorithm, all of your followers won’t see all of your stories.
So why not cross promote between your stories and your posts to ensure they are both being seen by as many people as possible? You can use your Instagram posts to direct your audience to watch your latest story series! Higher engagement on either your posts or your stories can increase your reach.
HASHTAGS IN STORIES
Hashtags aren’t just for regular Instagram posts. When someone searches for a hashtag, they can either view the posts within that hashtag or the stories! Including hashtags in your stories increases the chance that it will be featured on that hashtag’s search page. Currently, Instagram allows users to add up to 10 hashtags per story, which is significantly less than the 30 allowed for posts, so you’ll want to make sure you are finding great hashtags to use!
TAG LOCATIONS IN STORIES
You can tag your location in an Instagram story, just like you can in a post. Adding a location may get your story featured on that location’s explore page, which is an easy way to increase your reach!Your business doesn’t need to have a brick-and-mortar store to benefit from using locations, either. You can tag:
Cities
Countries
Landmarks
Depending on the popularity of your chosen location, you could be featured, which will introduce your account to a larger audience and can help you get more followers.
TAG OTHER BRAND IN YOUR STORIES
Instagram is meant to be a social place! Everyone loves a little shout-out once in a while (and they may even return the favor).When you mention someone on Instagram, they will receive a notification and be given the option to re-post your story to their own account. If they repost your story from Instagram, your account is tagged automatically, making it easy for their audience to be directed to your profile.
REPURPOSE YOUR STORIES
As a small business owner, it can be hard to find the time to create new content constantly, so why not repurpose it? Instagram stories may only have a 24-hour lifespan, but they can live on forever if you repurpose them the right way!
Repurposing your content for different mediums and even different platforms will help you cut down on the time you are spending creating new content, so let’s talk about some creative ways you can repurpose your Instagram stories.
UTILIZE INSTRAGAM HIGHTLIGHTS
With Instagram Stories Highlights, you are able to curate your stories and feature your favorites. Adding a story to your highlights will put it on your profile indefinitely – even after 24 hours your followers will still be able to view it. Luckily, you don’t need to remember to save each and every story. By turning on Instagram Stories Archive feature your stories will all be automatically saved (just in case you forget to save them before their 24-hour time limit is up!).When someone new comes to your profile, your story highlights offer them a way to quickly see what your brand is all about. By creating highlights, you can entice profile visitors to hit that follow button.
If you need ideas on how to group your highlights, try some of these below:
Featured products, Freebies, Behind-the-scenes, Personal (such as family or travel), Featured content, Best of, Shout-outs, etc..
Lastly, adding Instagram covers to your highlights makes branding your profile a breeze!
SWIPE UP FEATURE
If you have at least 10 thousand followers, you can benefit from Instagram’s “swipe up” feature in stories. Those account owners can add a link to their stories, which is activated when a user “swipes up”.Similar to shoppable posts, the swipe up action can take your followers directly to a checkout page, which can greatly increase your sales!
07 — GET MORE SALES
If your business follows through on a well-planned Instagram strategy, you should be able to generate plenty of sales, as the average Instagram user spends $65 per order, giving it the 2nd highest average order value among social networks. Do you want to get the most out of your Instagram presence? Would you like to learn how to get more sales with Instagram? See below:
OPTIMIZE YOUR MARKETING FOR MOBILE
Since the vast majority of time Instagrammers spend on the platform is on mobile, if you want to get more sales from Instagram, you need to first make sure all your online properties are optimized for mobile devices. People who enter your funnel from Instagram through a mobile device will most likely access the rest of your content through a mobile device as well. Make it a delightful mobile experience all the way through the process and increase your chances of making a sale!
INCLUDING A LINK IN YOUR BIO
Adding a link to your Instagram profile bio is an easy way to get people clicking over to your sales page. Instagram only allows you to include one link in your bio. But, there are ways to effectively link to more than one URL from your profile.
Linktree allows you to create a page with links to multiple pages (no coding required). When a visitor clicks on your Linktree link, your selected links appear, making it easy for you to promote various items at once through one link in your bio!
POSE GREAT PHOTOS OF YOUR PRODUCTS
Great news for product sellers using Instagram! 65% of the top-performing Instagram posts are product photos, meaning Instagram users want to see photos of your products.
When selling on Instagram, your images need to appeal to your followers to help you grow your reach and increase engagement, which can help you land on the explore page and get within the top posts for your chosen hashtags.
Gorgeous, professional-quality photos are a must on Instagram. Resist the urge to post anything that isn’t clear and beautifully lit.
Aside from posting high-quality images, there are also certain image qualities that can help increase engagement such as:
lots of background space
one dominant color/hue
low saturation
texture (such as shadows or ridges)
increased brightness
Try experimenting with different styles of imagery to see what appeals to your audience and receives higher engagement!
Lifestyle photos account for 43% of the most-liked photos on Instagram, so why not combine a lifestyle photo with your product and showcase how it can be used in real life?
TEAM UP WITH INFLUENCERS
If you want to promote your products to a larger and fresher audience, you should try out Instagram influencer marketing. It has the potential not just help you generate more sales, but if you get the influencer to tag your Instagram account in the post description, you’ll see your follower count grow as well!.
The ROI can be high, but be careful when vetting influencers you choose to engage, being on the alert for accounts with fake followers and low engagement levels. Partnering with them will do nothing to increase your sales or improve your marketing.
A few tips to help you find the right influencers:
Choose influencers relevant to your niche: The influencer you choose should already be sharing content relevant to the products you want to promote. Relevancy ensures that your promotion reaches the right followers.
Look for stats beyond followers:. While researching influencers, look at engagement levels. Check for both likes and comments on their posts.
Fake Followers: If the photos they post are getting less engagement than you expect (see this chart of average engagement rate by follower count), it may indicate a large number of fake followers. Stay clear of these people.
Ask for references: Ask these influencers for references and results of campaigns they have worked on in the past. If possible, contact these clients and find out if they were pleased with the experience and the results.
Work with an agency: There are marketing agencies that specialize in working with influencers. Usually they will have a portfolio of influencers they work with regularly and case studies that show results. If you have a high budget, you can work with them. They will save you a lot of time.
Once you’ve chosen the influencer(s), you can work with them and create an Instagram-optimized photo.
Don’t rush when creating the caption to accompany the photo. Include hashtags as they increase engagement – and don’t forget to tag your Instagram account so that the influencer’s followers can find and follow you easily. Make sure that they schedule the Instagram post at the most engaging time and if possible, get them to include the link to the product in their bio for a few hours when the post goes live. Don’t forget to add “Link in bio” to help people find the link quickly.
RUN CONTESTS / GIVEAWAYS PROMOTING YOUR PRODUCTS
Instagram contests might be the most powerful, and least used, tool in your Instagram marketing toolkit. A recent study found that accounts that hold Instagram contests grow their followers 70% faster over three months, on average, than accounts that don’t. That’s huge! Well-run Instagram contests can attract hundreds or thousands of entries. You only have to look at the requirements for many Instagram contests to see why they’d be so effective at acquiring new followers.
COMMON INSTAGRAM CONTESTS / GIVEAWAYS MECHANICS
To enter an Instagram contest you usually have to follow the account posting the contest.
Entrants are usually required to like the contest post
Entrants are usually required to @ mention another Instagram user in the comments. Often each @ mention counts as an additional contest entry.
Read Instagram’s Promotion Guidelines - with the requirement to include “Acknowledgement that the promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Instagram” in your giveaway post.
Other types of Instagram contests / giveaways include:
Like to enter (double-tap to win)
Photo contests (post your entrance with this branded hashtag)
In-store contests (take a photo inside our store and post it with this branded hashtag)
Successive contests (12 days of giveaway, with a new prize each day and a grand prize on the last day)
