Bought by Facebook in 2012, Instagram has become a powerful marketing tool for companies. The application now has more than one billion monthly active accounts worldwide and therefore offers companies a great opportunity to increase their number of leads and sales. Indeed, 50% of the platform's users follow at least one brand and 83% of Instagrammers say they discover new products and services on the platform.
Photos, videos, boomerangs, stories, IGTV or Reels, the application is committed to innovation and is constantly proposing new publication formats. In addition, it provides a very complete analysis tool allowing to follow the impressions and conversions of each post made.
How to launch your business on Instagram and take advantage of its benefits? We explain everything you need to know about this new lever for e-tailers.
Instagram, an advertising powerhouse
In this social network dedicated to images, visuals are of course of prime importance. The platform offers different advertising formats, such as single images, videos or the Carousel, but also several display locations. Instagram ads can appear to users in their News Feed, Stories or the Explore tab, allowing brands to reach non-subscribing users. They are displayed in the middle of organic content and always have a Sponsored icon and mostly a call-to-action button.
Instagram ads can reach large audiences with more targeted traffic because it takes advantage of data collected by Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp. As a result, a well-integrated ad in the news feed generates a high click-through rate.
Thus, exploiting advertising on Instagram can be useful for acquisition: the Mobile Collection format (where visual creations and messages to be conveyed take all their importance) will allow you to reach new customers, while the Product Carousel format (requiring a feed respecting a specific format and the corresponding pixel) will help you in your retargeting campaigns.
The different advertising formats available on Instagram - Simone Pérèle, Feed Manager client.
What is Instagram Shopping?
Launched in 2018 for business accounts, Instagram Shopping is a free feature offered to e-retailers by the number one social network for the under 35s.
With this service, brands have an immersive storefront and a "Shop" tab on their profile to showcase and market their products via the app. Shopping also allows brands to showcase products through organic posts on their profile. By tagging items in their photos, e-tailers activate a tag displaying their name and price. This facilitates the shopping process because when users click on an item, a link automatically redirects them to the website's product page. In this way, Instagram Shopping enables qualified prospects to be captured.
The conditions to be eligible for the programme
In order to be eligible for the shopping feature on Instagram, there are several requirements. You must:
- Have a professional Instagram account.
- Selling physical products.
- Have a product catalogue set up in your Facebook Business Manager.
A new social shopping feature currently being rolled out: Instagram Shop
In order to "offer a new, mobile-first shopping experience", Instagram has decided to launch Instagram Shop, which will allow users to finalise their purchases on the platform. Thanks to this integrated payment solution, which is currently being rolled out worldwide and will soon be available in France, Instagram is becoming a real online shop where users can move even more quickly from discovery to purchase, directly via the application.
With this new option, brands will be able to create collections and select the products they wish to showcase in their customisable online shop. An implementation that every e-tailer must follow closely!
Our tips and tricks
In order to master the Instagram Shopping feature, here are our recommendations:
- Analyze your account data and insights to identify what your followers want, on your Facebook Business Manager account
- Optimise your product catalogue according to the specificities recommended by Facebook (e.g. titles not exceeding 60 characters, send the GTINs of your products...).
- Define the advertising formats to be chosen according to the audience to be targeted (Carousel, Collection, Photos, Story, etc.).
- Use visuals (images, videos) of very good quality and adapted to the right format (1:1).
- Your campaign is ready for broadcast!
Feed Manager is at your disposal if you need support for your launch!
