Just Ask. eCommerce Marketing With Instagram

Sometimes it's easy to forget the 'Social' aspect of Social Media, and it's various platforms and applications. When it's time to look at methods of marketing your product, you may have come to the conclusion that traditional advertising is an ever-decreasing struggle as the web fills up with 'kipple' to quote Philip K. Dick's interpretation of the build up of stuff without human intervention.

You must have noticed the build up of useless click-baiting articles with header images that don't even match the headline. These are generated by services like Taboola and Outbrain, which strive to monetize high- traffic websites and generate advertising revenue. It's crazy and messy, but it works for some.

When looking into Social as a whole, you need to understand that blurting out stuff on your Facebook page doesn't engage anyone, it just becomes a relentless feed of content with zero interactions. So how do we overcome?

It's simple, and it's all about asking influencers if they can help you out.

Integrating Instagram

Take Instagram for example. It's easy just to ask an influential social media celebrity if they can feature one or more of your products or a campaign you are running. It's extremely easy to contact them and just say, 'Hey, I like your stuff, could you post something about my product?'. They might say no, or they might want something in return, but quite often as long as it fits their audience they will say yes. By doing this, you are presenting your product in a social space where the influence is in control. People tend to buy things more often by referral, and this is backed up by years of looking at purchasing behaviour.

The apparent gain by putting your product in front of someone else's audience, probably an audience that you haven't connected with before, but the real bonus is that most of that audience respect the opinion of the person posting the content. In this case, the content is your product.

Setting up your workflow

Concerning procedure, you need just to bite the bullet here. It's hard to just out of the blue ask people to do something for you, but remember that most of the time these super influencers are on the look out for things that they can post as long as they fit their persona or audience demographic. Don't be worried about asking!

The first thing to do is identify tags or hashtags that fit your product and then search out the same tags on Instagram, look for the influencers. They are easy to spot because they have an awful lot of followers.

Like anything else, success is not guaranteed, but work at it and refine your process. It's sure to pay off over time and it avoids just blowing words and pictures onto your Facebook page just because you feel you should.