Use Instagram’s New Features to Grow Your Sales

Why Instagram’s New Features Can Help you Grow Your Business

Have you heard? Instagram has lots of new features that can help you grow your business.

But maybe you don’t care. Perhaps you believe the social media platform based on images and simple captions will never catch on.

Well, think again. Instagram is not going anywhere.

Instead, the platform is maturing. It’s becoming a powerhouse and facilitating business and transactions, serving the needs of its one billion users.

If you’re a business or a brand or a personal brand that hasn’t taken Instagram seriously, you should because they just rolled out nine new features in 2021. And each one of them is a reason you should consider including Instagram in your marketing strategy.

1. FaceBook Shop

For example, Instagram has added Facebook Shop, which is a live store that resides on Instagram. But as a bonus, this feature allows the store owner to build their stores on Facebook and Instagram. Businesses can develop their catalogs on Instagram, and people can browse and buy directly from them all on the Instagram app.

2. Instagram Shop

Then there’s Instagram Shop, which is different from Facebook Shop. Using Instagram’s Explore page, users can browse their favorite stores and brands, find products and shop directly from Instagram. Their searches on Instagram will lead them straight to photos of the product they’re looking for. And to make things easy, shoppers can buy from the Instagram post.

Instagram Shop will also help by offering features like “Suggested for you” recommendations to stimulate people to buy.

3. Instagram Ads

IGTV’s Instagram ads will allow product creators to make money through their ads on Instagram, very much like they can on YouTube. These fifteen-second ads are just the first of many new features of IGTV.

4. Badges

Badges in Instagram Live are another way product creators can develop a new revenue stream. When viewers purchase a badge, it’s like tipping the product creator the way you would tip in a restaurant. The benefit for product creators is that they will know who their biggest fans are (the biggest tippers, of course). Then they can recognize those fans, building a stronger connection with them.

5. Live Shopping

Live Shopping allows sellers and creators to tag products from their Facebook shop before they go live with a product video. As the sellers go live with a video about a product, they can have live Q&A with their audience. Right then, while the seller is on air, people will be able to buy.

6. Green Screens and

7. AR Filters

These are a pair of other new features that make it easy for sellers to enhance their photos and videos.

With Green screens, you’ll be able to switch out the background in a video, allowing you to present your product in any environment you want. Augmented Reality (AR) filters will enable you to alter the images. For example, you’ll be able to change the background or add a big pair of sunglasses to your face. This new feature allows even novices the ability to alter the photos from their camera rolls. Imagine what that could do for product presentation!

8. Instagram Guides

Instagram Guides help users find recommendations from trusted sources, all curated into scrollable content.

9. Messenger Rooms

Instagram’s Messenger Rooms will allow users to hold group calls of up to fifty people, all from the Instagram app.

With the addition of these and other new features, Instagram is racing from just a photo-sharing site to a transactional business powerhouse.

Which shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, Facebook bought Instagram. And Facebook has monetized at a level other social media platforms have not been able to.

And now Facebook is doing the same thing with Instagram. This tells us Instagram will be around for a while. More people will be getting more value and use it beyond just finding interesting items or posts. But now, they’ll be able to buy directly from it without jumping to a website.

From a consumer standpoint, it makes the buying process easier. From a seller’s or creator’s standpoint, it makes monetizing their audience simpler, which is another way of saying making more sales or earning more money.

And that’s a powerful reason for you to invest in your Instagram brand and profile.

Now is the best time to build a brand online. If you’ve never developed your brand online, or you don’t know where to start, I can help you.

You see, I’ve done it for myself. My initial account had about 3000 followers.

I’m now up to a hundred thousand followers.

Here’s a campaign we did for a client’s account. You can see where we started from and where we’re at at the time of publishing this article.

When we started working with them, they had 391 followers.

We designed and implemented our ‘Content Marketing Machine’, and sure enough it began to pay off. We saw steady growth as the campaign went on.

A disciplined approach of powerful growth strategies mixed in with our ‘Social Media Content Marketing Machine’ and we had explosive growth. You can see that our followers grew and so did our posts, as we were very consistent with our content.

We’ve done it time and time again, across multiple niches and accounts.

And now they’ve topped 33,000 followers. Crazy right?

How did we do that? It comes down to the three critical things to growing an Instagram brand and an Instagram following. 

Three Factors to Growing an Instagram Brand

1. Your Account’s Strategy

To effectively build a following, you first need to define your overall strategy for the account. What do you want the account to do? Who are you trying to reach? Who is the audience you are speaking to? Once you know that, you can refine your content strategy. That way, the content you produce will be highly relevant to your audience.

2. Your Account’s Content

Many people try to copy other people’s content without thinking if that content is relevant to their own audience. Building a following requires creating your content that is what your audience wants to see.

3. Your Account’s Growth Campaigns

If you’re content with slow and steady growth, you can skip this one. But you can accelerate the speed of the growth of your followers. When developed with your strategy and audience in mind, growth and hacking campaigns can give you explosive growth and build your online following quickly.

We’ve done it for many different brands and different kinds of businesses, and we could do it for you.

But whether you do it with us or not, you should not overlook Instagram, because as you can see, it’s here to stay. It’s one billion users aren’t going to give up on it. With all the new features, Instagram is going to be even bigger than before. Smart marketers will make sure they don’t miss out on how Instagram can help their businesses grow.