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You know your product is great, and customers have attested to it.
But it’s still an uphill battle to promote products on Instagram.
You have to compete with thousands of other businesses trying to pull your prospects’ attention.
Attracting more customers for your products requires the right strategy and time, but it’s achievable.
And in this guide, I’ll take you through Instagram product promotion strategies to sell more products.
Let’s dive in.
Common goals of promoting products on Instagram
While the ultimate aim of promoting products on Instagram is to sell more, not every Instagram post about your product should be to sell.
Otherwise, you can easily bore your audience or, worse, piss them off.
Here are some common goals to have for Instagram product promotion:
Product awareness
You likely won’t buy a product the first time you see it. You’ll have to see it a few times and learn more about it before buying it.
The same logic applies to your customers.
That’s why one of the initial steps to promote products on Instagram is to get them in front of ideal buyers. After all, no one will buy a product they’ve never heard of.
Engagement
This involves attracting your audience’s attention to learn more about your product. At this point, you want your audience to see all the problems your product can solve for them.
Then, you build their interest to the point they like and comment on your posts.
With high engagement, your audience can get more curious about the product.
Lead generation
Leads are people who have problems your product can solve and are willing to hear more about the product.
You can direct these Instagram users to your website to collect their personal information.
Sales generation
Some of your Instagram posts should aim at the direct selling of products. Here, you can provide pricing information and direct them to your product page through the link in bio page or Instagram stories.
These posts aim to capture followers who are ready to buy.
Customer retention
While you want to generate more customers, retaining customers is the real gold mine.
So, part of your product promotion efforts should be to help current customers get more value from your product.
Now, let’s see ways to promote products on Instagram.
10 ways to promote products on Instagram
1. Create product teasers
The best time to start promoting your products is before they become available for sale.
Product teasers can help you achieve that by providing information about product features, benefits, and problems it will solve for users.
The aim of the product teaser is to wet buyers’ appetites before they can get the product. It’s a way of creating product awareness for people who may need the product.
Your product teasers can be videos or images and can contain various types of information. For example, a product teaser can be:
- A video showing the product in its box
- A video showing different views of the product
- A video showing use cases of the product
- An image listing the product specifications
- An image listing the features and benefits of the product
- An image listing the people who will get the most value from the product
Apart from your media, you can write engaging captions that further pique the curiosity of your audience.
To exploit product teasers to the maximum, create a product pre-order page. Then, you can direct interested buyers to the page.
Here’s Fastrack, a fashion accessory retail brand, sharing a product teaser of an earpod:
The product teaser features an influencer and a caption containing product details, pricing, and release date.
Product teasers can put products on top of your prospect’s mind even before they can buy them.
2. Capture unboxing videos
Unboxing is part of the purchase experience and can create a euphoria about a product you’re excited to buy.
So, unboxing videos can make potential buyers feel good and see what they’ll get if they buy your product.
If you sell luxury items, unboxing can show the amount of effort you put into packaging the product for your customers. Potential buyers can also see the accessories that come with a product.
An unboxing video should show the process of opening the box and what customers can expect in the package.
I often see Jacob & Co, a luxury watch brand, showing unboxing videos for some of its watches:
This makes sense since premium packaging is part of the luxury product purchase experience.
Unboxing videos can show potential buyers part of the purchase experience and move them towards purchase.
3. Collaborate with influencers
Even if you have a million Instagram followers, you can’t reach every potential buyer.
This is where your Instagram product promotion can benefit from influencers.
Influencers are people who have built a following over the years due to their expertise in a particular field. Due to their influence, their followers take their recommendations seriously.
So, if these influencers use your product or mention it, their followers will at least check it out.
Collaborating with influencers helps you reach a large targeted audience. According to a survey by Influencer Marketing Hub, 46.7% of brands that use influencer marketing do it on Instagram.
That said, there are 4 categories of influencers based on the number of followers:
- Nano-influencers (1K to 10K followers)
- Micro-influencers (10K to 100K followers)
- Macro-influencers (100K to 1M followers)
- Mega influencers (1M+ followers)
When looking for influencers for your influencer marketing campaign, you need to look beyond just the follower numbers.
The best influencer for your campaign will depend on your niche, influencer engagement, goal, and more. This information will also determine the Instagram collaboration idea that fits your campaign.
For example, if you sell a niche product, the best influencer may be a micro-influencer who is an expert in the niche. However, if you sell products anyone can use, then mega influencers can help you reach more potential buyers.
To find the right influencers, you can use influencer marketing tools like Brandwatch, Hypr by Julius, or Later Influence.
These tools can help you find influencers in your industry and provide data about their content and engagement.
After finding influencers, reach out to them about collaboration to iron out all the campaign details.
Then, you can start your influencer marketing campaign. After the campaign, track your results to ensure you’ve achieved your goals.
Alo Yoga, a yoga clothing company, regularly collaborates with influencers to promote its products. Here’s an Instagram post showing an influencer:
When you click through to the influencer’s page, you’ll see that she’s a yoga trainer.
Even though the follower numbers of Alo Yoga’s influencers have a wide range, all the influencers are yoga experts. This means their influencers’ audiences will also be interested in yoga and yoga clothes.
Collaborating with influencers combines their influence and ideal audiences to promote products on Instagram.
4. Collect and share user-generated content (UGC)
User-generated content is content created by customers about your products.
Now, very few things are as convincing as your own customers saying positive things about your product. Because customers have little to gain from promoting your products.
So, people are more likely to trust what a customer says about your products than what you say.
Beyond that, UGC can make your product go viral as you can reach thousands of potential buyers that are in your customers’ audiences. It can also show various use cases and benefits of your products.
While some customers will create UGC without asking, some need a little prompt to encourage them.
You have to take steps to collect user-generated content from customers. This can be through a specified hashtag in your Instagram bio, a giveaway, or watching your mentions.
To encourage more UGC from customers, share some of them on your Instagram profile.
But before collecting UGC, decide the type of user-generated content you want to collect from your customers. The type of UGC you collect will depend on your promotion goal.
GoPro is one of the best examples of UGC on Instagram. Most of its Instagram posts are from its camera users.
GoPro also encourages more UGC through the GoPro Awards.
Collecting and sharing UGC can help you deliver more compelling messages to convert your audience to buyers.
5. Share discount offers
Discount offers can help attract 2 broad groups of people: those who can’t afford your product and impulsive buyers.
For people who admire your product, a discount offer is an opportunity to get the same value at a lower price. At this point, you’re exploiting the fear of missing out (FOMO).
Discount offers can be in 3 common ways:
- A percentage reduction in product price
- Adding a product on top of the purchase
- Free shipping
Now, should you run discount offers every day?
Obviously not.
There should be a reason to offer discounts to your potential buyers.
It can be an important holiday or a business milestone. It can also be a general shopping season like Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
So, find important holidays for your audience and use that opportunity to sell more products.
Tamron Lenses creates lenses for popular camera brands like Nikon, Sony, and Canon. And to celebrate Mother’s Day, the company offered a discount on its lenses:
Discount offers can drag people who are considering buying your product to the finish line.
6. Run giveaways and contests
People love gifts, especially if they have to compete to win them.
This is why giveaways and contests are effective tools to promote products on Instagram.
The idea behind giveaways is simple. Participants will perform a task for a chance to win a gift.
Because of the tasks participants perform during a giveaway, the giveaway can go viral and reach thousands of people.
That said, running a giveaway requires the right strategy.
First, you have to pick the right gift. Since you’re running a giveaway to promote your product, the gift will be the product.
Then, you have to set giveaway requirements. Your requirements will depend on the goal you want to achieve with your giveaway.
For example, if you want to create more product awareness, you can tell participants to tag their friends in the comments and reshare your giveaway post.
If you want to acquire leads, you can ask for their details on the giveaway landing page. You can even ask customers to create UGC.
To increase participants, promote your contests before and during the campaign.
Then, to manage your contest and pick winners, you need to use the right Instagram giveaway tool.
Here’s a contest by Wickywags Candles:
The pet candle company invited pet owners (their ideal customers) to submit a picture of their pets to win a pet candle (their product). This contest will provide more awareness for the product.
Running a giveaway or contest can be a cost-effective way to promote your product.
7. Feature testimonials and reviews
Testimonials are content pieces where customers explain how your product has helped them solve critical problems.
Reviews, on the other hand, usually go into more detail about your product features and what they can help users achieve.
Both can be a potent source of social proof as they come from your customers.
You’re telling your prospects that if these customers can get great results, they can too. Testimonials can be even more powerful if the customer is similar to the prospect.
How do you get these testimonials?
From sources including:
- Instagram: Some customers will create testimonials or reviews and use your brand hashtag or tag your account.
- Review sites: You can get customer quotes from review sites like Trustpilot, Google, Yelp, and Facebook.
- Email: You can email customers to share their experiences using your product.
Whatever the source, you can share testimonials on Instagram to convince more of your prospects to buy your products.
Healthy Lifestyle Medicine, an integrated medicine company, features testimonials from its patients. Here’s one of them:
In this testimonial, she explained the benefits she obtained from the products and services.
Testimonials help you exploit your customer stories to convert even more customers.
8. Create tutorials
Whether you sell blenders or shoes, everyone would love information to solve more problems with your product.
This is where tutorials come in.
With tutorials, you can teach your customers how to perform specific tasks.
Tutorials can show various product use cases and reduce the load on your customer support reps. As customers get more value from your product, they’ll keep buying and using it.
What should you create tutorials about?
First, you can create tutorials on how to perform popular tasks with your product.
Second, you can create tutorials about tasks that customers usually have issues with. To know these tasks, reach out to your support reps about common customer complaints.
Then, if you find a creative way to use your product, create a tutorial to show your audience how to do it.
Here’s a tutorial from Peter Thomas Roth:
The tutorial shows how a customer uses the product. The beauty brand also explains the product’s use cases in the caption.
Tutorials can help you improve customer satisfaction and retention.
9. Use relevant hashtags
Hashtags let you organize posts on Instagram.
But beyond that, you can reach people who are interested in particular topics. When you use hashtags, your posts can show up on Instagram search to people who don’t follow your account.
Some categories of hashtags you can use to promote your product on Instagram include:
- Industry hashtags: These are hashtags that people in your industry use. For example, if you sell beauty products, you can use #beauty and #makeup in your posts.
- Brand hashtags: These are hashtags about your brand. So, if you sell multiple products, you can use these hashtags for all of them. For example, a brand hashtag for a brand like GoPro is #gopro.
- Product hashtags: These are hashtags for particular products. So people who click on these hashtags will find posts about that product. For example, the product hashtag for GoPro Hero 12 is #goprohero12.
Look at the GoPro post I mentioned earlier:
This post features a brand hashtag, product hashtag, and hashtags relevant to the image.
Hashtags are a great way to organize your posts about a particular product so that prospects can get all the information about it without leaving Instagram.
10. Run Instagram ads
If you need to achieve marketing results quickly, then ads are the way to go. For a fee, you can cut down the time to achieve your goals.
With ads, you can achieve the goals listed earlier like product awareness, lead generation, and sales.
To create ads, Instagram provides 2 common paths.
First, you can create an ad from scratch in the Meta ads manager. Here, you can upload your ad creative, select a goal, set up targeting, and add other information.
The other way is to boost an existing post. So, if an Instagram post has performed well, you can push the performance further by boosting it.
After running Instagram ads, track your results to see if you achieved your goal.
If you need to create traction for a product quickly, exploit Instagram ads.
Conclusion
Promoting products on Instagram requires the right strategy and patience.
But it’s all worth it since Instagram lets you reach thousands of ideal buyers.
Go through this list, and you’ll have enough knowledge to promote products on Instagram. While some tactics here are not salesy, they all contribute to convincing prospects to buy your products.
Pick a few of these tactics and implement them this week.
