E-commerce marketing is how brands build a pipeline that funnels traffic to their website and gets them converted into paying customers. This used to be simple, paid ads at the start before the advent of social media.
Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms in existence at the moment. And it has several benefits for brands as well which explains the meteoric rise of the platform with regards to business potential. We are going to dissect it and see if we can come up with trends that your brand can use to supplement its marketing strength.
Instagram – Arming Your E-commerce Marketing
It has several strengths that distinguish it from the other members of its ilk. For starters, it’s highly visual – and it works right now because visual sells the most. People don’t have the time to sift through pages and paragraphs to find out if your brand is worth a second look.
Instagram has been the choice platform of late with over 95% of brands already on the platform. There are an estimated 1 billion people currently on Instagram at this moment. 80% of the users on Instagram follow, at the very least, one brand on their feed. Over 200 million people visit a business profile at least through the day.
These are some hard numbers that shouldn’t be ignored, especially if you’re a marketer. Instagram has been working really well for brands, and a lot of them expend considerable time and effort to make sure that their Instagram strategy is up to snuff with their competitors.
Also, Instagram has a massive reach when compared to other social media platforms. It boasts of one of the highest engagement rates of any platform, and this makes it great for businesses that are looking to gain popularity as well as increase conversions.
Let’s talk about some trends that we think will elevate your e-commerce marketing efforts in 2019.
Instagram Trends to Supercharge E-commerce Marketing
We highlight several Instagram trends that we think will considerably improve your marketing performance to give you much better performance per dollar spent. Without much ado, these are the methods we believe will be big (or remain big) in 2019.
1.Videos Are A Hit
When it comes to visual content, people are consuming tremendous amounts of videos on the internet every day. There’s also an interesting statistic about Instagram and YouTube, 95% of people who have an Instagram account also have a YouTube account.
People browsing feeds are looking for movement rather than the plain old still image. So if you want people to get clicking on the content you provide, make sure that you include a good amount of video as well. The videos that you create can have your brand “signature” to them as well to accentuate relatability. It could be a particular filter or any design element that you think would help audiences identify as belonging to your brand.
2.Instagram Stories
Something that has been a revelation on Instagram has been the advent of Instagram stories. It was launched as a pilot project because of the popularity and has been a resounding success. Today, 400+ million accounts upload content on Instagram stories every day.
A reason why Instagram stories are really popular with marketers is because they are highly engaging and effective at getting users to click on links. An Instagram story does not take a lot of time like with video uploads and so users who are looking for something quick and easy to while away time are more inclined to watch this.
If you want to succeed with Instagram stories, you need to make sure that your visuals are stunning and you have the means to entice an audience.
3.Instagram Shopping Features
Instagram is going to roll out improved shopping features that make it even easier for the user to buy what they want with just a touch. These also make it a lot easier for marketers to integrate them into the content. Brands can use their Instagram channel as a full-fledged e-commerce channel without too much of a hassle.
These links are found within the Instagram Stories of the brand, and brands can use this to connect better and faster to their customers. We talked about how important Instagram stories are to brand building. You can click on the shopping bag as well as the product to get a lot of details about it as well as a shopping cart through which you can directly buy the product.
4.Micro Influencers
If you want to get word out about your brand and people interacting with your brand feed, there is no better deal than influencer marketing. Getting influencers to showcase your brand can increase engagement by several folds and get people interested in your brand.
When you are looking at influencers to push your brand, you need to consider the most bang for your marketing buck, which means getting in touch with micro influencers. These influencers may not have the draw of celebrity influencers with a million or so followers. A micro influencer has between 5 and 10k followers, but the key here is that the followers offer much higher engagement numbers than more popular influencers.
A lot of big brands are getting on the micro-influencer bandwagon to good effect. Companies like Google, Spotify, and Chrysler have seen commendable results with micro-influencer marketing.
5.Conclusive Metrics
Instagram is has advanced 3rd party tools that can measure your marketing performance which means you can get a much more accurate picture of what your advertising dollars are doing for your brand. There are several tools out there that can calculate what exactly what is going in and what is being delivered. Comprehensive tools take into account several Instagram metrics like engagement, follows, geotags, posting times, to name a few to give you a report which you can use to streamline your Instagram marketing even further.
6.Videos Need To Be Authentic
Big brands using Instagram video for marketing purposes have been losing out to smaller players. The reason – their videos have “too much polish.” People like it when their brands use videos that seem more authentic and less aimed at selling a product. A lot of times the audience doesn’t even relate to a video that looks straight out of a visual effects demo reel.
A lot of brands are now focusing on content that is much more, for lack of a better word, real. Professional shot images or video just wasn’t cutting it with the current crowd. This year, we will see more original, unadulterated content from these brands and that is a good thing!
7.Global Reach
Instagram is a platform that has a truly global reach all factors considered – over 80% of the users are from outside the US. If you are a brand that is looking to leverage their popularity with people all over the world, you’re in luck because Instagram shows no signs of slowing down.
While there were 714 million users, who accessed Instagram every month, in 2022 it is expected to surpass 989 million. That is almost a billion people logging in every month!
8.Hashtags #StillKicking
You’d be pleasantly surprised to learn that hashtags are still relevant and are critical to people discovering your brand. Gone are the days when there used to be a lot more hashtags than content on posts. Today is the age of responsible hashtagging.
About 70% of all hashtags come from branded sources, meaning that brands still consider them pretty important and it helps their audience search for relevant content.
9.Instagram Layouts
A lot of brands on Instagram are moving toward catalog-style content which seems to be attracting a sizeable crowd. A curated list of images in the style of product catalogs along with the much easier shopping features works to get people interested in the brand and get them buying products easier as well.
10.Instagram Destinations
One of the trends that is slowly catching on is the creation of places where your audience can get their own Insta-shots for their feed. What this does is get people excited about clicking a picture of their favorite brand venue and share it on their feed. This also results in a significant amount of user-generated content all adhering your brand’s unique style (because of your brand background).
To Summarize
People are always on the lookout for new and creative ideas, and if brands are able to get their attention, people are willing to reciprocate. These are trends that are not likely to die away any time soon and are most likely to work for your brand. Instagram’s ad revenue is set to grow to a mammoth $11 billion dollars in 2019 and does not seem to be slowing down. 2019 is set to be an exciting year for Instagram with several new features that are in development. Brands need to be on their toes to get the most out of their marketing experiences with the platform – we’ll keep you posted on how you can get ahead of the crowd!
Nicola Meeuws says
In your tutorials Instagram is not even part of the social media platforms you are supporting, did I miss something or do the tutorials need an update ??
Bruce says
Tutorials are made before we added Instagram automation. Please check:
https://jarvee.com/knowledge-base/
and look for Using Instagram in JARVEE
Marco says
Thanks for the tips! What they all say is that you have to stand out with your branding and visuals in order to get notices, since IG is crowded with content. It’s even more about the visuals then it’s about the text part of the post, since this is the first impression that makes you interested in something.
Gordon says
Visualization is the key part and videos are the main tool of visualization. Good video worth like 1000 pictures, but Instagram tools allows you to make videos from it, so, above all techniques is Instagram video posting and targeting right niches. Thanks for the great article, it’s action calling.
Georgina says
I noticed that big or small but successful brands are using less hashtags then before, this always looks too spammy. Love the responsible hashtagging expression 🙂
Selina says
I have seen so many brands using micro influencers for growing their followings and brand in general and usually this works very good. But you have to choose them wisely because you could lose more if you create a bad brand image with a bad choice of the person for the brand.
Sadiq says
Eventhough this article is related to 2019 the trends are still the same. Competition is a bit stronger but the king of social platforms still remain Instagram. If we find our place there, we have found youth spring 🙂
Hugo says
Coolest part is that users appreciate more natural look than the photoshop one. It’s not necessary to invest tons of money to get great video or photos, the idea and intension is what matters.