What Is An Instagram Influencer: The Shopify Merchant’s Handbook

Instagram (or IG as people call it) may be spoken about in the same breath with Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. It may come as a surprise to you that Instagram is nothing like any of the other social media platforms. In the last couple of years, Instagram has been widely associated with the “influencers” that it created. So, if you’re asking yourself; “What is an IG influencer“, this article is for you. You’ll find many tips about influencer marketing for Shopify as well as Shopify Instagram marketing tips in this post. We will try to cover many aspects of social media marketing using Instagram.

An Introduction To Instagram Marketing For Shopify

Did you know that out of the 1 billion Instagram monthly users, images on Instagram get an average of 23% more engagement than Facebook. On average, brands on Instagram see ten times more engagement on Instagram than on Facebook. So, if you an eCommerce business owner and you are planning on using Instagram to promote your business, this is the moment for you.

 

Are you able to showcase AI powered related products, upsell items and frequently bought together products on your Shopify store? To get all of these and more, install Perzonalization for Shopify now and start your 14 day free trial.

 

This article will delve into the world of Instagram and investigate ways to boost eCommerce sales with this great social media channel. Here are a few questions we’ll try to anwer throughout this post:

  • What is an IG influencer?
  • How to find Instagram influencers for Shopify?
  • Which are the most popular Instagram marketing tips?
  • How to find dropshipping Instagram influencers for your Shopify business?
  • Which methods to use in order to grow Instagram followers?
  • What to do if you want to create a solid Shopify Instagram marketing strategy?
  • How to shape up your Shopify influencer marketing strategy?

Let’s start with the basics of Instagram marketing for Shopify.

Why Is Instagram Social Media Marketing So Important For A Shopify business?

  1. First and foremost, Instagram marketing involves the use of high-quality images of your products, which look much better and are more engaging than generic photos.
  2. Secondly, it gives your customers an easy and convenient way to indulge in online shopping from anywhere and anytime.
  3. Since marketing via Instagram has a better reach, it attracts a larger audience expanding your overall reach. Thus, it helps with better brand positioning and enhanced engagement.
  4. Apart from being more engaged, Instagram users are highly quick to convert to paying customers. A recent study showed that almost 72% of Instagram users make a purchase decision after seeing something on Instagram – the most popular categories being makeup, clothing, shoes, and jewelry.
  5. Another important reason why Instagram is a favorite for brands, is the uniqueness and variety of business-facing tools like Instagram Stories and shoppable Instagram posts. These tools can create excellent marketing practices for businesses, if used effectively.

How to do the best Instagram marketing for your Shopify store?

Instagram marketing is a popular area of social media marketing. When executed with care, Instagram marketing can bring a decent amount of traffic and revenues for Shopify stores. Influencer marketing for Shopify is an important part of Shopify Instagram marketing. We’ll deal with that in the “What is an IG influencer?” part of this post. Let’s dive into Shopify marketing, now!

Shopify Instagram Marketing Tips 1: Create a Strategy

An Instagram marketing campaign is a lot more than just publishing high-quality images. Instagram marketing for businesses typically includes the following:

  1. A well-thought out strategy backed by careful consideration on the user demographics and preferences
  2. A well-designed and creative Instagram content strategy
  3. Your overall business objectives

So if you want to be successful on Instagram, start by drawing out SMART goals by;

  • Identifying the amount of traffic you want
  • Your potential of growing real Instagram followers
  • Setting benchmarks for all of these elements

Instagram offers a wide range of demographic information and key performance indicators for each post. These provide you with information, like which type of posts has the potential to perform better and which posts will engage your audience more. Identifying and evaluating your Instagram page’s demographic information is the ideal way to reach your target audience. Once you know your audience, it will be easier to tailor your content, accordingly.

Look at Maybelline for instance. With clear and crisp imagery, the cosmetics and makeup giant stays true to its overall brand, which is Maybelline.

Shopify Instagram Marketing Tips 2: Optimize your Instagram Profile

You need to have a very strong Instagram profile, which should include your contact information, a keyword-optimized description and a logo. Apart from these, there are few more things you need to include in your Instagram profile to get more followers. These are:

Clickable Profile Links

Instagram gives you the option to add clickable links to other user profiles in your own bio. This becomes useful when you have more than one company, or if you are partnering with another merchant to run a contest. This way, you can use these links to direct traffic to other profiles. You can also use this feature to redirect people to your personal profile if that is aligned with your branding.

Story Highlights

Story highlights are displayed above your feed on your profile and they make your profile look meaty. You can highlight user generated content or other posts that tell your brand’s story.

Clickable Hashtags

Clickable hashtags can now be added to your profile description just by entering # and then the desired phrase, similar to how you would do on a post. Focusing on the branded hashtags is a good practice for Instagram business profiles.

Profile Photo

This should ideally be your brand logo. Whatever it is, it needs to be appealing, legible and aligned to your brand.

Highlight Your Website

Put the link to your website on your Bio or link your latest blog here. This will prompt your users to check what’s new on your website, and will give you some organic traffic.

Fashion Nova combines all these features into a well-optimized profile.

 

Are you able to showcase AI powered related products, upsell items and frequently bought together products on your Shopify store? To get all of these and more, install Perzonalization for Shopify now and start your 14 day free trial.

 

Shopify Instagram Marketing Tips 3: Hashtags

An Instagram post with at least one hashtag averages 12.6% more engagement than one without a hashtag. Hashtags are powerful. They do everything from attracting followers in your niche to developing a relatable brand image and increasing engagement.

There are six key Shopify Instagram hashtags that can be used by eCommerce owners.

Generic Hashtags

These are hashtags that are popular among a vast majority of Instagram users, and if used effectively, they can get you a good chunk of Instagram followers. These are #love, #food, #fitness, #weightloss, #puppylove, #photooftheday, #travel, #repost, #tbt.

Contest Hashtags

This is a type of branded hashtag that you create for a specific contest you want to run. When filtered by these hashtags, Instagram shows all posts that use these hashtags, and in this way, you attract people who are interested in your contest. Some contest hashtags are #instacontest, #giveaway, #contestalert, #sweepstakes, #contestentry etc.

Branded Hashtags

Brands should have their unique branded hashtags. These Instagram marketing hashtags are attached to every post and placed in their profiles. They can also be used to encourage followers to attach to any of their posts when they are referring to your brand. It can include your brand name, but that’s optional. Examples include Fashion Nova’s #NovaBabe hashtag or Frooti’s #thefrootilife.

 

Niche Specific Hashtags

Every brand will belong to one particular industry, and there will always be some Instagram marketing hashtags that will be relevant to that industry. On their own, they may not give you the same reach, but when combined with branded hashtags or contest hashtags, they are sure to get you some relevant traffic. For instance, for an online tea store, niche hashtags could be #teatime, #siptea, #lovetea, #earlymorningcuppa.

Seasonal Hashtags

These usually pertain to seasonal holidays or special occasions like Valentines Day, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. So, if you are an online gift store, there are lots of things you can do with these seasonal Instagram marketing hashtags, e.g. #myvalentine, #daughtersarespecial, #mothersday, #christmas.

Fun Hashtags

These, similar to the niche Instagram marketing hashtags, will need to be teamed up with some other hashtags to be effective. The objective of these hashtags is to entertain your audience. They are purely funny or witty. Some examples could be #hilarious, #funny, #instafunny, #lmao etc.

In order to optimize your reach and get the most out of your Instagram marketing, you need to use the right types of hashtags.

 

Are you able to showcase AI powered related products, upsell items and frequently bought together products on your Shopify store? To get all of these and more, install Perzonalization for Shopify now and start your 14 day free trial.

 

Look at how Inspirato nails it with hashtags on Instagram

 

 

 

Shopify Instagram Marketing Tips 4: Targeted Advertising

Instagram offers five advertising formats – namely, photos, videos, carousels, story ads and slideshow ads. Each of these is integrated seamlessly into the user’s interface. These are of tremendous importance to eCommerce owners, as they allow the business to link their page in the post. The “Shop Now” button appears at the bottom of the ad redirecting users to a specific product or home page.

These advertisements also make targeted campaigns easier. While creating a new ad, Instagram allows businesses to tailor the audience based on demographics.

Shopify Instagram Marketing Tips 5: Shoppable Posts

Instagram’s “shoppable posts” feature the most innovative social selling method for ecommerce websites. When a user clicks on a shoppable post, they are able to see the name and price of a product. When they click on the tag, he/she will be sent to a more detailed page featuring specific product details, similar items and other shoppable posts from the brand. Businesses can now create a Shopify Instagram store on their websites.

Shopify Instagram Marketing Tips & Tricks

Effective Instagram marketing comes from experience and from following best practices that have made brands famous in the past. The following Instagram marketing best practices have been tested for success and are followed by eCommerce businesses globally to promote Instagram pages.

  • Commenting on and re-posting your followers’ content are the best things you can do to grow followers and acquire more followers.
  • Run contests and giveaways.
  • Tag products to make them more shoppable. Use clear CTAs while tagging the items.
  • Do some research and curate hashtags.
  • Connect the Instagram business page to your Facebook page.
  • Use the recently introduced tools like texts, stickers and drawing features on your standard posts to make them more attractive.

  • Put good Instagram marketing captions to supplement your images – what Costa Coffee does below is a good example to that..

  • Instagram “Stories” feature is a great way for eCommerce businesses to be spontaneous and creative at the same time.
  • Publish posts which demonstrate another side of you – something which will make your audience proud to be able to relate to you. Check this post by Louis Vuitton.

 

What Is An IG Influencer?

An Instagram influencer is a person who has the ability to influence other users’ decisions and tastes by posting images, stories etc. on Instagram. Instagram influencers have many followers and are quite active on this social media platform. Some of these influencers are making 6 figure revenues each year via their brand partnerships.

Influencer Marketing For Shopify On Instagram

What is an IG influencer and why is an influencer important for Shopify businesses? Instagram Influencers are those individuals who understand their core audiences and are successful in building their personal brands ground up. Brands often partner with these people in innovative ways to draw audiences and give their brands the much required credibility they need.

Instagram influencer marketing is now the hot topic for marketers and eCommerce brands worldwide. It’s just word-of-mouth advertising by people who have huge follower bases, and whose recommendations are valued. It’s like a friend recommending a particular store for the best fashion accessories in town. You appreciate their recommendation because you trust their judgement. Brands use Instagram influencer marketing to partner with their niche online influencers, to tap and engage their audience and to increase brand awareness in an authentic and organic way.

Follow the below-mentioned steps to kick off your Instagram influencer marketing.

Step 1: Start with identifying your marketing goals

What is an IG influencer? Is she/he just a face and an account full of beautiful photography? NO, these influencers are talented people who are able to create content that will help you reach your marketing goals.

Do you want to increase brand awareness?  Or do you simply want to gain more followers and want more engagement? Or is it more click-throughs you are expecting from the influencer marketing? This will determine your reach, what kind of influencers you want to collaborate with and your Instagram marketing cost.

Step 2: How to find Instagram influencers for Shopify? 

What is an IG influencer and how are influencers classified? There are three types of Shopify Instagram influencers.

  1. Celebrity influencers
  2. Macro influencers
  3. Micro influencers

Small businesses should focus on micro influencers and perhaps one or two macro influencers. If your main goal is to find dropshipping Instagram influencers for your Shopify business, then focussing on micro influencers might be a good idea in terms of maximising the return on your marketing budget. Likewise, you may choose one item from your dropshipping store and ask your influencer to post an Instagram Reel featuring this item might be a handy way of driving traffic to your webshop.

Macro influencers are those who have more than 100,000 followers, and can mostly be afforded by big brands. For most of the Shopify businesses, it would not be possible to work with a macro influencer. However, Shopify Plus merchants are in a better position to afford macro influencers.

The key is to identify and find influencers who are prominent in the specific niche that you operate in. Their audience ideally should be similar to yours, and hence, it helps you get in front of the right people.

Step 3: Pitch your Shopify brand to your Instagram influencer

What is an IG influencer and how to convince an influencer? Influencers will not necessarily work with you just because you are paying them. So, ensure that you pitch your brand perfectly to the influencer. You could draft a one-page overview of your brand and what it stands for. Few things you need to keep in mind are;

  • Give your influencers the freedom to exercise their creativity
  • Avoid (don’t) dictating terms to them
  • Work directly with an influencer rather than going through a marketing agency

 

Now that you’ve found the answer to your question of “What is an IG influencer?“, it’s time to concentrate on more conversions! Install Perzonalization for Shopify now, start your 14 day free trial to start displaying AI powered related products, upsell items and frequently bought together products on your Shopify store.

 

Step 4: Optimize your Shopify Instagram influencer campaigns

What is an IG influencer and what type of marketing campaigns are executed by the Instagram influencers? Luckily, influencers are flexible people in terms of playing with campaign types. There can be sponsored posts, contests, branded content, product reviews and brand rep programs that your influencer might get done for you, depending on the terms of your agreement and your budget.

Step 5: Maintain transparency at all times

What is an IG influencer and is it legal to work with an influencer for Shopify marketing? Laws regarding full disclosure around brand-influencer partnerships, material connection and similar stuff is pretty stringent. So, stay on the right side of the law while dealing with influencers. If their word of mouth can make your brand, they can also do quite the opposite. Make sure that all terms of your association are clear between you and your influencer at the onset to avoid any surprises later.

To show how Instagram influencer marketing works, look at how ASOS is able to widen its reach by encouraging its influencer, Ashley Morrison to build natural and organic audience based around the brand.

 

The Wrap-Up

We hope that you have now found the answer to your question of “What is an IG influencer?“. Hopefully two aspects listed in this post are now clear for you; 1) what an influencer is 2) why influencers are important for Shopify businesses. We have also listed the most critical steps in creating effective influencer marketing for Instagram along with Shopify marketing tips – hoping that you’ll find them actionable.

Make sure you apply all of these Shopify Instagram marketing tips as a part of your Instagram marketing strategy 2021. With new trends and technology on the rise, it is also important that you quickly respond to change and adapt to a dynamic environment. Sustainable success in Instagram marketing and influencer marketing is achieved by businesses that are able to establish sound Instagram marketing goals and stay on top of trends to achieve their long-term objectives.

Curious to learn more? Take a look at related posts!

 

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