Instagram isn’t dead and even with the recent drop in organic reach, businesses still turn a profit from marketing solely on Instagram. Do you want to learn how to sell on Instagram in Nigeria?
Keep reading!! Instagram has millions of active users in Nigeria alone and even with the crazy growth potential on TikTok, Instagram is considered better for marketers and businesses than TikTok. Instagram has so many features and tools to help businesses and entrepreneurs drive customers and sales consistently.
I’ll be sharing a simple step process to help you master how to sell on Instagram in Nigeria.
How To Sell On Instagram In Nigeria
1. Choose a Viable Niche
I’ve talked several times on this blog about the importance of niches in Marketing however I understand that not enough people know what a niche even means. Well, simply put, your niche is a small category of a larger market that’ll value your products and services. It’s a market that’ll harbor your dream customers.
Marketing years ago would have worked out even by serving a basic large market, unfortunately, as the years go by, every Market becomes a lot more competitive. For example, the health niche would have had fewer sellers a few years back than today. People start new health businesses every year, hence increasing the supply of the product or service.
Basic economics allows us to understand that the more the supply without a simultaneous increase in demand, the more competitive the market would be. Niching down is extremely important because the narrow you go in a market, the less competitive it’ll be.
For example, as opposed to choosing the health niche, you could choose a sub-niche instead of veganism or cardio, these niches will be a lot less competitive. Also, a business that caters to a target market will also be more attractive to that market than a generic one.
I’d rather buy products from a vegan-specific brand than from a generic health brand. Here’s an in-depth video with crucial questions to ask in order to validate your niche idea.
2. Setup a Highly Optimized profile
You’ll need an account to market and sell your products on Instagram. I’d need you to start fresh with a new account. This is really easy to do, just head over to Instagram.com and follow the instructions to create a new account.
- Make sure to choose a professional username, ideally your brand name without unnecessary dashes and spaces.
- Set your account name and make sure to add searchable keywords.
- Switch to a business account from the default creator mode to be able to access your analytics and other necessary tools for marketing
3. Find your Competitors
When it comes to marketing online, there’s nothing new under the sun. Try not to obsess over reinventing the wheel and instead find what works, gain inspiration, and create something new.
In the context of Instagram, you’ll need to find other 10-20 brands that are doing quite well and analyze their strategy. From your analysis, get the following things in order to get your profile up and going:
- Bio
- Highlights
- Content ideas
4. Plan your marketing strategy
Once, you have your profile all set up, it’s time to start marketing. I’ve categorized the most effective strategies into three parts.
Organic marketing
Instagram still has immense organic potential, people still blow up every day and generate sales for free on Instagram. It’s not all roses and balloons though, Instagram organic growth takes quite a while and a lot of strategies.
- Post quality Feed content consistently
Depending on your niche, you’ll need t to avoid posting photos of yourself and your food. Instead, post professionally designed slides and images sharing valuable information regarding what you sell.
These content pieces could be entertaining, informative, inspirational, or educational.
- Engage your audience with IG stories
We’ve all seen those big accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram but barely enough likes. These accounts suffer from low engagement with their audience and when they try to sell, barely any of their followers see these posts.
Make sure you consistently post 3-4 Instagram stories per day to engage your followers.
Let them see the behind-the-scenes of your brand and get to know, like, and trust your business. This way they’re more likely to buy from you when you sell.
- Sell to your audience on Instagram stories and lives.
When it comes to selling online, you need a way to humanize the whole process. Selling needs to spike emotions and reliability.
Selling on your lives and stories is an amazing way to get more conversions as opposed to just posting promotional content on your feed.
- Prioritize Reels for fast brand growth.
Reels have a high organic potential as Instagram is currently pushing these content types similar to TikTok videos. So to get more followers, start creating more reels and grow from there.
Instagram Ads
Organic marketing is just one way to market and sell your products online, another way to do so is with Ads. Just like with its sister platform “Facebook”, Instagram allows businesses to run ads on their platforms. This requires some form of expertise to make sure you’re targeting the right people and sending them to an offer that actually converts.
You’ll also need to work on your Ad copy to ensure that it convinces the readers to click on to buy from you. This strategy requires a huge technical Know-how and is therefore not an advisable marketing strategy for new business owners. On the other hand, financially buoyant businesses outsource this aspect of their business to expert agencies.
One thing to keep in mind about running ads is obviously the fact that you’ll need to put money in to get money out, hence optimizing every single aspect of your business sales process and focusing on converting most of your leads to sales is of absolute importance. Simply put, you don’t want to send paid traffic from Instagram to a poorly designed website or landing page as this would simply be a waste of money.
Influencer Marketing
This is similar to paid ads but is a lot more effective. Let’s take two ads for instance: One was ran by a random health brand using Instagram Ads while the other by your favourite fitness influencer talking about the same product. Research shows that people are more likely to buy when their favourite influencer tells them to. In essence, influencer marketing is a more cost-effective way to market on Instagram.
As a business owner, you’ll simply have to find an influencer of your choice, make sure you choose based on the engagement and quality of their followers and not just by quantity as most people result to buying followers to trick brands into patronizing them. You’ll also need to choose an influencer in a niche that’s in line with that of your business.
Once you find the influencer of your choice, send them a pitch through email or direct message, pitching your offer and negotiating a one-off cost of the sponsored content. You could either choose a story ads or a feed post ad. Once the whole process is completed and payment is made, you’ll start getting clicks and customers from that ad.
This is a more detailed step guide to influencer marketing in Nigeria
Unfortunately, not every click to your store will result into a sale, you therefore need to imploy other marketing strategy to ensure you’ll making back your Adspend. You could use Retargeting ads or Email marketing to reconnect with website visitors who left without making a purchase.
Conclusion
Instagram is still a viable marketing platform for business owners and entrepreneurs but there are several other viable social media platforms to try out for marketers. Explore this list to discover the.