There are plenty of reasons why influencers and brands alike prefer Instagram over other social media platforms.

One of them is that Instagram has over two billion active users worldwide. This fact makes it a great tool for business as well as one of the most powerful promotional platforms for advertising products and services.

In this article, we’ll guide you through each step of promoting a product on Instagram and converting leads into sales.

Since this global platform is not just for personal use anymore, a lot of influencers and content creators are already turning their Instagram accounts into money-making machines.

As someone who knows a thing or two about increasing Instagram following and engagement, you also should have a solid sense of your brand and products and how you wish to present them.

And there is a chance to benefit from learning the best practices of platforms.

So, read on to find out how to promote products on Instagram.

Hands down, this is the only guide you’ll ever need when it comes to promoting products on Instagram. To avoid feeling overwhelmed, let’s first find out why you should market on Instagram.

Why Should You Promote Products and Services on Instagram

People go to Instagram for videos, stories, reels, and, of course, amazing pictures. This means Instagram offers promotional opportunities for business growth through a variety of visually-appealing options.

So why lose such an opportunity to show off what you have to promote in innovative ways?

In addition, Instagram helps maximize your business reach. By leveraging the right hashtags, you can expand brand awareness to new audiences.

Else, there is a chance that people will start talking about your products on Instagram.

Since Meta owns Instagram, you can easily use the same targeting options you already use on Facebook.

Hence, if you’re just starting out with Instagram, you don’t have to learn from scratch how to schedule and set up a campaign budget. It will all be done through Facebook.

According to Marketing Charts, Instagram has a higher engagement rate in comparison to social media platforms such as FB or Twitter.

As a result, you can expect your ROI rates to be higher and the entire campaign to be time-consuming and more effective.

Benefits of Instagram for Small Business

If you’re a content creator who is running a small business and don’t have hefty advertising budgets, Instagram is a place for you. The social media platform provides opportunities for everyone who brings value to users.

Let’s take a quick look at some of these benefits:

1. Build Brand Awareness

Brand awareness refers to the way in which the audience recognizes and remembers you and your business.

Basically, with high brand awareness, users will be more willing to interact with you and buy your products. Instagram offers tools for building a better social media presence so you can reach more users.

2. Get More Clicks on Your Links

Instagram’s built-in tools can help you with measuring past engagement, reach, and click-through data.

If you have affiliate links to promote, you can add those in IG stories that will take viewers straight to the brand’s website.

Then you can learn who clicked and how popular they are. In other words, Instagram is a ready-to-use platform where you can start making money online.

As long as you have products to sell, there are countless options for converting your traffic into leads and sales.

3. Take Advantage of Visual Content

Whether it is infographics, images, GIFs, or videos, visuals give a unique touch to your IG page. And each of these types has a different impact on your audience.

Besides creating powerful and impressive descriptions to show the value of your products, make use of visuals and invest in video production to influence people’s buying decisions as well.

10 Tips on How to Promote Products and Services on Instagram

There are some useful tips that you can use to promote products on Instagram and this section will introduce you to some of them. Let’s dive right in!

1. Think Beyond Content Production

While you can create short videos, memes, or even customer photos trying to fill up your followers’ feeds, it’s better to focus on what visuals work the best for your audience.

To achieve this goal, you have to be smart and flexible, and try out different ideas and different approaches.

As soon as you find out what content brings value to your audience you will have to ramp up the content production and post it more frequently.

To stay connected with your customers, you have to post at least 5 times a week (one post per day).

After conducting competitive research, you’ll notice that some of your competitors post 2 or even 3 times a day. It doesn’t necessarily mean you should do the same.

Engagement rate is the key to understanding posting frequency. Once you figure it out, you need to know the best time to post your content.

Another way to interact with your audience is to use Instagram Stories.

These temporary videos or photos last 24 hours on your profile so it gives your followers plenty of time to familiarize themselves with your content.

Keep in mind that Instagram is rapidly evolving its features so you have to be active to keep up with the changes.

Focusing on assessing and adapting to followers’ needs can be a daunting task.

To succeed, come up with a marketing strategy for this. Use data to create effective social media content that your followers will love.

2. Set Up a Business Account on Instagram

Before you craft a winning Instagram marketing strategy, you need to set up an Instagram business profile. This option can bring a number of benefits to content creators, such as:

  • You’re taken more seriously;
  • View account insights;
  • Enables you to add a link to your Instagram Story;
  • Take advantage of Instagram ads and promoted posts;
  • Enables you to schedule Instagram posts ahead of time;
  • You get the ability to tag products in your posts.

Sounds great? Now let’s take a look at how you can switch your account over to an Instagram business profile.

To get started, go to Settings. Next, tap Account and find a blue call-to-action at the bottom of the page. To finish the process tap on Switch to Business Profile.

3. Use Instagram Hashtags to Build Community

Generally, the first thing that comes to your mind when it comes to promoting products and services on Instagram is hashtags. Using actionable hashtags, or in other words, your own branded hashtags can be a huge game-changer.

You can use those not only on Instagram but also on other social media platforms, such as YouTube and Twitter.

Using a combination of popular and niche hashtags can boost your visibility on the search engine results and find your target audience.

If you want to increase Instagram engagement, make sure to add hashtags that people use to tag their photos with the products they just bought.

You kill two birds with one stone when someone reposts a picture with your hashtags – not only do you introduce your product to new audiences but also enjoy free advertising.

When more people will realize the value of your products they will be more inclined to share the images with your hashtags on their pages.

4. Cross-Promote Your Social Media Profiles

Used correctly, the cross-platform promotion provides an effective way to use Instagram for business.

Knowing how to create quality content is not enough. You also have to promote it.

When it comes to producing high-quality content, you have to put in a lot of effort. Writing an engaging caption and taking the perfect photo shouldn’t go to waste.

So, what can you do about it?

Once you’ve published the next piece, post it across other social media platforms too. This way, you improve your social media exposure and tell users outside Instagram you’re there and ready to engage.

The cross-platform promotion provides many advantages. Keep in mind though, that every social media platform comes with its own best practices.

In other words, you may want to reuse the published piece in a different context. Doing this will help get more ROI from your presence on other social media while crafting content for all your audiences.

To make things easier, consider using scheduling software, video editing tools and marketing solutions from Admitad.

Here’s some food for thought before you start

5. Post Product Teasers

Since Instagram provides a lot of great tools for promoting products and services, you just need to choose the right tactic to encourage your target audience to click your affiliate links and buy products.

Don’t be too pushy introducing your products, potential customers are going to drop. Instead, generate some buzz by sharing product teasers.

One way to share an intriguing teaser is to use Stories and reels featuring you (or other people) using the product you’re promoting.

For example, you can tease people with a discount and a product image to click your affiliate links. It is effective for almost every niche. Even if there are drop-offs, users are at least going to engage with the post by reading it, liking it, or sharing it.

Therefore, showing off what you have to offer to your customers is important. Just be gentle when promoting it.

6. Show Why Your Products Matter

No doubt, Instagram is a place to promote your product, but it is also an experience-sharing platform. Self-portrait photograph in real-world settings saw the growth in popularity some 10 years ago and is still popular.

So, you will be able to reach new audiences by promoting your product more humanly. Explain why and how your product brings value. What makes it worth buying?

Encourage people to tag you their posts. User-generated content with your links in it can be your best bet for increasing visibility and sales on Instagram.

7. Use Instagram Stories For Business

If you want your followers to get interested in a product you’re promoting, take advantage of Instagram Stories.

These are separate from your traditional feed and are only going to be live for 24 hours.

Stories, however, can be saved to one of your devices to be used again if needed.

This feature acts as a sort of slideshow, with each piece uploaded to your feed representing a new slide.

If there are Stories available they will be shown as a circle around your logo. Once users tap your logo, a new window will pop up showing each Story one by one.

There is a number of reasons how you can benefit from using Instagram Stories.

First, since Stories appear at the top of your Instagram profile, this is one of the first things your visitors see. You can use the Stories section to post short videos that are totally different from the rest of your content.

Second, Stories enable you to experiment with various types of content. Whether it is infographics, videos, or live streams, Stories have got you covered. What’s more, you can add affiliate links to your Stories to make them look more natural.

8. Build Relationships with Influencers

If you create Instagram posts, chances are you will want to generate more exposure for your content.

If you want to reach new audiences why not ask those who already have them?

Collaborating with other content creators is a smart way to get more social influence without spending a bunch of money.

To start with, use hashtags or Instagram analytics tools to find a fellow influencer in the same niche as you who has the same number of real followers.

Analyze their engagement rate, and the audience to avoid fraud (gender, interests, city, country…).

Reach out to them asking whether they might be interested in collaborating and, if they are, ask what type of collaborations they are into.

Here’re the most common types of Instagram collaborations:

– Image posts

Share a variety of photos, and add an exciting caption telling why you collaborate with another influencer and how your followers can benefit from it. Tag your partner. This will increase your engagement rates and expand brand awareness to new audiences;

– Instagram video

According to Hootsuite videos receive about 38% more engagement than images so it would be regrettable to miss such an opportunity.

Upload professionally made videos featuring another content creator discussing some topic and mentioning you and what you have to promote. Again, both the topic and affiliate product should benefit viewers in some way;

– Instagram story

Since Stories is a very useful tool for your social media marketing, you can use it for influencer collaborations too. Showcase live events, workshops or training with your partners. Add affiliate links to relevant products that may benefit viewers;

– Reels

Create short, yet entertaining videos with quick tutorials, challenge videos, and how-to guides. Invite other content creators to make your content more inclusive;

– Instagram LIVE

Going LIVE on Instagram helps you to push your content to more people. Unlike other content types Live videos should be used from time to time to showcase amazing, real-time collaborations or engaging moments like Q&As or reveals.

9. Find Your Best Time to Post on Instagram

Obviously, promoting products and services on Instagram should correspond with your posting frequency.

If you post too often, you are sure to turn off your followers. When they only see advertisements from you, they might just unfollow you out of frustration.

However, if you complement valuable content with relevant affiliate links you keep your audience engaged and loyal.

At the same time, posting too little could ruin your promotional efforts. So, you have to find an ideal posting frequency to make sure that you stay on people’s news feeds regularly.

Post at least 1 time per day during the peak hours, and no more than 2 times per day.

A study by Later showed that the worst day to post on this platform is Monday afternoon and Thursday evening. Early morning can prove to be the best time to post your content.

Their study also revealed that the ideal times to post are between 8-9 am, and 2 am. The early hours of the morning is the time when Instagram users are getting ready for their work to travel to the office.

While 2 am refers to the hour when users scroll through the Instagram feed instead of sleeping. Thus, these are the best days to post on Instagram.

Keep in mind though, that the best time to post on Instagram may vary based on your target audience. To get better results, use post schedulers before starting improvements and check the metrics after making the changes.

10. Host an Instagram Giveaway

If you want to get more real Instagram followers, running a giveaway can be one of the most effective tactics. With the right plan, you can organically increase post reach – all while creating a strong community around your account.

Giveaways and contests are a powerful way to reach new audiences while engaging your existing followers.

In fact, Tailwind performed a study that revealed Instagram giveaways can help grow your followers 70% faster. Therefore, contest posts receive a significant amount of engagement.

You can do your own research to see how effective a giveaway can be in your niche. After receiving the results, you can decide if you would like to run the contest once again or not.

Here’s a quick checklist to help you run an Instagram giveaway:

  • Determine your marketing goals;
  • Decide on an Instagram giveaway prize;
  • Set the entry criteria;
  • Promote your Instagram giveaway.

How to Promote Products on Instagram FAQs:

1. How to get more Instagram followers on Instagram?

If you have to increase your Instagram following, you have to focus on creating high-quality content.

Make sure that people in your niche know what hashtags you’re using, they are willing to participate in contests, you know how to schedule posts, and share them on other social media platforms.

2. When is the Best Time to Post on Instagram?

To find the best time to post your content on Instagram, you need to determine what times your followers are likely to engage with your content.

3. How to do business promotion on Instagram?

Before even thinking about promoting on Instagram, you have to first switch your profile to a business account. Next, identify and analyze your target market by using Instagram features.

4. Is the Instagram business account free?

Yes, you can switch to the Business Profile for free.

5. How to promote a product on Instagram without paying

The first step is to find relevant hashtags to reach your target audience. Then you need to aim for the perfect balance of quality, quantity, and consistency of posting. Take advantage of all tools available – post pictures, create videos, share stories, and even live stream.

Interact with people, especially when you see an opportunity to highlight product features to attract customers.

Never underestimate the importance of connections. Put in some work to actually find those who may be interested in your content. If users feel they can benefit from your content and your affiliate links, they will interact with you.

Encourage them by tagging and mentioning them in your posts.

The Bottom Line

Having a solid plan on how to promote a product on Instagram will help you determine whether people are willing to click your links. You can use one or any combination of the ways we’ve covered above to promote your product and get clicks on your links.

What other ways can content creators and influencers use to promote products and services on Instagram? We’d love to hear your tips and creative strategies.