The Perfect Instagram Process for E-commerce Sellers

On the 32nd episode of Marketing Interruption, your host Andrew Maff dives into the Instagram process he uses for e-commerce sellers on a daily basis. He talks about the process for research, branding, posting, optimizing and of course, outreach. With this information you should be able to turn your Instagram into a sales machine!

Tune in and enjoy today's interruption!

MENTIONED IN TODAY’S EPISODE:

LinkTree - Flick - Sprout Social

TODAY'S EPISODE:

00:40

Hello, Episode Number 32 marketing interruption. I'm your host, Andrew Maff tone today I'm going to fly through the Instagram process that I do for e-commerce sellers. And the reason we fly through is because I wrote out a lot so bear with me, I will try to put as much of it in the show notes. If not, of course, you can always reach out to me and I'll just send you all my notes. So a quick little background Years and years ago, right around when Instagram came out, I was in an agency that focused on hospitality. So we were taking these great food pictures, posting them on Instagram and then just kind of hoping that something would happen and we just never really worked and it wasn't doing as well as it was. So shortly thereafter, I really started to dig into social media and Instagram specifically to try to figure out what it is I was missing. And basically this is what I dove into and this is now what I've proven is okay, this is how this works. Now there's the caveat of you got to know your audience and you need to know your and you need to know how to do great creative because of your creative sucks and your imagery is garbage that no one's gonna look at you anyway, but I'm gonna apply a plow through that. So the first section we're gonna talk about here research. So follow your competitors, see what they're doing. Use websites like answer the public are also asked or things like that to decipher what type of content you're going to post. Use your Google Analytics to make sure you know her demographics are Find yourself a talented Social Media Manager and a community coordinator, as well as curating a list of influencers, you might also want a designer, it kind of depends on who's working there. So if you've already noticed, what I mentioned is that the top social media team has at least three people, that doesn't mean they have to be full time. However, if they can be, that's great, that's ideal. That means you're really plowing through your social. Well, let's get into branding now. So making sure everything looks the same by now and hope to think that this is common sense, but it needs to be aesthetic and used to look the exact same way. Keep your brand voice, your brand aesthetic, all that stuff the exact same. Come up with a cohesive look, find yourself a graphic designer, which I kind of just mentioned. And you're going to want to have your graphic designer create templates, so it doesn't need to be wildly templated. Otherwise, it's gonna look wildly templated. But if you have them create kind of a concept for each category of posts that you're going to be doing. It's gonna make it go a lot faster, it's gonna be a lot more efficient posting. So, you're gonna want your social media manager post daily. That's my suggestion, at least daily or three to five stories a day at a minimum, sometimes more may very rarely less, you're always going to want to share your own posts and things like that. But always tag your products, always tag influencers or whoever else was mentioned in the video or in the images that you posted, use anywhere from 10 to 30 hashtags. Now once you pass that 10,000 follower mark, you can slow down the use of hashtags. You don't need to overdo them, they really help in the beginning to kind of get that extra reach. But you don't want to use shadow banned hashtags, which you could go to the hashtag It will literally tell you that it's shadow banned. And you don't want to use too many hashtags you want to use just right and you want to change them up test using geotagging. So if you're local, if you have a retail shop your brick and mortar somewhere geotagging will always work for you. If not, you might want to change your geotagging based on maybe the influencer you're using or something like that. So tagging that location of the post can always work great as well. Experiment with doing single images carousels, which can work great because of the engagement or video, all those, test all those, and then share all of your new posts into stories. So it's an easy one, one off story posted you have two more here. Okay, so outreach. So this is the most important one. Everyone thinks that this was the issue I had years ago when I was in hospitality. Everyone thinks that I made this beautiful picture, I have this great video, and I posted on Instagram now where all my followers, that is not how this works. So you have to go out social media is about being social. You can't just be a wallflower and hide in the corner. Not everyone wants to approach the wallflower. Some people do but not everyone. So you have to go out and talk to other people and then they'll start coming to you. So have your community coordinator contact people or comments on other people or like other photos and things like that for at least three to five hours a day. And this is just Instagram. I'm not talking having gotten into Twitter or Facebook or anything like that. That'll be another day. Another podcast. You want them to like and reply to all comments. So whether they're on your, they're in your DMS, they're, you know, from stories and things like that, or obviously they're on your own posts, or maybe they replied to a comment that you made on another post.

05:14

Once a new post goes live, this always works really well. So once a new post goes live, you're going to want to go back to your previous posts and real like everyone's comment. So let's say I posted yesterday, and I got 500 comments, and I liked and commented on all of them. And then I post today, as soon as that goes live, I'm going to go back to my post yesterday, and I'm going to read like, all those comments. It's a way that Instagram will basically give them an alert that so and so like your comment, and they'll look and go, why they just like my comment again. And they will actually go back to your profile and see that there's a new post. It sounds kind of like a weird growth hack. And it pretty much is but it's got a great snowball effect of getting people who engaged with you the day before to come to the next day and so on. Then go to the hashtags you're using talk to people there that's kind of self explanatory. And then share other people's posts. And again, this is kind of relevant to what your branding is. So you may not always want to do this, but I always like to share at least one to two other companies, other influencers or customers posts as long as they're not a competitor. And then last optimize. So on a monthly basis, have your social media manager go back and see what were the best times that you posted, have them tag the the type of posts that you're doing, you can do this in Sprout Social, which is what we use. And you can basically go back and see like, okay, all of our videos did well or all of our videos containing this did well and you'll really start to know what's working and what's not. You're gonna want to optimize your profile, profile, image description link, try using link tree, stuff like that. That one's also kind of explanatory, have a pretty self explanatory CTA. And then on a weekly basis, reevaluate the hashtags you're using and adjust accordingly. So make sure you're always seen which hashtags actually worked. You don't want to overuse them because you could get banned from using them. The last thing you want to get banned on Instagram, but I feel like that was more than enough. So that's all I got for you. I will see you all tomorrow.