Selling on Instagram: How to Increase Engagement With Personalized Posts

Online business in our modern era depends on social media platforms for the bulk of promotional work. People love feeling connected, and we also love seeing beautiful things and sharing them with our friends and loved ones.

This makes Instagram a great platform for basically any type of company. If you can nail down your particular aesthetic, and you are smart about your content strategy, you can be very successful with your Instagram sales.

This is especially true as 2021 is coming up, and online marketplaces are now the go-to shopping options in quarantine. Whether you’re already an established Instagram seller or you’re just looking to start out on the platform, here are four great tips for how to grow your engagement with personalized sales posts in the new year!

 

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What does “personalized posts” mean?

Personalization is a marketing strategy present across all platforms – email, webshops, and all of the many social media outlets. The purpose of that approach to marketing is to be more effective in meeting the needs of the customers and to do so in the most efficient way possible.

If you do it well, people can interact with your business much easier, much faster. This makes customers more satisfied – everybody likes smooth service! – and when they’re satisfied, they’re more likely to keep coming back and possibly even bring a friend along.

To put this in context, personalizing your Instagram selling posts means that you will be monitoring your target audience and adapting your content to match those trends. Collect information about their online behavior, how they interact with your page, what they are the most interested in.

Employ Instagram analytics tools to make sense of it all, and then use those insights to make your content more valuable to them.

Here are a few personalization strategies that can skyrocket your Instagram marketing campaign in 2021.

 

Show that you care about your followers

Personalizing your posts lets you create a closer bond with your followers. Your audience gets to know the human behind the page, and they will appreciate that connection. The best way to achieve that feeling of closeness is to always treat your followers as individuals.

While your page is starting out, make a short welcome post once a week and tag individual new followers in it. Once the page grows, and you get tens of thousands of followers, this obviously becomes impractical. Instead, spotlight individuals who somehow contribute to your brand.

Keep an eye on what they post on their own stories. Occasionally repost a relevant picture from them and credit them for it. Express gratitude for their support and offer incentives like discounts. Writing a letter of appreciation is a common business practice, and you can adapt it to the social media format and boost your Instagram marketing success too!

 

 

Snag the spotlight

In other words, focus on making content that will catch people’s eye when scrolling. Personalization doesn’t refer to just tailoring your posts to a specific follower or group of followers. It also means tailoring them to your niche so that they’ll stand out in the right ways.

Take a moment and consider the message behind your content. What’s the idea that people get from it? What are your brand values? Are they clearly reflected in what you post? Try and see your stuff from the followers’ perspective.

This can be tricky since, in your head, you already know what you’re aiming for. That can cloud your perspective, and you will overlook unclarities and potential misinterpretations. Get an outside view by asking a trusted friend to review your content and tell you what it feels like from their perspective.

Ideally, post things that will directly speak to specific interests instead of covering everything at once. Be non-generic. Share a view of your production line if you have one. Post a picture of your facility, office space, etc.

Tailor your content to be maximally shareable

When you do a good job personalizing your posts, people will relate to them more and want to share more. Your popularity will grow in turn. So make a point of being relatable.

Especially on Instagram, where you can just tag a friend on an original post and not bother copying the whole thing every time you share, this can be a powerful marketing weapon.

Here’s an easy tip to make use of that feature: literally invite people to tag their friends on your posts. For instance, let’s say you’re selling study tools for students, Subjecto is a good example of such a business. Add a prompt like “Tag someone who is awesome at exam prep!” in a post about study hacks.

In effect, this makes all of your followers an extended arm of your marketing department. (Especially handy if your actual marketing department is just you.) As long as they can connect to your content, they will want to share it with real people – potential new customers.

Avoid looking like an advert train

If there is one pitfall that every marketer is subject to, it’s being too blatant in their marketing. Nothing like an obvious commercial to make people run away! It’s a paradox: we want to buy things and get good recommendations for what to purchase, but we don’t want to be advertised things.

You have to navigate this minefield. Carefully plan out your posts so that you can promote your products in a form that’s not an ad. Your marketing has to be very subtle in its sales orientation, almost like you’re offering the product as an afterthought to nicely spice up a regular message.

If you make your advertisement too obvious, people will skip it in a heartbeat. Adverts are way too ubiquitous to ever be interesting again. More importantly, with the amount of intrusive and pushy commercials all over the web these days, the very concepts of “ad,” “promotion,” etc., have developed an exceedingly negative connotation.

In order to write social media ads that will actually get clicks, your best bet is to – yep, you guessed it – personalize them. Obviously, this isn’t something that you can really tailor to individual followers, but do tailor it to the niche market. Do everything you can to stand out from the competition.

For this to work, make sure to revisit the first point of this article: building a connection, showing that you care. When your page makes people feel welcome, they will enjoy your page in their feed and be willing to give your promotional posts a chance.

 

In the end, let’s review

You can personalize your content for followers and for the niche. Show people that you care, treat your followers as individuals and make posts that stimulate sharing. Find a way to stand out from the competition, and don’t be pushy with your advertisement. Follow these strategies, and your Instagram engagement rates will definitely see a rise in 2021!

Do you have a favorite personalization strategy that you’ve been using for a while already? What kinds of Instagram ads tend to get your attention when you scroll through the stories? We’d love to hear your insights, so leave us a comment!

Linda Ferguson is dedicated to research and writing in a number of fields such as Big Data, digital marketing, and sales. The texts she writes are always informative, based on qualitative research but nevertheless pleasant to read. In her spare time, Linda is a botanist and enjoys reading popular fiction literature.