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There was a time when Instagram was seen largely as a younger cousin to Facebook and Twitter—but with more than 800 million monthly users, it’s a social media force to be reckoned with.

Of course, those 800 million users provide some worthy opportunities for your company to gain some exposure and grow its audience—and that’s just for starters. With the right strategy, you can actually turn Instagram into a sales machine, using it to kickstart conversions and improve your bottom line.

In this post, we’ll show you how it’s done.

Add a Call to Action

Instagram is unique among social networks in that it doesn’t really afford much room for hyperlinks—so when you do get the chance to add a link to your Insta, you should do so.

One place where links are permitted? Your bio.

Add a link, but not just a link. Also include a strong call to action, encouraging users to click through. And make sure the link itself goes somewhere good—to an ecommerce store, or, at the very least, to product and service pages.

If you’re a cause-based organization, share your recent activities and achievements, or highlight some major news that affects you and your followers, and link out to a call-to-action page where someone can sign a petition or make a donation.

This is simple, but it can also be really effective at making it easy for your followers to buy from you or engage with you.

Add Links to Your Story

Another place where Instagram will let you include links is in your Story.

Wait, you might be saying. Instagram doesn’t allow for links in a story. Ah, but it does—assuming you have 10,000 followers or more.

If not, the links feature isn’t available to you, which is a good reason to work at boosting your follower number—but that’s a topic for another day.

If you can include links in your story, do so—again, with a strong CTA. This can be a great place to include a slideshow of your latest products, and make it easy for viewers to click through and engage.

Offer Free Products

Admittedly, this doesn’t work for all businesses.

For companies that mass produce small ticket items like accessories for people and pets—watches, sunglasses, hats, LED collars for cats and dogs—it’s recently been trendy to take out paid ads on Instagram, offering free products; all the customer has to pay is the shipping.

There are risks to this—it could turn out to just lose you money—but if you’re just looking to build buzz and get your products out there, this can be effective. It’s especially recommended if you’re selling a product people will likely buy more than once or multiples of.

Encourage User-Generated Content

Another tactic that can work well: Encourage your customers to produce Instagram content for you.

Encourage them to post images in which they are wearing/using your products—and to either tag your account or use your branded hashtag as they do so.

This is one of the best ways to create a real sense of community around your brand, boosting visibility in the process. It also serves as a kind of social proof, making it more appealing for other customers to purchase your product.

More Ways to Turn Instagram into a Money Maker

Of course, we hardly touched on Instagram’s paid ad platform, which can also be a handy way to boost revenues.

But no matter how you want to use Instagram, it’s critical to do so within the context of an integrative digital marketing plan. That’s something we can offer at Driven2020—a comprehensive, individualized, and goal-oriented strategy that will help you turn your digital assets into sales generators—and yes, that can include Instagram.

Start using social media to improve your bottom line. Reach out to our team at Driven2020 today.