A Graphic Designer’s Guide to Selling On Instagram

As a graphic designer, you can use Instagram to get more clients for your business. But, you must have a strong strategy for marketing your designs and merch on the platform.

If you’d like to learn more about building an effective plan, then read on to discover 5 genius tips for profiting from your skills in this graphic designer’s guide to selling on Instagram.

1. Switch to an Instagram Business Account

This may sound like a clichéd tip for graphic designers, but switching to a business account will help you get your work in front of more clients.

A personal account can help your marketing efforts in many different ways. With it, you can do a lot to promote your brand and be able to track likes, follows, comments, etc.

But, with a business account, you’ll be able to use the platform’s eCommerce functionality and create shoppable posts.

You’ll also be able to procure more insightful data that will allow you to focus on growing your business by tracking a lot of important metrics, including the following:

• Post Reach: This is the number of people who see each of your posts on the platform.
• Post Impressions: This is how many times your post has been seen by users.
• Profile Visitors: This is the number of people who visited your Instagram profile.
• Link Clicks: The number of times your bio link got clicked.

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Instagram analytics provides you with a ton of information, and with this data at your fingertips, you have the power to make better-informed choices about which audience to target, the best posts to promote, the types of content to publish in the future, and much more.

In short, you’ll be able to improve your content strategy on social media and reach wider audiences.

To switch to a business account, all you have to do is:

• Go to your Instagram profile
• Click on the hamburger menu (looks like three lines on top of each other)
• Next, click on “Settings”, and then “Account”
• Finally, choose the “Switch to Business Account” option.

2. Develop Cross-Sharing Partnerships with Other Brands

You can partner with another brand on Instagram to help you sell your products or services as a graphic designer. When done well, this type of social media collaboration can benefit the audiences of both brands.

The strategy is called co-branding and focuses on getting two or more brands to create, share, or promote content in order to harness the power of their respective audiences to boost each other’s marketing efforts and increase the target audience of all parties involved.

Some of the benefits of cross-sharing with other brands on social media include:

• Lead generation and sales growth
• Increased brand awareness and recognition
• Enhanced credibility and loyalty
• A reduction in advertising costs
• Expanding your range of goods or services
• Building long-lasting relationships with other brands or influencers

There are tons of companies that already benefit from this type of marketing strategy. Some popular brands include who are using this strategy effectively include:

• Burger King and McDonald’s
• Ben & Jerry’s and Chunky Dunkeys
• Mercedes and Louis Vuitton

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Follow these steps to find the right partners for cross-marketing:

• Set Your Goal: Be concrete about your main purpose and set one main goal that you will focus all your efforts toward. For example, your goal might be to increase your target audience, get more followers, or boost sales.
• Thoroughly Analyze Your Target Audience: For this to work, you must have a clear buyer persona (or personas) and enough information about the needs and wants of the target market that you can use to help you connect with other brands that cater to relevant audiences.
• Find Potential Partners: There are many places where you can find partners for cross-marketing campaigns on social media. For instance, you might search on a site like Collabosaurus where you will be matched with relevant partners for mutually beneficial collaborations on Instagram.

Once you’ve found the right partners, draft and sign an advertising contract that will protect both parties and ensure all conditions are met.

This agreement will include all the responsibilities of both brands, including a budget, expectations, and any other relevant information that will help you work together successfully.

3. Keep Brand Messaging Consistent

As a graphic designer, you can leverage social media to project yourself as an authority in your niche.

One of the best ways to do so is to use common brand messaging across all parts of your digital marketing mix. One of the best ways to start is by using web design tools for your website to create unique, engaging, and on-brand content that can be used as a template for the content shared on Instagram and other social networks. .

By maintaining consistency across your marketing, you will create a brand message and visual style that is instantly recognizable by your target audience. This will help you build trust with them, which will result in more engagement and sales.

“When people scroll through their feeds, they need to be able to identify you in a split second,” branding expert and founder of Mojomox Saskia Ketz explains. “Consistency in color, tone, and fonts helps people recognize brands in an instant.”

You can create consistent campaigns by following these tips:

• Define your brand and message first. Before you can create consistent messaging for your brand, you must first define your brand and the message you want to get across to your target audience. Once you’re clear on this, you can then proceed to the next step.
• Set guidelines for your brand. Create clear rules and standards for all the material (both written and visual) that you will create on social media. This includes your brand’s tone and voice, color palette and images, logo, fonts, copy, frequency, etc.
• Organize all your marketing assets in one place. When you have a single hub where you (or your team) work from, it makes it a lot easier to maintain brand consistency across all channels accessible by everyone who requires them.
• Use a marketing calendar to plan ahead. Stay on top of all your campaigns and promotional efforts by taking advantage of marketing calendars and other planning tools. This will also help you coordinate multichannel campaigns for simultaneous campaigns on one platform.

4. Integrate Instagram with Facebook

Instagram and Facebook work together seamlessly for business. The ability to link Facebook and Instagram gives you the opportunity to leverage the cross-sharing, messaging, and eCommerce capabilities of both platforms.

Connecting your Instagram account to your businesses Facebook page is a simple process:

• First, name your page after your business. Then, add a description in the About section. This will be helpful in guiding users to find your page and explain what your business does.
• Next, add a profile and cover photo. You might use the logo for Instagram as a profile photo and for the cover photo, choose an image that represents your business well. This can be a picture of your shop, products, team, etc. Just remember that when using a logo on any social network, you need to copyright your logo to protect it from theft or misuse.
• Finally, add a call to action. At the top of the page, add the action you want visitors to take. This will direct your page visitors to complete the action, whether it’s to visit the website, call your shop, join your list, etc.

After connecting your two social media accounts, you can then proceed to create a product catalog on Facebook (if you haven’t done so already).

Once you’ve added the shop to your Facebook page, you can submit your account for review, and as soon as it’s approved, you’ll be ready to start making sales through your Facebook shop.

The review process typically takes a few days, and once you’re approved, you will receive a notification on Instagram. After that, you’ll be able to start adding products to your posts by selecting the “Tag Products” link which appears below the “Tag People” option.

*Note that in each post, you can either tag people or products, but never both.

5. Stick to Your Niche

This is important because there are so many different types of graphic design available today, including:

• Corporate graphic design
• Marketing graphic design
• UI graphic design
• Packaging graphic design
• Motion graphic design
• Vehicle wrap graphic design
• Apparel wrap graphic design
• Print media and publication design
• Environmental graphic design

…to name but a few.

You want to create content that captures the interest of your actual prospects, which means you must specify your niche and avoid straying from it in everything you do on social media.

Just don’t restrict yourself too much. You must still be able to show your creativity, but make sure that the vast majority of the content you post on social media is clearly within the realm of your chosen specialization.

Conclusion

These 5 tips will help you sell more and Instagram. Implement them as part of your marketing strategy on the platform so you can start enjoying the many benefits that come with making full use of the platform’s marketing and eCommerce features.

Your turn. Which of these steps do you intend to add to your Instagram marketing strategy first? Share thoughts in the comment section below!