The huge growth of e-commerce during recent years has made it much easier to make money from home.
The first immediate consequence of this trend has been the online sale of Print On Demand t-shirts by the so-called “influencers”, who took advantage of their popularity to sell products to their customer base.
Social media are therefore the main reason why an e-commerce site becomes successful or not.
If you’re wondering how to sell Print On Demand t-shirts on Instagram, you should start setting your profile as a vendor, create a post with your t-shirt to promote and run advertising, integrate your Instagram account to Shopify, and contact an influencer for further exposure.
Set a Vendor Profile On Instagram
The Instagram profile represents the showcase of your business. It must therefore reflect your identity in a clear and unexceptionable way.
- Clear Username. The username is the first thing that catches the eye. It must be as short as possible and easy to remember. We recommend a username that is two to three words long, and that condenses your identity to the maximum. Try to compensate for the lack of name alternatives with creativity and cleverness.
- Cool Picture Profile. The choice of images has to be made starting from the logo. The logo is the first thing you need to do if you are planning to create an e-commerce site and it best represents your identity. Some sites let you create a custom logo; on the other hand, you could ask a graphic designer to create one for you. All in all, the logo must be creative, professional, and awesome.
- Exhaustive Bio. Biography is the third thing people look at when they’re visiting your Instagram profile. The space available is not much (you have a maximum of 150 characters) but it’s enough to give an effective description of who you are, what you do, and what distinguishes you from others. Try to be authentic because the description is the way you can truly connect with your users. It reflects your behavior and your thoughts towards the niche you are dealing with.
- Pictures Order. Instagram feed represents the brand’s first experience. Usually, if we scroll our feeds from top to bottom we notice random pictures of our contacts, one after the other. That’s absolutely what you want to avoid: a confusing selection of pictures without any order. When users come to visit your profile, they should catch the real essence of your store, from the images to the bio description. The visual appearance, particularly, has the biggest impact on their overall experience so you have to take care of image selection, their order, and their evocative power. This can influence their final decision on purchasing or not your product.
Promote an Instagram Post
Promotions on Instagram are the best way to drive traffic to your Print On Demand store. You can target new customers and attract people outside your circle of followers.
It’s therefore important to choose the post you want to promote. It should be the one that better represents the essence of your product, with high-quality images and effective descriptions.
Then click to “promote”, link to Facebook (you need a Facebook profile to continue), and choose among “Automatic”, “Local” and “Manual” advertising:
- the first option sends promotions to users whose preferences are similar to yours;
- the second sends promotions to users based on their place of residence, up to a maximum of 30 km from your headquarter;
- the third sends promotions to a certain category of people, that you have manually chosen before.
Once decided your option, set the budget you want to spend on that promotion, and for how long. In the end, check it all before running it.
As with Facebook Ads, there is no perfect method for each case. You need to test which promotion best fits your product and brings more traffic to your store.
It’s a matter of time, so be patient and don’t rush.
Run Advertising
Instagram Stories are effective to convey a sense of urgency to your promotion.
Since a story is only 24 hours long, you could use it to post an introductory offer or a short-time period promotion.
It’s typically used for recurring holidays or special events, and it’s very versatile as it lets you create both image and video stories, depending on your tastes and their engagement effectiveness (you should choose the one that immediately grabs the users’ attention).
It’s also possible to add a link to the story to immediately direct people to your store (“swipe up” function).
We recommend choosing attractive graphics that can entice people through that link.
Integrate Your Instagram Account To Shopify
The integration between Shopify and Instagram has brought the online shopping experience to another level.
With this feature, users can purchase directly through socials, as they can scroll products and relative price in a specific section of Instagram.
To implement it, you just need to create a business account, connect it to a Facebook profile and to the Shopify Store (check if your country is among those supported, according to the Shopify Policy).
It’s definitely recommended to improve your store’s shopping experience, as users won’t need to leave their social interface to purchase the product.
Contact An Influencer
Influencers have a central role in this game, as they can direct the current trends in one direction or another, especially among the fashion industry.
From small shops to big brands, today companies are quite forced to go through them if they want to reach a greater share of users.
Their communicative power increases the value’s perception of a specific product, in both a positive and negative way.
This is the striking case of t-shirts: you can create the most beautiful and eye-catching design but if it’s not worn by an influencer it won’t have the same perceived value as you expect.
It might seem absurd, but the fashion industry works in this way right now. The only clothes worn by influencers can generate a purchase hunt from their passionate audience.
To choose the right influencer, you should target those who belong to your niche and have a fanbase of at least 100,000 people, we don’t recommend the million followers ones.
That’s because, statistically, the medium size pages have a higher level of engagement than bigger ones, so your sponsored post would likely attract more people genuinely interested in your product.
Let’s Sum Up!
In 2021, Instagram has become an essential tool to advertise your Print On Demand store.
Regardless of the product category you are selling, there will be always suitable influencers for you.
You can go through them if you are willing to pay several hundred dollars or take advantage of paid promotions if you want to intercept the right audience more gradually. The latter case will take longer and you may have to test different strategies.
Anyway, promotion on social media remains still the most effective way to advertise your product.
BONUS – Why Don’t You Create A Blog?
Creating a personal website boosts your visibility and makes you intercept an increasing number of customers worldwide.
There is no more effective marketing strategy like this.
These are the main advantages of having a blog.
SEO Engine
It’s undeniable that search engines prefer new, high-quality content to dated ones. If you keep posting every day new articles your visibility rises constantly. Dare to type keywords to your articles, and focus on writing long content, minimum of 1.000 words per post. It shows that you’re not just spamming random products but providing valuable content for anyone else interested.
Powerful Engagement
The blog phenomenon is a pretty recent trend. More than 200 million bloggers are on the internet today; just a few years ago there weren’t at all. Blogs make you intercept users from worldwide countries and interact with them on a daily basis. You can build trust and engagement with your community by reading and answering their feedback on your posts. In this way, you can understand their preferences and so to retargeting your marketing strategy on them.
Advertising Through Socials
Socials can be useful if you add the URL of your blog in bio and in each post you’re going to publish later on. Every time you write a new article, you should be considering sharing it on social platforms too, so it can get to a wider audience possible. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter are commonly used for this purpose. They provide great visibility and engagement among others.
