How to sell products on Instagram without running Ads

Case study: How I sold 107 products on Instagram within a 24 hour period. FYI, I didn’t spend one naira on ads

I simply used a content plan. I made sure to have one Instagram post up, every day for 9 months before attempting to sell anything. I’ll rephrase that. I posted a piece of content everyday, for almost 9 months before arriving at the right product to promote to the audience I had built! . In actual fact, for the entire 8 months, I generated just 196 pieces of content.

At the start, my goal was just to build authority in the natural skin & hair care space.

Authority meant these 2 things to me.
1. People will seek my opinion on what to do with their skin or hair.

2. Skin and hair care product formulators will require my services to promote their goods & services to my audience.

As I designed my simple content calendar, I realized the content outlined was inadequate to fill up 7 the days of the week. I had only 3 slots filled. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. Since marketing and food were some of my other passions, I included both.

My simple but amateur content structure was...

Monday - post either hair or skin care quote

Tuesday - post about the woes of the natural hair journey

Wednesday - post marketing strategies tested and used.

Thursday - post about natural/organic ingredients, products and tips used to take care of African skin.

Friday - post about food (both the ones eaten at restaurant & those cooked at home)

Saturday - this was a free day until I added a category that was dedicated to my dog, Temi

Sunday - also a free day, till I started posting viral Instagram videos

Please note that the education and entertainment content had a 5:2 ratio. The idea behind this is to keep them engaged enough to learn but also entertained enough to come back

After about 5 months, I had achieved getting people to ask me about their skin and hair care problems

They also wanted product recommendations. I built my engagement to a point where I was responding to between 8 - 25 DMs per day. I was in marketing heaven. I didn’t have a lot of request to promote skin and hair care products so I did what I do best.

I created 2 pieces of content requesting skin and hair care formulators to allow me promote products for them.

Here is one of the pieces of content I used to reach out to them. The picture The caption

Yes the post I used to introduce my pitch was about food but it worked

From this, I got a couple of requests and of course a boosted confidence. At this point I decided it was time to pitch my very first offer, it was a “Build your website for less than N50,000” offer ðŸ™„ like everyone needs a website, so go figure.

Boy did it FLOP! As devastated as I was, I still kept up with my initial content structure while I tried to figure out what might have gone wrong

Get this, I was addressing 3 major topics
-Hair Care
-Skin care
-Marketing

BUT...I ignored these facts

- 60% of the posts generated was about skin and hair care. Marketing was 20%
- 80% of the questions and DMs was also about skin & hair care

Once I realized this, I knew creating a product or service around skin & hair care was best the way to go.

I also knew

1. People like free stuff
2. Every business wants more buyers
3. Every business respects numbers
4. Every business respects experience
5. Customers want comfort when accessing whatever they buy
6. Anyone can achieve ‘impulse buys’ with these price points N500 -N2500

Armed with this knowledge, the first step was to get products I didn’t have to pay for. Another name for such products is called SAMPLES!!!

Of course this also meant I couldn’t charge for it either. The idea was to send a box containing 2 skin and 2 hair care product samples. This will give people the chance to try these products and if they liked it, they would purchase it directly from the formulators. I reached out to 20 skin and hair care formulators. This is what I told them

I reached out to 20 skin and hair care formulators. This is what I told them

Read also : How Instagram Guides work.

Toperants message 2

14 out of the 20 formulators I reached out to decided to be a part of it. Most of them didn’t have samples and rather opted to send actual products.

Is this what I sold? NO, I GAVE THE PRODUCT AWAY FOR FREE but charged a delivery fee. FYI, the word FREE sells more than BUY! ðŸ™„ what is the rationale behind charging for delivery?

By provoking impulse buys, I identified potential buyers for these businesses. I also knew current customers behavior values easy access to whatever they buy.

Did I know if any of my followers will buy? I didn’t. But going by the number of DMs I responded to daily, I felt it would be an easy sell. Because I was unsure, I did the next best thing. I SUBTLE SOLD my followers the box sale idea for 3 weeks

What I mean by subtle selling is, for every piece of content posted within that 3 week period, I mentioned the box sale and how anyone can get free product samples if they participated

On the day of the actual sale, a good number of my followers were already eager to get a box. This is the post I put up

Within a 24 hour period, 107 people had paid for the boxes, even though we mention only a 100 was available.

https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1224664240872656903/pu/vid/1280x720/JYm3LbiNswoL4R60.mp4?tag=10

This is how I used a simple content plan to sell out in 24 hours. I did it without spending one naira on paid ads

What I just taught you is only a fraction of how you can be use content to sell on social media. I have a training video that teaches you how to use my unique content structure. In the training, I talk about the 2020 Social Media Content Calendar for SMEs, a readymade content plan that anyone can use no matter the business you’re in.

This calendar is 366 daily social media posts already planned out for you.

It also has content specific to
Fashion
Skin care
Hair Care
Real Estate
Furniture
Legal Services
Health care
Aphrodisiac services
Cleaning Services
Catering Serives

This means you don’t have to break your head learning how to deploy my unique content technique. You can just simply copy & paste.

From now until Feb 29th, only 50 businesses (7 slots are already gone) will be allowed to purchase the 2020 Social Media Content Calendar for SMEs

To find how you can be one of the 50, visit ðŸ‘‡ðŸ¾
topeolofin.com/social

That’s
topeolofin.com/social

As in
topeolofin.com/social

PS: I know you enjoyed reading this so don’t be selfish. Share with others too ðŸ˜ ðŸ™ðŸ½

Author

Updated at 5:52-pm August 30, 2023

Tags: Instagram

Author : Kekeocha Justin

How to sell products on Instagram without running Ads

Related Posts