How to Advertise on Instagram for Your Dropshipping Business

You’ve just launched your dropshipping website. You’ve got your products, you know your niche, and now you’re ready to start converting leads into sales. Every dropshipping business needs to have a presence on Instagram – just like other small and independent brands. Your Instagram account has the potential to scale your dropshipping business and help you smash your sales goal.

Advertising on Instagram isn’t easy. Instagram has over 1 billion active monthly users on the app, with 500 million daily active users. It’s the 6th most popular social media platform by the number of users – making it an invaluable tool for your business.

At Doba, we help dropshippers scale their business by giving them access to high-quality suppliers and products. Our platform makes it easy for you to add products to your website while syncing orders efficiently. To get the most out of our service, you need to be growing your presence on Instagram.

We’re sharing our top tips on how to advertise on Instagram to convert followers into customers. Research shows that 75% of users take an action after seeing an Instagram ad. If you’re not advertising on Instagram, you’re missing out on one of the most effective ways to grow your sales and customer base.

Why you need to be advertising on Instagram

The beauty of using Instagram for advertising is that you can curate your feed to promote your products directly to your target audience. You want to showcase your products in a way that is aesthetically pleasing – meaning it’s always best for you to have the products in hand. Your goal is to make your Instagram account look like a brand’s profile and not a dropshipping website.

Instagram is one of the main ways that users discover new products and websites, with 90% of users following at least one brand on Instagram. You want to grow a presence within your niche online, creating content – both organic and advertising – that fit the lifestyle of your target demographic.

The benefit of using Instagram is that you have dozens of tools built into the app to do just that. When you pay for advertising on Instagram, it appears like a normal feed post or story. The only difference is that your advertisement will feature the word ‘sponsored’ at the top. You can also incorporate a call-to-action button to drive traffic to a specific product or your website in general.

Five steps to advertising on Instagram

We’re sharing the five steps for starting to advertise on Instagram, from setting up your account to getting your advertisements to go live.

1.   Set up a business account

Your first step is to set up a business account. If you have an existing personal account, you can convert it to the business version within your settings. Your account will need to be set to public to be able to switch it to a business account. You’ll need to have a business account before you can start running advertisements on Instagram for your dropshipping business.

When you have a business account, you get access to real-time data and metrics that allow you to see the performance of your advertisements and posts. You’ll also get important insights into follower behavior.

Once you’ve got your account up and running, make sure to include your dropshipping website link and contact information in your bio. Add your profile picture and get some content onto your feed. You want to optimize your business profile on Instagram by making sure your profile picture incorporates your brand identity and that you have a clear description on your Instagram bio.

2.    Link to your Facebook account

Your next step is to link your dropshipping website’s Instagram account to your website’s Facebook page. You can do this by visiting the settings section of your Facebook page and selecting ‘Instagram Ads’. Once you click ‘log in’, you’ll fill in your Instagram account login information.

Instagram advertising works through the ‘Ads Manager’ platform on Facebook. It gives you full control over your Instagram advertisements, including allowing you to decide how they appear on Instagram and which demographics you target. You can also set your budget for Instagram advertising for your dropshipping website.

3.    Create your Instagram advertisement campaign

Once you have your backend systems set up, it’s time to create your Instagram advertisements. You can choose to format your advertisement as a carousel, photo, Instagram shopping ad, story, video, or IGTV. These different formats each allow you to curate your advertisements towards a specific goal, with various call-to-action settings available for you to utilize.

Most dropshipping websites choose to use a trio of advertising formats – shopping and story ads, along with traditional photos.

The benefit of advertising on Instagram is that you’re able to choose objectives for your advertising campaigns. This step is essential to help you optimize your advertisements for the best results.

You have eight different objectives to choose from for Instagram ads. You can choose from app installs, brand awareness, conversions, engagement, reach, traffic, and video views. Most dropshipping websites will be focusing their Instagram ads on conversions to drive sales. You’ll need to have a Facebook pixel installed to be able to use this objective for your advertising.

When you choose your objective, you’ll need to decide your audience, budget, placements, and schedule. If you’re familiar with Facebook ads, the targeting options are the same. You can select different automated targeting, behavior, demographics, location, lookalike audiences, and interests.

If you have a custom audience on Facebook – users who have engaged with your posts or visited your website – you can use these for your Instagram targeting.

4.    Design your content for your Instagram ad

Once your campaign is established, you need your content to upload onto Instagram. As a dropshipping website, you want to make sure that your products are front and center. It may take some trial and error to find the right image style for you. You can experiment with filters, graphics, text styles, and lighting – while considering your branding and the aesthetic of your dropshipping website.

You want your content to be on-brand and show your products in a visually pleasing way. Take the time to decide what you want the message to be behind your advertisement and what emotion you want to create amongst your audience. Instagram is a lifestyle-driven platform, meaning that you want to consider this when creating your content.

Lifestyle photographs, incorporating real people, typically outperform product images. Relatability is something that you want to consider when creating your content. You want your content to appear as organic as possible so that the advertising appears as part of the user’s feed.

Don’t forget to consider the caption for your Instagram ads. You only have a small amount of text to use to create a compelling call to action that will encourage users to engage with your content. The first section of your caption is the hook to get the user to click the ‘more’ button and see your call to action.

You also want to consider your organic content for Instagram. The platform has become shoppable, meaning that you can incorporate links directly to your products within your images. The shoppable feature is a gamechanger for dropshipping websites by allowing your followers to shop directly through your feed.

Shoppable feed pots can also be turned into Instagram ads for your dropshipping website, allowing you to streamline your advertising campaign within your organic content.

5.  Analyse the performance of your Instagram ad

Now that your Instagram ads are live, it’s time to start analyzing and monitoring your performance. When you have multiple Instagram ads that are live, you’ll be able to look at which variables and targeting work best for your dropshipping website.

Through Facebook’s Ads Manager, you can choose to edit your Instagram ads to allow you to utilize split testing, or you can change the parameters for your targeting. It’s a good idea to explore the ‘Insights’ tab under your different advertising posts as it’ll show you how well your advertising campaign is performing and who your followers are.

You can track KPIs within the ‘Insights’ tab, including conversions, engagement, reach, referral, profile views, and impressions. These KPIs allow you to see what is working within your Instagram advertisement strategy and what you need to change.

About Doba and our dropshipping service

Doba is a leading dropshipping website that connects you to high-quality dropshipping suppliers, offering integration with top-selling marketplaces and platforms. We give you the tools to sync orders with suppliers to efficiently fulfill orders and improve the customer experience. With these services in place, you’ll be able to select products that will work for your niche and customer base.

Our platform makes it easier than ever to launch a successful dropshipping store or to find a dropshipping niche. You can find products that will help you create engaging Instagram advertisements to grow your dropshipping business and convert followers into sales.

Start your 30-day free trial of Doba here – and take your dropshipping store to new heights.