How to Get Sales from Instagram Without Having an Instagram Account

Allow me to just jump into the exact steps that you need to know for a shout out of your product through Instagram Influencers.

Find the right influencer

The most challenging task, and one of the keys to a successful campaign, is finding the right influencer. The checklist goes like this:

a) Niche—Making sure the influencer has an account that aligns with what you sell is crucial. Dog niche products on a luxury account, seen by eyeballs who aren’t really dog lovers, Sounds weird. On the other hand, luxury watches, luxury wristbands, luxury handbags on a luxury account is called precise targeting.

b) Authority—For instance, when an influencer says, “Tag your ex,” in the post caption, and if a lot of people in the comments do it, then it’s a clear indication that the influencer has an authority over the followers. Finding an influencer who leads their followers is key to a successful campaign.

c) Engagement matters, not the number of followers—51.9K followers and the 23 posts on the account have 3 likes on an average: “Nah, I’ll pass”. Having a lot of followers doesn’t mean the influencer has a lot of influence, it’s the engagement rate that matters. Usually, a good engagement rate is 2%-3%, but after Instagram got their new algorithm, even 1% is a very good engagement rate.

1% engagement rate means that if the account has 1-million followers, then their posts should be averaging 10,000 likes.

This is a classic test that tells you if the influencer is influential or not.

Getting their contact info

After you’ve found them, get their contact info!

For example, assume you are asking for a paid shout out to any mega-influencer like @millionaire_mentor or @dailydose.

The first thing you need to do is, obviously, get their contact info. Usually, you’ll find their contact info on their Instagram Profile bio.

For Business Profiles, you can click the “Contact” button as shown below:

 

For personal profiles, you can find their contact info as shown below:

If you got puzzled by the word “kik” then don’t worry – Instagrammers usually hangout on a platform called KIK messenger, and they usually list their kik usernames—in this case it’s ‘tkspo’—on their Instagram profile bio. A few of them hang out on Telegram Messenger as well, and instead you’ll see their Telegram usernames.

 

Contacting Them and Getting the Right Quote

Now, contact them!

Step 1: Contact them via email or KIK messenger and tell them something like this:

Hey, 

I came across your Instagram account and love what you do. Your posts are amazing!

I run an E-Commerce business, and I would love to buy a shout out on your account as well as a product link in your profile bio. 

Can you let me know what the cost of this would be? 

Thanks,

<your name>

 

Step 2: Bargain for prices.  (Optional)

​When they reply with a price, you then send them a revised offer asking for at least 20% discount. A good bargaining tactic can be—“Hey, I’ll be a returning customer, can you get the price down to X.” Bargaining is an art, and you improve at it the more you do it.

 

STEP 3: A beautiful caption and a picture that is a visual treat.

When the deal is done, provide them with a caption, a product image, and your store’s product page link so that they can put in their bio.

Sample captions: A caption is very important as your campaign can make or break on how you write it. Basically, it’s a CTA—call to action—where you tell your customers what to do. Here are a few sample captions:

Sample 1: “20% discount, today only! USE CODE: 20TODAY. Click the link in the bio of @millionaire_mentor  to Order NOW!”

Sample2: “Only 84 remaining! Click the link in the bio of @millionaire_mentor  to Order NOW!”

If you observe carefully, I have shown scarcity/limited time availability in these captions which are very crucial as we are making customers take an action immediately. Make sure you have a scarcity/limited time availability element in your caption or CTA. Here is a good caption that I found on Instagram:

Emojis draw attention and eyeballs.

A beautiful picture:

Give the influencer a beautiful, classy, high-resolution, 1080 x 1080 picture of your product!.

Tip 1: You can put a CTA on the picture, such as “Click the Link in the BIO,” if you want to, or you can leave it as-is.

Tip 2: If your product has color variants or style variants then you can use a collage and include some of the variants in the product image that you send to the influencer.

Tip 3: If you have a good budget and your product is already a proven winner then you can ask influencers for a “shout out campaign.” This entails multiple shoot-out of your product. They’ll give you their pricing plans of multiple shout outs of your product, which they’ll do with their accounts, other accounts, and partner accounts as well. The possibilities, as you can see, are endless with Instagram Influencer Marketing, and it’s just the beginning.

Very Important Note

If you are new to Instagram, you’ll have very few followers to your own Instagram account or your own store’s Instagram account and hence always use the influencer account’s bio. Send the potential customers to their bio and not to yours! For instance, I have told people to go to @millionaire_mentor bio in the above captions.

Asking to put your link in their BIO will cost you a little bit more, but the ROI is amazing—you don’t need an Instagram account to do this. Although, not every influencer agrees to put the link in their BIO in such case you need to put the link in your bio and send followers to your Instagram account. Some may argue that sending followers to store’s account/own account is better because they get both sales and following which is true. Hence I suggest you to split test these two methods.