Social media has become the new marketing. Traditional means are falling out of favour. While movie placements and banners are still being employed, brands and companies know that it’s nothing without also advertising on complementary channels of social media. Seeing a banner of McDonalds in real life might help with brand awareness, but seeing a promotional ad while scrolling on your Instagram? It might just prompt you to pull up your food ordering app and get it delivered and that’s the whole point of marketing. You want to drive sales. You want to convert eyeballs into checkouts. Here are a couple of tips on how to get that done.

Strive to get the blue tick

What does it mean to be verified on Instagram? It basically means that you’re the real deal and you are the accurate representation for your brand. You’re recognized to be official and it eliminates any doubt that you might be an imposter. When you’re a business or a brand, it’s doubly important to be verified on Instagram because you want people to look at you and trust that they can purchase through your channels without getting conned out of their money. The verified symbol is in essence, a symbol of trust. The blue tick is Instagram’s personal seal of approval.

There are a couple of ways you can do this. One is to get loads of followers. While you might know how to get IG likes fast, growing your channel can be difficult, especially when you’re not familiar with the platform and your audiences which is why many choose to buy their followers instead, which can help in the long run.. But beware, influencers that have been accused of buying their followers can sometimes be cancelled by their followers. Furthermore, fake fans can hurt your brand.

You need to market your products

Just because social media is the new marketing trend doesn’t automatically mean that you can be lazy in your marketing campaigns. You want to create hype, desire, need. Just because you have millions of followers on social media doesn’t mean that you will automatically have millions of buyers. One recent case study involves a social media star that goes by Arii on Instagram. With 2.7 million followers, she couldn’t even sell 36 t-shirts. According to experts, the reason that she failed so spectacularly is because the merch doesn’t align with her brand, but more importantly, because her marketing was “immature, unprofessional, and lazy.”

There was no passion involved even as she said in a now deleted post that “I’ve poured my heart into this drop”. The influencer only made two posts about her merchandise and there were no concrete call to action. There was a lot more she could do in order to create awareness, such as generating hype on her Instagram stories as well as posting more interactive content that involves her product. Therefore, it’s important not to let numbers blind you to the necessary things that you need to do.