At Seller Square, we are always on the hunt for superior-quality content and strive to share it refreshingly and conveniently. We love to inspire you with each blog we write, which would help you take your D2C business to the next level. After taking a break from blogging and using the same for extensive research on marketing and ways to grow a business, we have come up with a one-way ticket toward success for your brands. You can call it the Ultimate Guide…The Ultimate Guide For Leveraging Instagram Reels For Branding And Sales. Let’s dive in. 

Why Instagram Reels?

With the mark of 2020, a new era of marketing surfaced on the Instagram platform; Reels, a fresh method for creating short videos. What started as an alternative to TikTok soon rose to be the epitome of perfect social media marketing. 

Amid Coronavirus, with people acting differently toward businesses, and new platforms ascending to the top, Instagram Reels became a global sensation. Soon, brands such as Sephora started leveraging Insta Reels for branding and sales. 

Mining over 1.3 million views with their Reels, Sephora saw a sudden spike of 70% in their sales chart.

How?

A simple thought that led to a powerful strategy. 

Thought: Buyers want to experience personally what a product can accomplish for them. 

Strategy: Sephora pipelined the thought into perfect content, which helped them emotionally connect with the customers. You've probably experienced disappointment with "must-have" goods before, don't you think? With the help of Reels, Sephora successfully addressed the impact of that pain point, which resulted in a drastic increase in their sales. 

This strategy teaches that a deep understanding of your target audience can help create powerful content. 

In the current scenario, Instagram revolves around brief, interesting videos. Consumers respond to them the most, making them a highly profitable technique for increasing interaction.

Instagram Reels have proven to increase views and engagement rates for several influencers and companies. A recent survey showed that brands posting Reels each day for a month noticed a 2,800+ rise in followers. Since integrating Reels into their Instagram approach, Brands have seen a 500%+ spike in interaction rates.

Benefits Of Instagram Reels

Promote your brand in a compelling way

With the average attention span being eight seconds, Reels are ideal for captivating your target audience through appropriate music and infographics. 

Increased Engagement from your followers

Compared to a stagnant post, your Reels would gain more engagement and reach according to the present-day Instagram Algorithm. So, more Reels, more engagement!

Enhance interactions to get your content on the Explore Page

Mining enough interactions with Reels will help push them to the explore page! This would help in more brand awareness and drive your customers to your link in the bio and make a purchase. 

Showcase Brand Personality

Consumers today expect to be treated like people, not just another sale to increase the brand’s profit. To match this demand, creating Reels with the right brand personality and content is your one-way ticket to success!

Spend less time creating content 

Rather than creating complex and time-consuming design posts, invest in easy Reels, that require fewer graphics and editing. 

Multi-purpose content across other platforms

Reels are multi-purpose content that can be used on other social platforms and also for your marketing needs. 

How Can D2C Brands Leverage Insta Reels For Branding And Sales?

If you are thinking of a social media strategy without Reels, you should unroot that thought at once. 

Why? 

The digital world of today sees rapid change. Algorithms and Trends go off overnight, and the brands that jump on board first will reap the profit. For your company to remain relevant and succeed, you must keep up with changing consumer expectations, especially if millennials and Gen Z are part of your target market.

Let’s take a look at how this could be achieved. 

Brands That Utilize Reels’ New Features Will Be Instantly Pushed To The Discover Page

Instagram has always been an eternal fountain of growth that not only helps in interacting with your current followers but also expands the reach, thereby helping your brand grow. 

After thorough research on the brands that appeared on the explore page of Instagram, it was evident that they have utilized the latest features, audio, or filters in Reels. It was seen that brands that used them had a massive 37-53% spike in their views and likes. And from viewing their succeeding posts, it was clear that these brands have continued using trending songs and features, resulting in consistent growth.                                                    

This is a terrific motivation for brands out there to stay relevant and reap benefits. By implementing this into your Reels strategy, you will be seen as inventive and gain more awareness on the platform.

Take Inspiration From Other Brands

Now let me take you back to Sephora, a brand well-known for its beauty products. With 21.1M followers, Sephora knows the pulse of its customers and thereby creates useful information for them to hold a place in the trending list. 

Creating crisp videos of challenges and information with an appropriate call to action, they have always mined engagement and reach like no other brand. Even their very first video had a tremendous 2.1M+ views and 30K+ likes. 

When you know exactly what your target audience wants, a brand can easily create a winning Reels strategy. Studying your competitors and other renowned brands can help with this. They are successful because they employ content that appeals to their Instagram followers that they already know works. 

You can also take inspiration from other brands and tailor the content according to your needs. 

Informational Content Can Win Hearts

Keeping the product as the secondary emphasis of the video is the most crucial component of generating short-form content, and it should not be overlooked amid all the fascinating things that IG Reels has to offer. Keep in mind that you are not creating a standard commercial where the product is the main focus when attempting to engage your audience with brief, genuine, and informative material.

What you want to create is a film that is both incredibly entertaining and excellent at subtly marketing your product. It's a fantastic idea to display items, but marketers should do so by embracing trends and producing material that is more concerned with the Reels effects, the innovation, and the originality of the content than the product itself.

Making content about topics on which you are knowledgeable and authoritative and sharing it with your audience is a smart strategy to avoid this. Use IG Reels' features to show off your expertise and genuinely inform the audience. This might be anything from "How to bite an apple perfectly?" to "5 ways to wear turtle neck T-shirt."

Leveraging The Discover Page, Not Engagement, Is The Key To Growing Your Followers

It's critical to fully comprehend how consumers will interact with your IG Reels if you want to maintain your follower’s growth. Brands need to continue expanding their fan base Reels, but they shouldn't anticipate this to occur in the same way every time.

Since Reels is brand new, Instagram will promote each film made using the tool based on how many times it has been viewed and liked, rather than how much it has been interacted with, as is the case with TikTok. Many people won't be sharing, commenting, and engaging with the content, in the same manner, they do on other platforms since they are unfamiliar with Reels.

Instagram will encourage videos with the high watch and like counts to show up on random users' Discover Pages in place of engagement ratings. 

Conclusion

Instagram has evolved from a tool for sharing photographs to a platform used by companies all over the world to accomplish a variety of objectives. Instagram has the potential to be a powerful marketing platform that greatly expands your reach, fosters relationships, and creates prospects.

Make sure you are producing informational or pertinent material for your Instagram Reels audience and maximizing the use of Instagram’s most recent features if you want to continue to show up on users' Instagram Discover Pages. These pointers will put your business in the best position.

Have you tried any of these, yet?

What are some methods that have been successful for you?

Comment below with your thoughts and let us know.