How to feel better about selling on Instagram

How do you feel about talking about your business? By that I mean how comfortable are you at promoting your products and services? Does the word selling bring you out in hives?

I’ve been running my Instagram training business for nearly 5 years and I’d say that the common denominator between all the people I’ve worked with has been that really do not like selling.

But the truth is - selling is part of running your business. Without making sales, there is no business. So I wanted to share ways that you can feel more at ease with selling and feel happier about doing it.

You can never be sure when your customer is ready to buy

It can be impossible to predict when your customer will be ready to buy from you - so many factors will effect their buying decisions. So that means you have to be prepared to keep talking about your product or service until the buying window closes or your product or service sells out.

You have to hold your nerve

Sometimes promoting your products and services can feel demoralising - am I right?

When you feel like you have had the big launch and you’re doing the promoting and sharing it across Instagram - and the sales aren’t coming in. This is when you need to hold your nerve - it’s like you have to go through a pain barrier.

Because buying behaviour is hard to predict, you have to keep consistently sharing your sales messages. In spite of the uncomfortable feelings, you have to keep going. Because you just don’t which of posts, Reels, Stories, Lives are going to be the one that lands with your customers that triggers them to click buy.

Here’s an example - I ran a Reels online workshop last week. It had been selling ok and with two days to go I could have stopped talking about it but I decided to carry on selling. I shared more Stories where I talked about the workshop and where I added the link sticker to direct people to my website. I also sent another email to my email list. The result of this final push was that I sold nearly half of all my ticket sales in that last 24hours before the workshop. Like I said, buying behaviour is unpredictable.

Find different ways to talk about the same thing

Now this may feel like difficult advice to put into practice but Instagram offers you lots of different ways to talk about the same thing.

If you have a new product about to launch - you can tease it in Stories first using the Countdown sticker to build up FOMO for the launch. You can share a static image post of the new product, you can create a Carousel post where you can share up to 10 different images or videos featuring the new product. You can share a Reel where you can demo the new product. You could even go Live and share an exclusive discount code for the new product. That’s six different ways already to talk about the same thing.

Get creative with the way you talk about your products and service and although you might be talking about the same product - for your customer it will feel like they’re hearing about it in a new way each time.

People need to hear a message 7 times before they absorb it

If you ever catch yourself thinking, I’m being too pushy or I’m being too salesy - just remember the statistics show that humans need to hear a message seven times before they absorb it. So try to remember that when you need that nudge to keep on talking about what you do.

Getting comfortable with repeating your sales message and reminding people about what your business has to offer them is good practice. It means you get better at selling and you’ll help your customer to make those all important buying decisions.

As we edge ever nearer to Christmas and your customers are bombarded with selling messages you have to find more ways to be seen and be heard. So get more comfortable with selling and you’ll see that it results in more sales.