CASE STUDY: How I Sold 107 Products On Instagram Within a 24 Hour Period

Case study: How I sold 107 products on Instagram within a 24 hour period. FYI, I spend a dime on ads

I simply used a content plan. I did it by putting up one Instagram post, every day for 9 months before attempting to sell anything.

I’ll rephrase that. I posted a piece of content every day, for almost 9 months before arriving at the right product to promote to the audience I had built!

In actual fact, for the entire 9 months, I generated just 196 pieces of content.

At the start, my goal was just to build authority in the natural skin and hair space.

Authority meant these 2 things to me.

1. People will seek my opinion on what to do with their skin or hair.
2. Skin and hair care product formulators and retailers will require my services to promote their goods and services to my audience.

As I designed my simple content calendar, I realized the content outlined was inadequate to fill up 7 the days of the week. I had only 3 slots filled. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday.

Since marketing and food were some of my other passions, I included both.

My simple but amateur content structure was…

Monday – post either hair or skin care quote

Tuesday – post about the woes of the natural hair journey

Wednesday – post marketing strategies tested and used.

Thursday –  post about natural/organic ingredients, products  and tips used to take care of African skin.

Friday – post about food (both the ones eaten at restaurant and those cooked at home)

Saturday – this was a free day until I added a category that was dedicated to my dog, Temi

Sunday – this was also a free day until I started doing posts about my silly self. I wanted my audience to get to know me.

Please note that the education and entertainment content had a 5:2 ratio.  The idea behind this is to keep them engaged enough to learn but also entertained enough to come back. 

After about 5 months, I had achieved getting people to ask me about their skin and hair care problems. They also wanted product recommendations. I built my engagement to a point where I was responding to between 8 – 25 DMs per day. I was in marketing heaven.

Number 2 was still shaky so I did what I do best. I created content and asked skin and hair care formulators to allow me promote products for them.

Here is a piece of content I used to reach out to them.

Yes it’s a food post (everyone loves food d’uh). From this, I got a lot more traction and a boosted confidence. At this point I decided it was time to pitch my very first offer, it was a “Build your website for less than N50,000” offer

🙄 like everyone needs a website, so go figure. Boy did it FLOP!

As devastated as I was, I still kept up with my initial content structure while I tried to figure out what might have wrong.

Get this, I was addressing 3 major topics

1. Hair care
2. Skin care
3. Marketing

BUT I ignored the facts

1. 60% of the posts generated was about skin and hair care…marketing was just 20%
2. 80%  of the questions and DMs was also about skin and hair care.

Once I realized my best bet would be to create a product or service that had to do with skin and hair care, my job became easier.

Here are another set of facts I wanted to leverage on

1. Everyone likes free stuff
2. Every business wants more buyers
3. Every business respects numbers
4. Every business respect experience 
5. Customers now want more comfort when accessing whatever they buy
6. I wanted impulse buys, so keeping the price pint between N500 – N2500 was a priority

Armed with this knowledge, the first step was to get products I didn’t have to pay for. Of course this also meant I couldn’t charge for it either. Another name for such products is called SAMPLES!!!

The idea was to box 2 skin care and 2 hair care product samples.

This will give people the chance to try these products and if they liked it, they will purchase straight from the formulators.

I reached out to 20 skin and hair care formulators. This is what I told them.

14 out of 20, decided to be a part of it. Most didn’t have samples and rather opted to send actual products.

Is this what I sold? NO, I GAVE THE PRODUCT AWAY FOR FREE but charged a delivery fee because customers love comfort accessing whatever it is they buy from you.

FYI, the word FREE sells more than BUY!

🙄 what’s the rationale behind charging for delivery?

By provoking impulse buys, I identified potential buyers for these product formulators or businesses.

Did I know that my followers will buy?

I didn’t know. I felt there was a possibility going by the number of DMs I responded to daily but I was still very unsure so again I did the next best thing. I SUBTLE SOLD them the idea for a period of 3 weeks

What I mean by subtle selling is this. For every piece of content that went out within the 3 weeks. I mentioned the box sale and how they can get free samples. By the time the day of the actual came, they were already eager to be one of the few to get a box

On that day, I didn’t write the usual “come and buy” post. I wrote a length caption, which some would call a sales letter.

This is what I wrote

Within a 24  period, 107 people had paid for the boxes., even though I mentioned only 100 was available 

This how I used a simple content plan to sell out in 24 hours. I did it without spending one naira on paid ads

What I just showed you is only a fraction of how you can use content to sell on social media.

I have training on how to implement my unique content structure.  In the training, I talk about how to set up the ultimate sales machines. A system that contains 3 sales strategy including this unique content structure. Yes, you can literally plan out your 2021 social media content calendar, no matter the business you’re in.

This means you do not have to break your head trying to figure out how to create content or how to sell. To get in on that training click here

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