A Study of Using Instagram as a Marketing Tool to Promote Trading for Online Sellers in Thailand

Abstract

In recent years, Instagram has become the most popular platform to promote the products and services. Some studies suggest because of the smaller number of advertisers in Instagram which produce less competitions thus offering greater opportunity for online sellers to use Instagram as a marketing channel. However, this does not necessarily represent the view of all the online sellers. Thus, this research paper venture on two main questions; 1) What are the reasons of online sellers choosing Instagram as a marketing tools? And 2) What are the effective features of Instagram which help online sellers to increase brand awareness and boost up their sales? To answer these 2 questions, this paper has conducted semi-structured interview with 10 online sellers. According to the findings, respondents or interviewees chose Instagram as a marketing channel or tools because of target group base (large number of active users), familiarity with the platform (easy to use), interface of the platform (engaging platform and visual advantage), and effective algorithm (availability of many marketing tools). Subsequently, respondents employed 5 main Instagram features to promote and boost their sales namely, post feature (the most popular feature), story feature, reels, hashtag, and ads. In addition to these Instagram features, they also have adopted 5 more marketing strategies or methods such as hiring influencers, adopting promotional campaigns, posting pictures at the right time, constantly updating the content and uploading unlimited story contents and changing content patterns. However, among all these features and marketing strategies, post feature is the most popular tool used for promoting products and services. All the respondents post pictures every day to keep their audiences active and in touch.