In addition to the native Instagram Shopping possibilities such as Instagram Shops, Feed, Stories, and Live shopping, Shopping through Guides, Reels, creators, and now even DM Shopping, we recommend fuelling your eCommerce promotion with Combn Growth as well.

Here's the pack of short guides to help you find your target audience on Instagram, engage with it, detect audiences who interacted with your competitors, analyse your efforts, and schedule Instagram content to be published automatically.

Find Your Target Instagram Audience with Combin Growth

Before you even start working on your Instagram marketing, you should know who you want to make content for and who you see as your followers.

Here's how you can find it out with Combin Growth when searching customers by hashtags or locations. Let's pretend we need to promote a small jewellery store from NYC.

  1. Launch Combin Growth and open the Search tab.
  2. Type in a tag of interest into the Hashtag or Location field. Click the plus icon to add fields for more hashtags to target.

We're entering #jewelry to find posts of people wearing them.

You can choose one or several hashtags that your target audience might use in their posts

đź’ˇYou can use these two fields simultaneously.

3. Select the time period at the Posted form to specify when the tagged posts should have been published.

4. Set the range of Likes and Comments count that the found posts should fit in. Thus, you can specifically target the hottest content, mildly popular publications, or overlooked posts.

5. Enable the Advanced Filters and Analysis functionality to automatically sift irrelevant users out and specify Language, Gender, and audience size (Followers and Followings count) of the accounts that published the tagged posts.

In our case, these parameters might be female and English. The number of their audience are of no difference to us.

6. Click the Find button.

Engage with Your Target Audience

After you find your target audience, you can start engaging with it. Within Combin Growth, you can like, comment, follow, and mass view stories of the users from the search results you get from the actions above.

Search results of the combination #jewelry + location New York – our potential target audience

To do that in bulk, click on the profiles you want to engage and choose an action the tool needs to perform.

Let's like some of the users we've found 

Combin Growth will then schedule these actions to be performed at intervals, thus imitating the way a human might do it, not software.

Find an Audience Who Engaged with Your Competitors

To make the search even narrower and more targeted, you can find audiences that have engaged with specific posts or users. Keeping an eye on competitors’ business is one of the keys to success on any platform, Instagram included.

With Combin Growth, you can find and attract your competitors' audience or any other Instagram account’s audience.

Combin Growth lets you target everyone — followings, followers, likers and commenters of any public or accessible Instagram account.

Here's how:

  1. Launch Combin Growth and open the Search tab.
  2. Select the Users search type at the top of the application window.
  3. Click the Search by field and specify whether you want to find Followings, Followers, Likers or Commenters.
Enter the name of your competitor and choose the audience. We suggest you should choose Likers and Commenters – these audiences are active. 

4. Enter the account username into the User field.

5. Enable the Advanced Filters and Analysis functionality to automatically sift irrelevant users out and specify the preferable Language, Gender and Followers/Followings count of the accounts that engaged with the Instagram user you selected.

Here, we can again specify that we're looking for females, speaking English.

6. Press Search.

Users who commented on Tiffany's Instagram posts

When you find these users who have engaged with your competitor, you can start engaging with them: select and like, comment, follow, and mass view stories.

Find Relevant Influencers

Influencer marketing is a vital part of social media growth strategy. People trust their favourite influencers and buy things they tout more willingly.

đź’ˇSuggested read: How to Create an Effective Influencer Marketing Strategy

Searching for the right Instagram influencer is not easy, but Combin Growth saves time and helps you find lots of potential influencers.

Combin’s functionality allows you to exploit 3 influencer searching strategies:

1. Searching for competitors’ followers and following lists

This strategy lets you find followers of your competitors who have many followers and can be your relevant influencers. To find them, do this:

  1. Open the Search tab.
  2. Pick User search and type in a competitor’s username, specifying followers/commenters’ last activity time and search results number.
  3. After getting the results, sort them by the number of followers or set the required followers' number before the search.

đź’ˇNote that sorting by the number of followers works only if you enable Advanced Filters and Analysis in your search parameters.

Users who follow Tiffany Instagram account with many folllowers. 

Accounts at the top of the list could be your potential influencers – check their profiles for more information and contact them about the details of possible partnerships if they seem suitable for advertising your product.

đź’ˇSuggested read: How to come up with a brief for collaboration with Instagram influencers.

Alternatively, you can find trending posts and choose influencers among the authors.

  1. Open the Search tab.
  2. Pick Posts search, enter hashtag(s) or location(s) relevant to your business, specifying the post date and search results number.
  3. Sort the results by the number of likes/comments and look up the posts uploaders’ profiles. When picking an influencer, pay attention to the following:
  • Make sure a real person is managing the account. A potential influencer’s account shouldn’t look spammy; focus on the image quality, the language, captions and account description.
  • Don’t pick the influencer based only on their huge following. It doesn’t always mean success + it can easily be just an army of bots. In order to prevent dealing with the latter, check a handful of the posts and see how many comments the account receives on average – the larger the following rate is, the more comments there should naturally be. Be aware of shady accounts with a massive following and single to no comments under their posts.

3. Searching by accounts’ bio

Another strategy you can use is to search for specific keywords that the potential influencer should have in their bio.

  1. Open the Search tab.
  2. Pick the Users search.
  3. Select search by Bio. Type in a keyphrase the potential influencer should have in their profile, depending on your business field and location (in our case, we should search for fashion influencers, so we enter fashion).
Influencers that can help us promote our jewellery brand

4. Sort and filter the accounts you find and hover the cursor over their profiles to see more information (bio text, their language and gender).

💡Note that search by bio works the same way Instagram search does, so it doesn’t bring over 56 results and cannot be updated.

Analyse Stats

Combin Growth provides Instagram account statistics. Here is how you can track Instagram followers growth and get other important data with the app:

  1. Launch Combin Growth.
  2. Open the Statistics tab.
  3. Change the time period for which you would like to see the data in the upper right corner. Click it and choose the preferable period: Last Week, Last 30 Days, or Previous Month.
There are two sections are displayed within the Statistics tab. The top section contains information about Instagram account followers number and growth rate, as well as incoming actions: the number of likes, comments, new and lost followers. The bottom Activity Combin section displays the outcoming actions for following, liking and commenting the application processed on behalf of your Instagram account.

4. Click the correspondent tabs of the top statistics section and hover the cursor over histograms and line graphs to get more information.

💡Note that Combin Growth only tracks data about actions processed within Combin and doesn’t gather information about likes, comments, follows and unfollows made through other third-party applications and via Instagram directly. All information given within the bottom section of the Statistics tab covers only interactions processed through Combin Growth.

Schedule Posts and Stories for Auto-Publication

Combin Scheduler is a free Instagram content planner that helps you streamline your content creation process by automating Instagram media publishing. The tool can automatically post Instagram stories, posts, and repost content at the exact time you set the media to go live.

Follow the steps below to schedule posts to your Instagram account:

  1. Install Combin Scheduler. It’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux.
  2. Log in to your Instagram account within Scheduler.
  3. Once you are logged in, click Stories or Posts in the upper left corner of the application.
  4. Click Add New Story or Add New Post at the bottom of the application window to start planning your content.
Here's how you can add a new post to go live within Combin Scheduler
  1. Drag and drop images or click Choose Photo to select images. Bulk upload for stories is available.
  2. Select the posting date and time. Scheduler synchronises with the timezone of your OS.
  3. Click Post Now. Your media will be published at the scheduled time.

⚡️Keep Combin Scheduler launched until your content is live on Instagram. If the look of the opened Scheduler window annoys you, leave the application running in the background instead of quitting it.

Here's how to do so:

  1. At the menu bar, click Tools and select Preferences.
  2. Enable the setting Run Combin Scheduler in the background when it’s closed. After that, Scheduler will be minimised when you click X to quit it.

Try Combin Growth and Combin Scheduler to boost your eCommerce on Instagram 👇