For someone who is new to Instagram, Let us answer the question what is Instagram?
Quoting verbatim the Instagram founders,
Instagram is a fun and quirky way to share your life with friends through a series of pictures. Snap a photo with your mobile phone, and then choose a filter to transform the image into a memory to keep around forever. We’re building Instagram to allow you to experience moments in your friends’ lives through pictures as they happen. We imagine a world more connected through photos.
Ever since the launch of Instagram in 2010, the mobile photo sharing and social networking platform has grown and has been steadily growing to be one of the biggest social networks.
The astonishing growth of reaching 100 million users in just 2 years made Instagram lucrative and hence Facebook made its foray into buying companies when it bought Instagram for 1 billion dollars in the year 2012
Instagram just like other social platforms like Twitter and Facebook has been taken full advantage of by brands to promote their products and services. See and learn from 40 of the best brands on instagram.
What Makes Instagram More Appealing To Ecommerce Marketers:
Visual Medium: Unlike other social platforms where the medium of promoting brands is primarily text through the use of posts or ads, Instagram is a visual medium, primarily photographs that greatly appeals to users.
General Electric communicates how GE is making the lives of people better and hence makes the world a better place to live.General Electric communicates how GE is making the lives of people better and hence makes the world a better place to live.
A recent study by Social Media Examiner states that, marketers have found that visual medium has been highly effective not just in promoting a brand and improving conversions but also in establishing trust and increasing engagement. According to the study more that 90% of the marketers are planning to experiment on visual content to promote their brands.
Simple & Easy To Use Platform: Unlike other social networks, Instagram is easy to use and with just a few clicks you are all set to promote and engage with your customers. The user interface of Instagram looks clean, uncluttered with one picture at a time on the screen, this enables brands to get more attention from a typical user.
Videos: Instagram to battle and arrest the development the growth of Vine launched Instagram videos that allowed users to upload and share 15 sec videos. Ever since the launch of videos brands have started to use them for running carefully made and highly engaging 15-second ads on their products.
Getting Started On Instagram
Creating an account
Since Instagram is a mobile application available for both iOS and Android you can download the app from either Apple App Store or from Google Play Store.
After downloading just open the app, where you’ll find two options to either sign up for a new account or log in to your account. If you are new to Instagram then you can create an Instagram account by,
1. Registering using an email address and password.
2. Using your existing Facebook account.
Updating Profile:
1. Sign in to your account.
2. That would take you to your profile page. Click on Edit Your Profile.
3. Update your profile picture by uploading a picture that best relates and represents your brand. The best practice is to upload your brand’s logo or a flagship product.
4. You can also add a website on your profile, this ideally should be the URL of your ecommerce website. 5. Instagram also allows you to add a short biography about your ecommerce company.
Using Instagram Features
Camera
Instagram is a primarily a photo sharing app, and hence the most important feature of the application is accessing the camera function.
1. Click on that would take you your phone’s built-in camera.
2. After snapping the picture you’ll be taken to basic photo editing features to enhance your pictures. The basic editing features include,
Filters: Instagram provides around 10 inbuilt filters that you can chose to automatically enhance the effects on your pictures.Top 9 Filters that are most commonly used on Instagram and that has the most engagement.
1. Mayfair 2. Inkwell 3. Walden 4. Amaro 5. Lo-Fi 6. Valencia 7. Hefe 8. Hudson 9. X-Pro
With the new major update, Instagram also allows you to perform some basic image edits like enhancing exposure, contrast, warmth, saturation, vignette and sharpen the images.
After completing the basic image edits and the application of filters you’ll be taken to a page where Instagram allows you to tag people on your picture, Share pictures to your brands Facebook and twitter pages and also add location details on the picture. Finally click on Share to upload your picture to the network.
How Ecommerce Companies Can Leverage Instagram For Marketing
Create A Brand Strategy
Since Instagram is a completely different medium, catering to a different audience, you should come up with an entirely different strategy for Instagram.
You must always aim not just to promote and sell products.
Create a community to enrich and make the lives of people better. For instance Nike has created a whole list of communities like Nike-Football and Nike-Basketball to promote sports and spread the message of importance of health and fitness in one’s life. Another great example of going beyond promoting a brand is that of Nike-Running, that has succeeded in creating an awareness of being fit and healthy amongst millions of people.
Promote Products:
Just like traditional marketing, you should mostly use Instagram to directly promote one’s products or services. Top brands like Macys, Ford Motors and Starbucks use Instagram to showcase their products.
Introduce New Products:
Marketers have successfully leveraged Instagram to successfully launch and market their new product to millions of people all with a single click. Brands like Ben&Jerry gives teaser to products that they are about to release, which greatly increases engagement amongst its customers.
Promote Events:
Instagram is a great way to promote new events. For instance Nike-Running promotes Nike’s Women Marathon on its Instagram account.
You can now promote special launch events, Thanksgiving sales and other events thorough Instagram.
Instagram also acts as an effective medium for doing a live coverage of the event for those who are unable to attend the event; this in a way greatly enhances engagement.
Share Values:
Taking a different route, Companies like General Electric is using Instagram not to promote products but to share the company’s true values, its mission and vision through breathtaking photographs.
General Electric communicates how GE is making the lives of people better and hence makes the world a better place to live.
Quoting from Instagram’s blog, GE uses Instagram,
To tell a broader story of building, powering, moving and curing the world – which just happens to be their company mission
You can use this strategy as an example and think what can you do similar for your company.
The Power Of Hash tags:
We are quiet aware of the power of Hashtags from Twitter and Facebook. Hashtags on Instagram is more efficient and has high affinity to bring people together to share similar and related visual content.
You can take take advantage of this and use Hashtags based on products, services, offers and events.
You can also plan and strategize long term brand specific Hashtags to create awareness and build a community around it. For instance Nike strategized a brand specific Hashtag called #werundirty that encourages every one to come as a community to share and promote long distance trial run.
You can also capitalize on the most trending Hashtags and run promotions around that specific Hashtag to increase visibility and reach.
Engagement
Most of the brands on Instagram fail to understand that Instagram is a social network and highly underrate the importance of a brand being genuinely social.
You must find opportunities to engage with your customers or community as a whole not just for promotion but also to gain valuable feedbacks.
You can engage on Instagram by,
1. Hashtags: Brand specific Hashtags are the best and the most efficient way to engage with your target audience. You must always find chances to ask questions, answer to questions and gather feedback from your followers.
2. Mention Your Followers / Fans: As an ecommerce company you can highlight/showcase the content from your ardent followers. This greatly increases the trust between the brand and the fans.
3. You can embed fan’s pictures on your website: Instagram now gives you the ability to embed posts on any website. You can embed posts of some our your most ardent fans on your website and show your love to them.
4. You should like, comment and respond: You should like the pictures of your fans, occasionally you can comment on their posts as a token of appreciation and finally you should respond to comments by your fans on your Instagram posts.
Instagram Videos:
Instagram Videos unlike traditional television ads are highly effective on Instagram.
1. You can produce creative and highly engaging 15-second ads on new products and services.
2. You can show product demos on product and service through a 15 sec video.
3. You can record small 15 sec customer testimonials that can embedded on your store to increase trust.
Partnerships:
As an ecommerce company managing lots of brands, you can easily partner with other brands and run a co-promotion on Instagram, Which is indeed a Win-Win for companies.
When you contact a company about partnering on Instagram, you should focus on the benefits they will get from the partnership and try to show them how partnering with you will be a win-win for their company.
Contests:
Nothing creates engagement and kindles interest like a great contest. You can run contests like,
1. Photo contests based on a specific theme of either a product/service. For instance Bolt House Farms ran a contest where any one who posts a picture of Bolt house farms with a specified Hashtag will get a coupon code which they can redeem online.
2. Captioning a photo contests.
3. First come first serve contests.
4. Web applications like Wishpond makes your life easier by helping you to create and manage contests on Instagram.
5. Apparel Ecommerce companies like TopShop provides special promo codes on Instagram photos of apparels that which they could redeem on their website.
Geo-Tagging:
You can take full advantage of the Geo-tagging of photos feature on Instagram to run marketing campaigns targeted to a specific geographical location.
Showcasing Your Company:
Sometimes rather than promoting products you can share interesting moments from your company’s day-to-day work, its culture and values.
1. Brands like New England Outer Wear shares the methods and care that goes behind every product they make through a series of inspiring photos and videos.
2. Brands like Media Temple uses Instagram to show why they are ranked top for the best places to work by posting pictures of their highly creative work place.
Instagram metrics:
If you can’t measure it you can’t improve it – Peter Drucker
As marketers you must always try to set small achievable goals that can tracked and measured. Key Performance Indicators like fans gained and engagement factor must be set and measured so that the process can be optimized further for favorable outcomes.
There are many third party analytics tool that helps you to track and measure the efficacy of your marketing strategies. Two such analytics tools are:
1. Iconsquare.com
2. Totems Analytics
These tools help to measure,
The engagement factor of your Instagram channel
The measure of how much your fans like your Instagram channel.
– Most liked posts
– Posts with most number of comments
– Top engaged followers
– Total number of fans gained over a period of time
– Total number updates over a period of time
– Average comments and likes per post (which is a basic measure of engagement)
– Which image filters has triggered more engagement.
– Most engaging hashtags.
Conclusion:
Considering the ease with which marketers have readily recognized and adopted Twitter and Facebook as an efficient medium to reach out to customers, Instagram is still in its nascent stage when it comes to marketing. Instagram as a company and marketers are still experimenting. Brands like Nike and General Electric have successfully built a model for creating a brand specific community. This is a great sign of encouragement for you to test the waters of Instagram.
What are ways that your company has used Instagram? Please share in the comments different marketing strategies, so that all of us can benefit.
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