Instagram has upped the social game over the last two years and has evolved from being a simple photo sharing platform to a full-fledged marketing platform. The statistics for Instagram has changed drastically as marketers realized its potential.
Instagram worked significantly well for most fashion brands and food tech companies. In fact, according to a recent study, more than 95% of US based fashion brands are on Instagram. Another predictive analysis has also revealed that the number of brands registered on Instagram (overall) will rise from over 48% to more than 70%.
This brings us to the question, why are brands really using Instagram? The answer is the huge user base and the platform’s usage itself. Hashtags are the new cool, and Instagram for sure is acing the hashtag game! So much so, that it has even overtaken Twitter over the last year. It might be hard to believe, but Instagram’s performance has been better than all other social media platforms. According to a study by Brandwatch, engagement with brands on Instagram is 10 times higher than Facebook, 54 times higher than Pinterest, and 84 times higher than Twitter.
This brings us to the question, are brands interacting with their customers on Instagram? The Instagram use-base is a whopping 500 million and only a mere 8% of this is not a constant user. Among this, maximum users are from the age group of less than 35 years. Interestingly, that is also the target audience for most brands (the earning population as well as the tech savvy one).
It has been long understood that visual content works best when it comes to marketing your product/content. Instagram therefore is one of the major places to be in while trying to promote your brand. However, it is equally important to understand your marketing goals and how to drive the same on a platform like Instagram.
Why and How?
If your aim is to increase awareness around your brand/products, you need to have a large following. Make sure that your audience is organic, this helps in making sure that your audience is genuinely interested in you and eventually, them being there would help you understand your audience segments in the future, strategically target your campaigns and finally increase your sales. This also requires you being present at the right places. “Hashtags” can be a great way to achieve this. There is always more power to your campaigns, when you run them with a certain hashtag. Another way to gain attention is by being present in the most common hashtag areas.
Creating visually appealing content, with call to action is a must. Host a contest, arrange a competition or run a campaign. This helps in increasing interaction with your customers and also increasing brand awareness, which eventually increases your followers count. To make your campaigns more successful, cross promote them on other social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Also create an alert for your mailing list, if you get lucky they might just promote your campaign as well.
What’s next?
If your customers are on Instagram, they definitely have a lot of questions to ask. Are you simply posting on Instagram or are you also responding to those messages? Whether it is a complaint, a query or for that matter even an exclamation your audience should feel that they are being heard. Your Instagram audience is just like your girlfriend (or boyfriend), you are in a two way relationship and it goes beyond just striking the conversation and responding to their comments. Look at the bigger picture and nurture the relationship with personalized content/offers to make them feel special.
BONUS!
Don’t ever forget to reward your contest winners! They hate it when they make an effort and do not get appreciated for it.
Monitor and Measure
So, you have run a very visibly successful campaign and wish to see how it has actually performed. Here’s where social media monitoring tools come handy. While not all tools have the capability to measure all of Instagram, some tools do have the capability to do “hashtag tracking”. This allows a brand to understand how the hashtag you put your money on has performed and also derive meaningful insights, like how popular was it, who were a part of the audience which interacted with your brand, which gender your brand performs better with and the like. Benchmark against your competition to understand your market stance against them.
Are you an #instagrammer yet?
