The visual web has taken over, with Instagram helping to lead the trend.
Now part of Facebook and with over 100 million users, the popular photo-sharing app has turned regular users into amateur photographers.
But within the thousands of doughnuts snapped under Brannan or painted nails shot under Hefe, lies a marketing tool many brands are ignoring.
The content that Instagram users are generating and consuming allows innovative brands and e-commerce sites a way to harness the power of photo sharing to increase customer relations and enhance the feedback loop.
These six simple tips are a starting point for brand success on Instagram.
1) Create your account and set up an editorial calendar.
Images are a great way to communicate with your clients, and that makes Instagram a great distribution channel for your most visually appealing content. Whenever you’re releasing a new product line or hosting an event, a single photo can communicate more effectively than the longest press release.
But like with other forms of content marketing, you shouldn’t limit it to these events. Set up an editorial calendar (posting at least a couple of photos per week could be a good start) and define what type of content you’ll create. A good example is Nike, a company that regularly displays a mix of their own products, events, sports team gear or customers wearing their product.
If you still need some ideas to get started, here are some themes you can use to define your initial content strategy.
• Shots of your current products
• Sneak peeks of upcoming products
• Creative uses of your products
• Shots of your brand ambassadors and representatives
• Behind the scenes shots
• Shots of your products in the wild
• Sneak peeks of future marketing campaigns/ads
• Photos that relate to the lifestyle your brand represents
Whatever you decide to use, just remember that in the same way that your editorial content has a voice or tone, your phone content should have a distinct personality.
2) Pick a series of hashtags and focus on these.
Hashtags are the best way to categorize your content on Instagram, but also the easiest way to build a brand on the service. Instead of using a spray-and-pray strategy for your hashtag, you should define a few hashtags and stick to them. This will help your followers to remember and identify them with your brand.
Apart from the obvious ones, such as the name of your brand or your best-selling products, it is a great practice to create campaign-specific hashtags that resonate with your brand. For example Footlocker promoted #approvedwithlove for a campaign with Kevin Love to request photos from the NBA player’s fans. Another good example is Tiffany, who have been promoting the hashtag #truelovepictures to collect photos from their customers.
3) Interact/comment on your customers’ photos about you.
Whether you are actively engaging or not, your clients are already talking about your products on Instagram, so there is no better place to start the conversation than there! A great example is how the Greek Yogurt manufacturer Chobani features photos from their customers and uses the comments feature to answer questions they may have.
4) Merge offline/online.
The mobile nature of Instagram enables a level of interaction that simply isn’t possible on other platforms. This gives you the opportunity to engage with your users around specific locations or events, which is a great opportunity to blend your offline brand building efforts with your digital presence.
Take as an example the “Shoes About Town” campaign from Bergdorf Goodman. The luxury retailer created an interactive map using #BGShoes where they aggregated all the photos that their customers were taking around Manhattan. Additionally, they displayed some of the photos on their blog and their store.
5) Display photos from your customers on your products.
A few years ago, Google Vice President Jim Lecinsky, wrote a book called “The Zero Moment of Truth” where he explains in detail how the Internet has changed consumer behavior. In this book, Jim shows that since consumers now research online about your brand before buying, you should embrace product reviews and comments about your product as a new marketing opportunity.
The same concept can be applied to Instagram. As the web is becoming more visual, what better way to help your potential customers research your product than showing other happy customers using it?
Brands like Free People have already started working on this concept, integrating Instagram photos onto their product page.
This type of integration brings several benefits. Your prospective customers can now see how your products look on a regular person, which will help sales conversions. Additionally, featuring your existing clients on your product page is a way to increase their loyalty and therefore repeated sales.
6) Combine.
Finally, you can combine all the initiatives above to create a more comprehensive experience, like lululemon is doing with their #thesweatlife initiative, which enables customers to browse products using instagram photos and display the same photos on their product pages too.
As you can see in all the previous examples, Instagram can be a great way to increase brand awareness, user engagement and even drive more sales to your ecommerce store, so get started now!
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