Instagram, you have obviously heard of it if you’ve discovered our website and our blog.
Moving on there’s Instagram marketing – yes it’s a thing. But why is it a thing, you may ask?
Because the platform has a large and growing community. The number of people joining the platform is just continually increasing and the Facebook community is shifting to this platform, luckily Zuck owns both social media spaces.
The power of Instagram, therefore, cannot be undermined, to grab the attention of your consumer base you need to be where they are and generally this is on Instagram. Thus Instagram Marketing is a thing.
The millennial community is, of course, the largest part of the platform but they don’t dominate it alone. Whatever your industry, Instagram, and marketing on this platform must be embraced. In a recent article on CNBC analysing a UBS study, even the luxury fashion industry can no longer underestimate Instagram data as a metric for analysis.
“The number of Instagram followers a luxury brand has is likely to correlate to sales. “We note a clear linear relation between the number of followers on a given social channel and the brand sales at retail,” UBS notes. Even if fans can’t afford to buy a designer item immediately, their interest will likely mean they purchase “sooner or later.”
For 2019, your brand and your company need to really focus on the platform and building a solid relationship with the community and your followers. Your brand needs to act like a media company and communicate daily in a contextual manner. As noted in a recent article on ADWEEK “It is great for content marketing and paid advertising and, at the same time, for communication and customer service”.
To truly embrace the power of Instagram, your strategy needs to include:
Interacting and storytelling
Use the platform like your brand is a media production house. You need to be hyper-targeted with your content in a real-time manner. Allow your brand to engage with your audience frequently and look for new followers as you go along.
Use Instagram features throughout the platform to continue to build engagement. Stickers, polls, and sliders add to the community vibe.
IGTV & Stories & Ads
Video is huge especially to most of the Instagram community who sometimes don’t have time to scroll through a post and will happily watch a short format video instead. The age of instant gratification!
But there is a large population who are also keen to watch longer form video on Youtube. This population are also massive fans of Instagram and so IGTV was born. It was created to allow for long-form video to be created. You cannot ignore this.
Of course, supplementary to this, you need to invest in Story Ads. This is a perfect solution to communicate straight to the point messages however they need to be very strong on a creative sense to ensure they don’t look and feel like an invasive ad. Otherwise, it’s easy to forget and swipe past.
Influencer Marketing
How did we get this far down and not mention our favourite form of marketing? Find the right influencer and build a partnership. The value of this form of engagement is still highly underestimated but will continue to grow. We predict a strong amount of ad budget being spent on influencers in 2019.
The power of the platform is huge, it cannot be underestimated. Time and marketing budget needs to be invested into Instagram. With some patience, the results will be worthwhile.