Welcome to a new lesson of the Instagram Academy. If you have followed us so far, you certainly have enough grounding to take your first steps on the platform and promote yourself or your company through Instagram marketing.
You have built your Instagram profile. You even had the sense to make it a business one, meant for shops and companies. You have started publishing nice photos and videos of your products or office life. You have stuffed every post with hashtags, as the good ones do.
You have done all that, and there are no results. How is that possible? What is wrong? Instagram marketing, like any marketing worth the name, takes thought, strategy and (often) a great deal of patience. The results you can get, though, are beyond imagining. Consider that by June 2018 the network created in 2010 had reached a billion users worldwide. In Italy too there has been a boom in recent months: there are now 19 million active users (people who use Instagram at least once a month); in 2017 there were “only” 14 million, a jump of 36%.
New to the Academy? Have a look around: you will find plenty of other lessons on Instagram, on SEO, on Facebook and on growth hacking.
In our Instagram Academy you will find other lessons on how to become an influencer, on how to download Instagram photos, on buying followers, on how to use Instagram as a company and much more…
How do you catch the attention of a slice of this enormous audience? Let’s try together.
Today we look at the methods of the best — the ones who built successful Instagram marketing strategies. Lorna Jane, Wayfair and ASOS offer three important lessons everyone should keep in mind before starting.
Ready? Let’s go.
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Lorna Jane: convey personality
Among the most important things to ask yourself before starting any communication work: who are you? What are your strengths? What are your values? Questions that matter above all for a business, and that any Instagram marketing worth doing has to answer.
All of them can be boiled down to one simpler question: “If your brand were a person, how would you describe their personality?” That is where Lorna Jane, the Australian company selling sportswear, started. Every Instagram post reflects the brand’s answer to that question.
Today the label has 820,000 followers, built from zero through this strategy.
Image from www.instagram.com
Lorna Jane’s answer was: “If my brand were a person, she would be between 20 and 30, a woman, sporty in spirit, wanting to stay in shape and lead an active life”.
So the photos and videos the brand shares on Instagram are not only there to show off the clothes it makes. They are an essential part, certainly, but above all the posts convey the image of the woman they want to reach — their audience.
To succeed yourself, your brand has to have personality. It has to be distinctive and, exactly like real people, it cannot please everyone. To present the right image of your company you first have to understand who your audience is. It is as if you were building a profile of your “average” customer. How old are they? Men or women? Why do they come to you — which problem are they solving, which desire are they satisfying? Once you have answered, you will also understand the tastes and needs of your Instagram followers beyond their interest in your products. Lorna Jane, for instance, understood that beyond sport its customers care about a healthy lifestyle in general. That is why it often publishes content other than clothing.
Here is an example:
Image from www.instagram.com
That way you don’t give the impression of always selling at any cost, but of being a friend who accompanies their customers, always offering content of value.
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Wayfair: watch for new features
Wayfair’s Instagram marketing campaigns teach us another important truth about social communication: you always have to watch for what is new, keep up to date and innovate. But always with the user’s interest first. There is a very simple rule we often forget: make life easier, solve someone’s problem, and they will tell everyone about you.
How did Wayfair manage it? The brand sells furniture and home accessories online. It won by simplifying the online purchase process for its customers, through a new Instagram feature launched in 2017.
It used to work like this: an Instagram user saw a photograph; they had to work out which of the “pieces” shown in the photo or video they liked; then they had to close the Instagram app, open a web browser, search for the furniture they liked, work out whether it really was the one in the photo, put it in the basket and buy it. Headache already? Us too.
Now look at this post:
www.instagram.com
Today Instagram offers shoppable posts — posts you can shop from. A brand can add tags to the photo offering its products directly. When someone taps a tag, the app shows a pop-up, a new screen where the product’s details can be explored and, if wanted, bought. And to do that there is no need to go to the retailer’s site and hunt for the item. Thanks to this feature the user is taken straight to a landing page where they can complete the purchase. Far simpler, isn’t it?
Always remember that on the web, whoever makes life simpler wins: think about how you can do that before launching a post on Instagram.
Want to know more about tags? Read the lesson on Instagram tags.
ASOS: engage your audience
Image from www.instagram.com
The story of ASOS, another fashion brand (no surprise: fashion is one of the main global trends on Instagram), teaches us that social means social. A social network is a platform for creating social interaction on the web.
Imagine a conversation in which you never speak while the other person buries you in information and news. Not pleasant, is it? That is your brand on Instagram when it pays no attention to its followers and talks, talks, talks.
Remember: social media are also an essential tool for listening to your audience. Complaints, compliments, problems with products: people are increasingly used to writing on social media about everything that happens in their relationship with your company. That is a good thing, because you can step in when there is a problem and correct course. It also means you have to be ready to reply to everyone, for praise and criticism alike.
An excellent Instagram marketing strategy built on engaging people is to make the most of so-called “user-generated content” — UGC, to those in the know.
ASOS engaged a great many people by launching the #AsSeenOnMe campaign, in which people show the brand’s clothes on themselves (On Me, exactly). To take part, ASOS asked people to publish on Instagram photos and videos using the hashtag, showing their outfit. In exchange, the chance to appear on the brand’s own profile, which today has an audience of 7.7 million followers — a unique opportunity, including for many who may want to become fashion influencers in future.
If influencer marketing interests you, read the lesson on how to become an influencer.
The ASOS hashtag was a resounding success: there have been almost a million posts with #AsSeenOnMe — just search Instagram.
This kind of work helps so-called engagement, the involvement of your audience: as we said, your Instagram strategy should not look like a monologue. Try to involve as many people as possible, creatively prompting replies and participation.
Free image from Pixabay
Conclusion
Here we are at the end of this Instagram Academy lesson. Today you saw three good Instagram marketing success stories and learned three important lessons. If you want to start succeeding on the image network it matters that you: know yourself and your audience; keep up with new features and make your followers’ lives simpler; listen to what your audience has to say rather than delivering monologues.
We will see you in the next lessons, where we will go deeper into other Instagram subjects you are sure to find interesting. Stay tuned and keep following your favourite Instagram Academy.
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