The year 2015 is truly a promising year for digital marketing. Social media is among the primary digital channels that businesses utilize to promote their products and services and reach their target market. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram are the seven leading social media platforms that marketers use for their campaigns, according to the 2015 Social Media Marketing Industry Report.
With Instagram usage rising significantly from 28 percent last year to 36 percent this year, it has evidently become a promising social network for sharing photos. And it’s not even a new phenomenon, with 6 Powerful Reasons Why you Should include Images in your Marketing – Infographic Jeff Bullas himself admitting that he’s turned into a habitual Instagrammer as early as 2012. This “visual culture” is not the future‚ it is the now.
Top brands from various industries all over the world are capable of amassing millions of followers on their Instagram accounts. People are already congregating on the platform. Armed with the right strategy, it shouldn’t be too hard for your brand to rally an audience around itself.
Fifty-two percent of marketers plan to increase their Instagram use, up from 42 percent in 2014. This is very telling of what your industry peers have up on their sleeve. We break down the reasons why Instagram is every digital marketer’s favorite:
It has better engagement than other social media sites
According to The Marketer’s Guide to Instagram 8 comments Forrester Research, Instagram fan engagement rate is 58 times higher than Facebook and 120 times higher than Twitter. Based on statistics alone, Instagram has greater potential to reach and engage an audience compared to other social media sites. One obvious reason is that Instagram’s interface is simple while others‚ are too clunky, which is not pleasing to the eye and cumbersome to navigate. Instagram shows one image at a time by utilizing continuous scrolling so that people can easily process the thought or message that each photo wants to convey.
It communicates the personality of the brand
An Instagram feed says a lot about the personality of the brand, and this should be reflected in the aesthetics of each photo as well as the entirety of the feed. For example, if a brand is promoting a lively and cheerful persona, their Instagram feed will be colorful; if a brand wants to appear understated, it will post minimalist images. A brand’s personality also has a chance to shine through its use of hashtags. Marketers can assign an official hashtag for their brand and for every campaign, allowing the market to also use this hashtag when posting an image relevant to the brand and/or campaign.
It can relate to the audience yet stay relevant to the brand
An ideal Instagram feed stays relevant both to the brand and its audience. For your target audience to tap the follow button or double-tap your pictures, they must see its relevance to their lifestyle. For engagement to be potentially successful, a brand must be relatable to its target market. And it’s not just about sharing images that are nice to look at or curating a seemingly flawless feed the entire user experience must be improved by the interaction. This phenomenon of customers interacting with the brand with the touch of a fingertip bridges the brand-audience gap, increasing customer affinity.
It can get immediate feedback from the market
One of the better features of Instagram that’s very important to marketers is platform’s means to get immediate feedback from users. If a photo can gather a thousand likes within minutes of posting, it most likely means that the post is of high quality, so much so that the target market reacted favorably to it. Another sign that a brand’s Instagram account is staying relevant is the increase in the account’s number of followers and the positive comments that users leave on each post. Marketers can easily glean a brand’s reputation based on these feedbacks.
It can instantly announce brand offerings to the market
Instagram is also an avenue for announcements, promos, and other important notices. These types of posts, among others, are the most anticipated among all kinds of posts. Posting such pictures encourages Instagram users to follow a certain brand. A brand’s Instagram feed also becomes an avenue for the market to know not just the brand’s story but the worth of the products they are purchasing. It can be a platform for the audience to see the value of these products and why they have to choose it over the other brands.
As a relatively young social media site, there’s still room for improvement for Instagram in terms of marketing and advertising. Needless to say, marketers should watch out for these updates. Probably years from now, Instagram will surpass the other channels and lead the digital marketing pack not just in the Philippines but in the whole world.