How Effective is Instagram as a Marketing Tool to Engage Customers?

As we know, Instagram is an immensely popular social media platform, currently boasting around 800 million worldwide users (Statista, 2017).

The platform is also considered as a valuable social media marketing tool, mainly attributed to it’s visually appealing nature combined with a high number of daily visitors (Statista, 2017). Instagram influencer marketing is predicted to be worth $2 billion dollars by 2019 (Mediakix, 2017).

This blog post aims to break down and analyse the implications of Instagram marketing, therefore focussing specifically on the management of social media presence from Chaffey’s sixth digital marketing channel (Chaffey, 2012):

Engagement Levels: 

Instagram is renowned as one of the most engaging social media platforms available. A study conducted on the 25 most successfully engaging global brands revealed that the average Instagram post gained an engagement rate of 3.31%, this is a significant figure considering tweets from the same company averaged a rate of 0.07% (Peterson, 2017).

Potential of Instagram advertising:

• 80% of Instagram users follow at least one business account, and at least 30% of users have purchased a product they discovered via an advert on their feed.
• Instagram stories receive 250 million daily visitors.
• 1 in 5 minutes that people spend on a mobile device is either on Facebook or Instagram.
• 65% of top performing Instagram posts feature products.
• Effective hash-tagging system – posts with hashtags receive around 12.6% more engagement.

A risk to consider however…

Due to the platforms overwhelming popularity however, Instagram suffers from content saturation, as a result approximately 70% of Instagram posts don’t get seen unless they have received a substantial level of engagement. So pushing for additional likes and hash-tagging is now more significant, as well as adding a location, and even posting at the right time of day is an effective method in order to avoid this issue.

 

A more comprehensive list of stats can be accessed below:

https://sproutsocial.com/insights/instagram-stats/

 

This following section will be covering the sophisticated new approaches Instagram offers, in order to truly utilise the app effectively and maximise engagement levels…

Instagram Business Tools: 

This recent innovation from the company is an effective tool to allow marketers to tailor their profiles into a business orientated page, as well as incorporate analytics to effectively analyse how engaging their posts are:

• The company’s email and phone contact information can be incorporated through the profile. Directions to the store can also be added:

• Analytics can be used to highlight the most successful posts the company has uploaded in recent weeks. Specific countries, ages and gender of followers which engaged with posts can also be identified by the tool, allowing the company to tweak their output to increase engagement levels:

• Posts can be converted into adverts in a few easy steps – the company can simply choose a post, and run it as an advert for as long as desired. Here we can see how a page has taken a relatively old post and converted it into an advert to appear on more feeds, offering a click through link for customers to directly access the companies site.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Creating Effective and Engaging Advertisements

So now we have established Instagram is a highly engaging platform, an effective tool to advertise, and also allows businesses to monitor and analyse the success of their campaigns, this section looks to identify what techniques companies should adopt to create truly engaging and effective advertisements:

• Keep adverts simple: promoting a single product and providing a direct URL link to the company website – the below examples are of companies that have successfully achieved this:

All of these posts have been highly successful campaigns at promoting engagement from their target audience. The adverts all have a simple and effective message, with attractive and eye catching imagery which is more likely to attract the attention of the viewer, as apposed to a cluttered and overwhelming advertisement.

• Identify and target the correct audience: Instagram uses Facebook’s advanced built-in targeting system, allowing you to tweak and fine tune adverts to specifically appeal to a target market. Further information for how to successfully use this can be found here:

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/494140404019543

These factors combined with the analytical tools mentioned earlier provide a suitable starting point to create attractive and effective adverts, allowing a business to engage further with it’s target audience and measure the campaigns success over time.

 

Bibliography

Chaffey, D. (2012). Digital marketing: strategy, implementation and practice. 5th ed. London: Pearson Education Limited.

Osman, M. (2017). 18 Instagram Stats Every Marketer Should Know for 2017. [online] Sprout Social. Available at: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/instagram-stats/

Read, A. (2016). Where Social Media Is Headed in 2017: The Biggest Trends to Watch For – The Buffer Blog. [online] Buffer Social. Available at: https://blog.bufferapp.com/state-of-social-media#instagram

Statista. (2017). Instagram: active users 2017 | Statista. [online] Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/253577/number-of-monthly-active-instagram-users/