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Learn From The Best: 3 Brands Nailing Instagram Marketing And What You Can Learn From Them

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Instagram has rapidly become one of the best social networks for marketing a business, particularly when it comes to retail, fashion, beauty and food – just to name a few.  Instagram currently has 1 billion users, out of which 500 million use it every day. In fact, in less than a few months the total of number of daily has more than doubled, from 200 million to 500 million. But the best statistic that brands will love to hear is that Instagram users often follow and interact with brands on the popular network – as many as 80% of all accounts follow a business on Instagram.

But the big question is, how do you achieve success on Instagram? In other words, what are the best Instagram marketing strategies that you should employ?

In this blog post, I’m going to talk about 3 top brands that are nailing Instagram marketing and show you what you can learn from them and apply to your own Instagram marketing strategy.

Encourage more user generated content: Adobe

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Brands can use Instagram for a variety of reasons: improving brand awareness and increasing engagement with your audience, for social selling, to promote their products or services and so on.

Adobe are clearly using the platform to increase brand awareness and their Instagram engagement – and they’ve got an amazing strategy to help them achieve their objectives.

Namely, they rely almost completely on user generated content – or UGC for short. Not only does this generate amazing content for their Instagram profile (and they don’t even have to create any content, but simply curate and repost it), but it also serves to promote their product in a highly efficient way: by word of mouth.

Adobe use their bio space to explain what type of content they want to feature on their profile and what hashtag people need to use when posting an image. In this case, they’re looking for user generated content that focuses on emotion and connection, taken by people who use Adobe.

Adobe users can then take amazing pictures, use the hashtag provided in the bio - #Adobe_HumanElement – and post the photos on Instagram so that they’ll hopefully  have their pictures reposted on Adobe’s Instagram, helping them reach an audience of over 820k followers, as with this post.

UGC can be an incredibly powerful marketing tool if you can get people to create it; for example, Adobe essentially built a huge team of brand ambassadors that are promoting the brand every time they post an image and use the hashtag.

To encourage UGC from your own audience, you’ll need to start a UGC campaign like Adobe:

  • Pick a theme: for example, people wearing your products or using them in interesting ways
  • Pick a great hashtag: make it short, catch and easy to write – and make sure you read it through before you make your campaign live so you can avoid the fallout and ridicule that can came up with a bad hashtag (for example #hobbitch as a hashtag to promote The Hobbit, or the famous #susanalbumparty which was supposed to read as Susan Album Party, but instead took a completely different turn)
  • Promote your campaign: promote your UGC campaign on your profile, with Stories and images/videos, as well as in your bio to encourage people to participate

Showcase your products and drive more traffic to your website: Califia Farms

Another big reason why brands use Instagram is so that they can showcase their products and drive traffic to their website – and indirectly, also more sales.

One of the brands that does this beautifully is Califia Farms, a brand that creates and sells all kinds of dairy-free products such as dairy-free yogurts, almond milk coffees and creamers and other similar products.

Their strategy is simple, yet highly effective: they’ve found a way to not only promote their products on Instagram in a way that works very well on this platform – i.e. with beautifully-plated foods – but they also drive traffic to their website and inspire their audience with the different ways that they can use their products.

In most cases, it’s with very photogenic foods and recipes.

The images look amazing, the food looks delicious and all the recipes are made with their products. As you can see above, they then explain what the recipe is and let their fans know that they can get the recipe for themselves by going to their bio.

If they click on the link in to bio, they’ll get to a page where each recipe is listed in chronological order. Then, the visitors just has to click on the recipe they want to see and they’ll be directed to Califia’s website where the recipe resides.

Whether you create food products or not, there’s plenty to learn from this Instagram strategy:

  • Find ways to showcase your products and all the different ways that people can use them in photos and short videos
  • Build up your website traffic by giving your fans and followers a good incentive to click the link in your bio (for example, for recipes as with Califia Farms, for providing instructions on how to use a product, for reading more about an interesting subject and so on)

Showcase your company culture: Charity: Water

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Charity: Water is a charity, yes, but it has a lot to teach both businesses and non-profit organizations when it comes to Instagram strategies – especially if your goal is to showcase your company culture, your values and the human aspect of your business/organization.

Charity: Water post a lot of varied content on their Instagram profile but their main focus is on the work they do and the people who help get it done. They go behind the scenes and show off their team of interns, as you can see here. Plus, they also show behind-the-scenes images of their upcoming projects to help tease their audience and they even showcase their supporters (or in a businesses’ case, the customers).

As I mentioned before, there’s a lot to learn from their strategy even if you’re promoting a business and not a charity – particularly if your goal is to showcase your brand values and company culture, as well as boost awareness of your brand:

  • Get behind the scenes and focus on creating content that fits that theme: images from around your office, videos of your team creating a project or developing a new product
  • Showcase your charity work and your brand values: what you support as a brand, pictures, videos and Stories with your charitable projects
  • Put the spotlight on your customers and clients by creating quick case studies of your work together or how they’ve used your products or services

Conclusion

There is a lot to learn by looking at what other brands do on Instagram to get people’s attention, as well as get them to take action. Each of the brands covered in this article uses a specific strategy aimed to help them achieve a very particular goal.

When planning your own Instagram marketing strategy, take the time to really consider your objectives so that you can build the ideal strategy to help you reach these goals – just like Adobe, Califia Farms and Charity: Water.