The Struggles of Instagram E-Commerce at a Skincare Startup

This week at my work as the junior digital marketer for the beauty startup Vain Pursuits, I was put in a position to deeply consider how a user’s path to purchase actually works on Instagram. Through the past four months, I’ve been focusing on a rebranding strategy for Vain Pursuits’ Instagram feed, featuring more lifestyle shots and bringing in Instagram influencers as brand ambassadors. Our initial growth in followers and engagement in June was high and we were thrilled to see a few conversion to sales. However these days, there are symptoms showing that this initial plan is no longer capturing users’ attention as we planned it to. Our number of followers have relatively plateaued and engagement rates per post are decreasing. 

Looking at an article from Adweek detailing how to turn Instagram into a revenue channel, it was reinforced that “when presenting your products on Instagram, you can’t just sell. You have to inspire.” This is something that I’ve picked up on a long time ago, just by being a regular Instagram user and Instagram brand shopper myself. The problem that now exists is how do we capture Vain Pursuits skincare in a way that inspires people to buy? It is evident through analytics that just taking shots of the products themselves is not very effective, as consumers cannot envision themselves using the products. I closely studied how Frank Body, an extremely successful coffee body scrub from Melbourne have done their Instagram photos. Bringing in $20 million in revenues the past year through just Instagram as the acquisition channel, it is no surprise that Frank Body knows quite a few things about how to best showcase your products subtly and stir enough curiosity to drive sales. 

Frank’s advantage is by having a strong brand personality through personifying the coffee scrub as a flirty guy. Although this is not completely relevant to what Vain Pursuits does, it can be inferred that we definitely need a stronger and bolder tone of voice in the captions of our Instagram posts. At the same time, the photo posts themselves need to feature more faces and beautiful models. The truth is, Instagram is a place where action is taken based on aspiration. “The aspirational nature of Instagram is driving desire, and that desire dries sales” and so we must devise a new kind of photo-taking and photo styling approach that shows a sexier side of our skincare that our target market consumers would better take in.

It’s crazy that a simple app for viewing photos is actually a complicated science in itself. Successful Instagram e-commerce is a combination of consumer behaviour and intensive visual content marketing. Even though it can be a lot of work sometimes, this is the type of marketing puzzle that I want to solve every day in my future digital marketing career. 

Link to Adweek article: http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/how-to-turn-instagram-into-a-revenue-channel/627189

L'Oreal Canada in the E-Commerce Scene

This past week was full of a whirlwind of events. However, one of the most memorable moments was definitely speaking with L’Oreal Canada at the Desautels Career Fair about their opportunities in digital marketing and e-commerce. This experience inspired me to look more into how L’Oreal successfully manages multiple brands on e-commerce right now.

I came across an article and video that discuss the partnership between L’Oreal and OSF Global Services, an e-commerce technology services provider. It was interesting to see that L’Oreal decided to outsource the development of an e-commerce platform instead of developing it in-house. The company had the goal of replatforming multiple brands within a limited time frame and thus it was more feasible to collaborate with a specialized and innovative firm. This actually relates as a nice example to what my INSY 333 class discussed last week about firms outsourcing software development when it is not part of their core competency, or when they need the final deliverable within a short time frame. Through working with OSF, L’Oreal was able to deploy four brands including Biotherm, Shu Uemura, Clarisonic and Kerastase within 3 months per brand onto the “core architecture” created.

What intrigued me was the concept of “responsive design”, which OSF implemented to meet L’Oreal’s requirement of a clean and sleek design that not only attracts, but engages customers on the sites. Responsive design “suggests that design and development should respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation”. I find it so fascinating how everything revolves around the user nowadays. May it be an e-commerce site or even just an overall digital marketing strategy, a push strategy is pretty much completely out of the picture, while the possible dimensions of a pull strategy continuously increase as new opportunities arise to interact with consumers in various aspects of tech.

I would say the key takeaway is that digital is evidently changing the retail landscape, and it’s here to stay. Even a large beauty company like L’Oreal that has traditionally relied on B2B selling to retailers has immersed in the e-commerce scene to greatly increase their conversion rates and revenues. This is only the beginning to a lot more change that digital will bring.

Links:
http://www.osf-global.com/company/newsroom/osf-helped-l-oreal-achieve-a-double-digit-increase-in-sales
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/01/guidelines-for-responsive-web-design/

When Tinder Meets Uber- For the Modeling Industry

Welcome to my first blog post for e-business. I don't want to bore you right off the bat, but I also want to make sure that you know the nitty-gritty of what common theme to expect among the many more future posts to come. I love the fashion and beauty industries (original for a girl, I know), but what I love even more is understanding how tech and anything digital are shaping these industries and changing the way traditional business models operate. And even more specifically, how the e-commerce and digital marketing scene works in the businesses of these two industries. Let's get started, shall we? 

It’s not every day that you have a friend excitedly sending you an article on Facebook saying “OMG your ex-boss is on Business of Fashion!”, but that’s exactly what happened a few days ago. I interned at a modeling agency in New York called Silent Models last summer and little did I know that one of the intern duties of testing out a new app my boss was secretly developing would one day become one of the headline articles in BoF’s “Fashion-Tech” section. 

When I first played around with Swipecast, identifying bugs and weaknesses of the UI, the app idea intrigued me a lot. While the app’s current analogy is “Uber for models”, as detailed in the article, I bet few people know that it started out more with the concept of “Tinder for models”. In the earlier concept, the idea was to have models upload their profiles and for casting agents to swipe through models looking for work, much like how users of Tinder do based on judgments of appearances. It was extremely interesting for me to see how this initial idea was eventually adopted to the current “Uber for models” approach whereby models upload a portfolio and casting agents filter them based on preferences such as height and hair colour, and can send booking requests, much like how you would send one for an Uber driver. 

The UI of Swipecast

With the emergence and fast-paced growth of social media and disruptive technologies to support and even become the primary platform of many traditional businesses and e-businesses, it really makes me reflect on the growing impact of technology on multisided platforms, and how this creates new business opportunities that could never exist years ago. With apps like Swipecast, aspiring models can easily gain more exposure and job opportunities while budget-tight fashion brands have more options in economically casting their campaigns. 

However at the same time, it is also clear that this kind of technology can’t completely replace the human interactions required in booking big modeling jobs. There are still many key considerations such as the level of accountability or the model’s ability to move and interact on set. 

At the end of the day, I think examples like Swipecast in fashion industry push us to deeply consider, to what extent mobile technology can change the ways traditional business models work, and shift work to a more digital basis without jeopardizing the value of human interactions.

Link to the article: http://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/fashion-tech/modelling-apps-swipecast-feels-instagram