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
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