Today Nike is the second most followed account on Instagram and the most followed apparel brand on the platform. With 76.9 million followers Nike has grown their Instagram following 134% in less than two years. Between their active lifestyle aesthetic, motivational slogan and their loyal community, Nike has been able to create a brilliant Instagram strategy that brought them all the way to the top. WHY USE INSTAGRAM?Nowadays, your Instagram page is just as important as your website’s landing page. Instagram is different than other social media platforms in that its visual nature allows for brands to highlight their identity through images and create a narrative that lets customers feel the personality of a brand just by looking at the profile. According to Forbes, 80% of the 700 million Instagram users choose to follow and connect with brands on Instagram, making their consumer to brand engagement 10x more than Facebook, 54x more than Pinterest, and 84x more than Twitter. This makes Instagram a fantastic platform to highlight your brand's story and connect with consumers. LEARN FROM NIKE’S IMMEDIATELY RECOGNIZABLE BRAND IDENTITYIt’s a Lifestyle — Nike’s brand identity is so strong that you can pinpoint one of their products, advertisements, or posts simply by the presence of their swish or their slogan “Just Do It” and sometimes even without those at all. Nike’s motivational identity is at the heart of everything they do regardless of being online or offline. Nike uses Instagram to connect their brand to build the “Just Do It” lifestyle rather than solely focusing on bombarding its followers with product shots and promotional material. According to Inc, they very successfully use Instagram to make customers feel as though they are not buying the products but instead buying the lifestyle that is associated with the products. They use motivational copy that connects with their followers gaining them up to 500,000 likes per post. Nike has been wildly successful when creating a community both online and offline that share the same lifestyle goals as the brand. Nike was able to do this, not only because of their cohesive brand lifestyle, voice and motivational mission, but because they actively reach out to their community. Nike encourages their followers to participate in the Nike community by asking them to share their #Nike lifestyle and then regularly giving customers a shout-out on their page. By allowing your customers to participate in content creating and interact with your brand it creates a narrative that is compelling and worth following. Yes, we want to hear other people's personal stories because it makes us feel like we can share our own and it only elevates the authenticity of the brand. Instagram is a great platform to showcase your brands personality. Before posting you have to consider who you are as a brand and who your audience is. Is your brand “Funny? Inspirational? Heartfelt? Sarcastic?”, figure out who you are and then stick to it. Create an Aesthetic — Although Nike sells work out clothing, sneakers and sports equipment, all things that wouldn’t stereotypically be considered stunning, they play to the nature of Instagrams platform and post images that are visually beautiful and hard not to like. According to Sprout, your Instagram posts should not only connect to the overall personality of the brand but they should also connect visually. Weather that be a cohesive color pallet or a type of camera angle, the composition of your Instagram should reflect your brands lifestyle mission but also your brands aesthetic. When working with Instagram you have to take into consideration the nature of the platform. Instagram is founded on visuals, so in order to be successful you have to post beautiful content that isn’t just a montage of branded images. Remember, on Instagram your posts are selling a lifestyle not just your products. People Like a Good Story — Many think that Instagram stops after taking the photo but captions are just as important when creating your brand's story. According to Forbes, a consistent voice will create authenticity and allow people to connect with your brand. By linking your comments and copy on Instagram to the same mission as your photos you create a brand that has personality and reliability. A brand that people want to follow because they are sincere and interesting on top of posting great content. A "Just Do It" COmmunityHashtags -- Using hashtags allows people to connect their personal pages and posts to your brand, which strengthens the community and allows for content to be shared within it. #Nike, has over 68 million posts on Instagram allowing people to interact with the brand and see how other people are interacting with them as well. Nike used the growth of #Nike as a way to celebrate their community. For 24 hours Nike shared 10 Instagram photos from their customers who had posted using their hashtag thanking them for inspiring the company and highlighting the story of the fan who posted the original photo. Doing this not only build brand loyalty and made customers feel appreciated and included but also gained them thousands of likes and comments, made headlines and created brand awareness. User Generated Content -- Like Nike, when your brand’s community grows large enough for members to start sharing photos that feature your brand, it allows you to repost their content and encourage others to post their experiences with your products. According to Sprout, UGC is extremely beneficial to creating brand loyalty and trust but when using UGC you still have to make sure it is in line with your brands image before posting it to your own page and to give the original poster credit. UGC allows for a “we’re all in this together” vibe that not only gives your brand new content to post but also creates greater brand loyalty. Final ThoughtsNike has done an incredible job of highlighting the personality of the their brand and creating a lifestyle that is associated with their products. But you don’t have to be a huge brand like Nike to follow their Instagram marketing strategy successfully. Once you have a mission statement about who you are as a brand and what you want to portray to the world you just have to stick to it no matter what. Weather it be your voice, your instagram photos, or the narrative you tell through all your content, being true to your brand will make you relatable and trustworthy. If you create your brand as a lifestyle people will want to live it.
Go create an Instagram empire. Nike’s brand started from scratch just like yours did. “Just Do It”.
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Social media has completely changed the way in which we interact with our friends, family and acquaintances but it has also drastically changed the way in which we interact with brands as well. Social media has allowed for brands to be seen as people too, allowing businesses to connect with their customers as if they too where your bestie. Ten years ago Time Magazine named “you” the person of the year to highlight how everybody can become somebody on social media and since then businesses have taken social media by storm creating brands with personality. Glossier, an online skincare and make up brand, founded by Emily Weiss has completely mastered creating a brand that you want to be friends with. Inspired by her blog Into The Gloss where she interviewed women in the beauty, fashion and modeling industries and discussed their beauty routines and favorite products, Emily noticed that there was a gap in the beauty industry where women didn’t really have a voice or an ability to say what they wanted and needed from products and there sparked her idea for a digitally native beauty brand inspired by real life. WHY BE SOCIAL?The Pool highlights that 52% of millennials are likely to make beauty purchases on social media. The blog talks about how nowadays the best way to drive beauty purchases is to have tutorials with a “click to buy” link. People want to be informed rather than bombarded with advertising messages that don’t offer any insight. Instead we are looking for a brand that offers transparency, reliability and personality. According to Lipschultz, social media allows for these informal conversations where customers can be a part of the dialogue and creates an environment where consumers can interact with the brand, ask questions, post reviews, gather information, become part of a community and share control. STYLE GOES A LONG WAYBeing a part of the makeup, fashion and modeling industry, Jess Weiss understood how important the “look” and “voice” is when it comes to creating a successful brand. With pastel color blocking on pristine white packaging and bolded black text, Glossier's image is the perfect combination between simple and eye catching resembling an artists dream of Pantone's color chips and paint tubes. Hootsuite highlights the importance of linking your brands voice and tone with the brands style, which is exactly what Glossier does. The brand strives to create products that are beautiful, simple to use and reliable and their packaging’s simplicity and class translates that seamlessly. According to Lipschultz, brands need to look relevant, engaged and authentic because if their content is unimaginative then it makes them look completely uninteresting. In an interview with Forbes, Emily said that because of this need to stand out, she spent an enormous amount of time with an illustrator creating the packaging, stickers and illustrations so that when people got their products they were so excited about it they wanted to take a picture of it and share it. the glossier strategy. Test, evaluate, adjust.According to Hootsuite, it is really important to test, evaluate and adjust your social media marketing plan in order to know what will and won’t be successful when trying to connect with your customers. Social Listening allows companies to understand what is trending, what is important to the customers and how their brand is relevant. Glossier is founded on the idea of “test, evaluate and adjust”. The brand itself was born from the conversations that women have when choosing the products that they use everyday. Through research, re-choosing, reviewing and recommending products to people they know as well as people on the internet, women create a dialogue about what types of products they do and don’t like.
Test — What Works? What Doesn't? Founder Emily Weiss wanted Glossier to become a brand that women wanted to be friends with, connect with, be inspired by and trust. Tech Crunch claims that in order to do so she needed to create a direct-to-consumer strategy that allowed her customers to engage with the brand, writing reviews, explaining what they needed and getting tips and tricks from the brand so that she would be able to create products that filled the needs of her customers. According to Entrepreneur.com, Emily, understanding the power of social media being part of the world of blogging spent all $8.4 million she received in funding on investing in technology, data analytics and studies of Instagram and other social media platforms. She wanted to understand how well certain Glossier posts performed in comparison to others, whether or not people liked her products and how people where engaging with her posts. Evaluate & Adjust — What Do People Want? Let's Make It Happen. Brands are normally in control of the messages that surround them as well and the messages that they give their consumers. However, Lipschultz claims that reviews allow for customers to become influencers through their comments because future customers read reviews to determine the value of a product or the sincerity of a brand. Social media and reviews allow brands to create extremely valuable customer service based on how they respond to reviews and remain transparent online. Positive customer service leads to the sharing of positive experiences and the growth of brand loyalty. Glossier took full advantage of reviews as a way to create products truly inspired by the customers, which built trust and loyalty for the brand. According to Entrepreneur.com, Glossier posted on Instagram asking followers what they wanted in a moisturizer and after 1,000 people responded asking for a priming lotion that hydrates the skin while still allowing a matte makeup finish to be applied on top, the company took their insights into consideration and released the Priming Moisturizer Rich. Glossier’s marketing, editorial and customer service teams are all responsible for responding to all comments both publicly and through direct message so that all their customers feel heard. Glossier takes pride in their open communication channel with their customers and even recruited representatives or “Glossier Girls” to receive new products early in return for feedback sessions so that they could create the best possible products inspired by what their customers wanted. At Glossier, the influencers are regular people who engage with the brand online, which makes them accessible, and trustworthy.
Glossier's Cult like followingGlossier grew an impressively large community with extreme brand loyalty. Since their launch in 2014, Glossier has grown to have 1 million followers on Instagram, 150 thousand #Glossier tagged posts of people using and endorsing their products and brand loyalty so strong it has been described as a “cult following”. According to Refinery, this Glossier fan base is so devoted that its products regularly rack waiting lists with tens of thousands of people. Weiss claims that Glossier owns 90% of its success to their fans because the four-year growth of the brand has not been through paid advertising and marketing but mostly word of mouth. By creating a Social Business, Glossier was able to use social media as platform for word of mouth advertising where customers feel like they are having a conversation with the brand, learning from the brand or even seeing the brand as a "friend". This connection, or Friend-of-Mine Awareness, is created by making customers consider your brand as a friend in order to gain attention and loyalty. In an interview, Emily Weiss claimed that whenever they talk to a customer through captions, email, on the website, or directly, they write their copy the same way they would write a message to a friend. This voice of “friend” has created a loyalty and trust within the Glossier community that other companies could only dream of. Final ThoughtsI first became aware of the Glossier brand on Instagram when I saw a video tutorial of their Cloud Paint crème blush and immediately was intrigued by how easy it looked to apply, and their beautiful packaging. The caption had a quirky line about how Glossier was for the girls who didn’t know how to use a makeup brush and in one post I had already decided I liked the brand. Once my friends started raving about it I couldn’t hold out anymore and I bought some of their products.
The brands we choose and use are a reflection of who we are and when a brand comes along that is so transparent, reliable, efficient AND makes you feel a part of a community it makes you want to collect all of their products. I have friends who seem to be on a mission to have every single Glossier product as if they were collectables because not only do their product work but it is refreshing to have a brand be truly inspired by the needs of the people purchasing the products and so focused on communicating with the customers. |
HELlOI'm Sydney, a 20 year old from Boston figuring out how to "adult" and not freeze out here in the real world. Archives
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