5 tips for Running an Instagram Campaign

March 16, 2015 2:17 pm // Author: David Moceri

Running an Instagram campaign is a great way to drive fan engagement and create some user-generated content to promote your brand. With over 200 million active users per month and over 20 billion photos and videos shared, Instagram has come into its own as a social media power player. And although millions of businesses have joined Instagram, few have successfully figured out how to harness the popularity of the image-based social platform. In this article you’ll discover 5 tips to make your Instagram marketing campaign a success:

1. Know the Culture
Every social network has a distinctive culture. Instagram is the site where brands show fans who they are; it’s about shaping perceptions of a brand’s personality. Instagram’s fundamental purpose is to facilitate users sharing their own images and videos. In contrast, Pinterest users can have thriving, active accounts without ever contributing a single image themselves. Get to know Instagram culture, as well as your fans. Understand who you’re speaking to and with. Do some research to determine what your fans are talking about and what are they sharing. Connect to your audience. Successful campaigns are built around a connection with the audience.

2. Determine goals
When planning your campaign you need to determine your marketing goals and how your tactics will achieve the objectives you set. Any good strategy begins with goals, you need to know where you are going so you can know how to get there. Sales are, most of the time, the obvious choice, but there can also be secondary goals that lead to sales.

3. Find Your Frequency
it’s likely people will miss your message if they’re not tuned in when you post. In regards to email, tweeting, Facebook posts etc, there are days of the week that will gather more attention, but it’s the complete opposite for Instagram. With the mobility of Instagram, it is inherently on “24/7,” making any day of the week optimal for posting. While looking at the Fortune 500, there is no conclusive best day of the week to post on Instagram, but people do post the most on Thursday.

4. Leverage Partnerships
A little celebrity endorsement never hurts, but celebrities are an expensive resource and not available for every brand. With not many advertising options available for marketers who’d like to use Instagram, a growing trend is the use of influencers—Instagrammers with a large following—to help with marketing efforts Instagram users who have a large follower base can be just as effective, and they will usually deliver a much higher ROI on your campaign. Be careful when choosing your influencers. If an Instgrammer has been doing a lot of promotions via his account, it’s very likely that he’s exhausted his following. In addition, you want to make sure that the influencer has real likes—not ones bought illegitimately. You need to do a thorough analysis of each influencer’s profile. If an Instagrammer has 200,000 followers but gets only 100 likes on each photo, the account is spam. Every photo should have, roughly, 5% engagement. In other words, if the Instagrammer has 200,000 followers, then photos should be generating, on average, 10,000 likes and comments (combined).

5. Keep track and measure results
When displaying this content you need to moderate out any inappropriate or irrelevant content. After you plan the campaign’s goals, consider how you’ll measure against those goals to understand the success of the campaign. By measuring the engagement and reach of the campaign with metrics like the Relative Engagement you can bring some context to the efforts you put into the campaign.