Instagram grabs the lion’s portion for lifestyle brands

With the progress in technology over time, a new era of digital transformation has begun ‘The 4th Industrial Revolution’ and along with it, there has been a symbolic change in the way business corporations’ function. It has simplified the process of analysing data thus enabling efficiency in operations (EY Global., 2018). Everything is buttoned down to automation, data exchange, cyber-physical system, the internet of things, cloud computing and artificial intelligence on industries. It brought about a paradigm shift in the marketing and the volume of B2Bs and B2Cs investing in their digital marketing campaigns has been multiplying ever since. This has revolutionised how companies reach their customers and in turn how customers have reformed their buying process from the traditional shopping at physical malls to online shopping.

Instagram has ascended as a leading pedestal for brands since its launch in 2010 connecting people via visual elements and building a global network of over 1 billion monthly users. Apart from cross-channel engagement targeted shoppable posts also help brands reach the prospective customers and help spread awareness about the brand. Shoppable posts are most suitable for brands that have to reach the targeted customers based on their demographics, psychographic, behavioural and geographical needs.

User-Generated Content Marketing

Instagram’s popularity is also associated with User-generated content marketing which can be implemented by brands in two ways. The paid form is known as Influencer marketing and the unpaid form is known as user generated content marketing. User-generated content marketing is when brands repost the organic content by the users and fans of the product in their social media pages or website. The content can be a picture, video, blog, testimonial, review, posts and anything else that the users post. It’s from users side rather than the brand itself.

One of the most popular companies Coca-Cola hugely benefitted from their share-a-coke campaign. In this campaign, one side of the logo on the bottle was replaced by ‘share a coke’ and the other side with any of the 250 most popular nicknames. It ran across 80 countries since its commencement in Australia in 2011.

Influencer Marketing

The second form of paid user-generated content marketing is called influencer marketing.  These influencers have a large following and they impact the buying decision of their followers.

Influencer marketing is when brands collaborate with famous social media influencers for a fee. It can be used by brands to gain the attention of a wider audience and give proper instructions on product usage in a short time period. These influencers review the products and spread awareness about those products. The Influencers today have followers from 10k to millions and have the power to establish or demolish a product. Brands with a high spend can go for macro influencer marketing. These influencers are like the celebrities of social media with a minimum following of 300000 and could take your product up on a colossal level. This exorbitant popularity comes enormously priced. Then come the micro-influencers in play. These influencers have a following of a minimum of 10000 and can go up to 50000. This category of influencers also creates enough hype about the products and are suitable in places where the requirement of brand promotion and brand awareness is more inclined to specifically targeted locations.

Mamaearth is one of the most recent brands that has been collaborating with micro-influencers based in different states to create an area-specific awareness of their products. Mamaearth made its debut 3 years ago and ever since has reached 1.5 million customers in 500 different cities as per IndianWeb2 (S. Chaudhary, 2020).

Some of the other lifestyle brands actively using influencer marketing are, Maybelline, Sugarbear hair and so on.

Engagement rate and Conversion rate

Not only does Instagram have a high engagement rate, but also good conversion rates as compared to other social media platforms.The average engagement rate on Instagram is 1.25% as opposed to 0.0875% on Facebook (Feehan B., 2019). Instagram is an enormous asset for lifestyle brands like fashion, food, cosmetics, beauty, clothing, accessories, etc. Apart from helping target prospective customers, the app also becomes a portfolio for the brand to showcase its products on a big scale to a wide audience and serves as an online community for people to share their thoughts, views, feedback, and grievances about a product with the brand and the fellow customers.