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Lesson 1:
How to Use Visual Marketing to Grow Your Business on Instagram
How to Use Visual Marketing to Grow Your Business on Instagram
In just five years, co-founders Griffin Thall and Paul Goodman went from selling 100 bracelets out of their suitcases to managing a multi-million dollar business with more than 30,000 online orders per month. The extraordinary success of their store, Pura Vida Bracelets, is in a large part due to their ability to tap into visual marketing on social channels like Instagram. In this guide, Griffin Thall explains the importance of visual content, and how brands can use customer photos and videos to build a marketing strategy that really works.
When people ask what our secret is, it’s pretty simple: Growing up around social media, we kind of understood how to work it from the beginning. And we knew that strong visual content was the key to getting it right.
Today, you really don’t have a choice about which social networks to be on. If you’re targeting Millennials, you’ve got to be on Instagram.
And because Instagram is a platform built for visual commerce, there’s a huge priority on creating quality visual content. Instagram is hands down the most direct way to reach your fans.
As far as figuring out the right type of content to connect with your fans on Instagram, you need to identify your theme and discover what your fans want to see.
It’s not about creating content you want to show your audience – it’s about creating content your audience wants to see. If you continue to get low likes, try something else.
Respond to what your customers are responding to. When you see a certain type of content is getting engagement, double down on it. Just keep posting stuff, and then see what works. You need to constantly adjust your strategy according to how your audience responds, and that may change from one day to the next.
One thing that’s helped us is that we caught on to tactics, like influencer marketing and marketing with our customers’ photos, before other people started talking about it.
What a lot of eCommerce brands today don’t understand is that it’s not about you as a brand anymore: it’s 100% about your customers.
You can gain lots of traction at first, but your Instagram is like a television channel; if your audience gets bored, they’re going to switch to a new channel. One way to keep their interest is by leveraging customer photos and influencers.
Customers want to engage directly with your brand – giving them shout-outs and showing off the photos they submit gives them that feeling of a personal connection, which is huge for a growing brand that still needs to keep those one-on-one relationships.
Influencer marketing is super important for taking your eCommerce branding to the next level.
We have a whole book of secrets for influencer outreach. We’ve honed in on a pretty advanced and streamlined process, and I can’t let you in on all the details because that’s what gives us our competitive edge, but a few things we have learned over the years are:
1. The influencer has to choose the product they want to receive and post about. If they don’t like what they receive, they’re not going to be genuine in their post and the audience will be able to tell. If they get something they absolutely love, they’re going to want to rave about it.
2. You’ve got to stay on top of them. They’re not celebrities, but they have an ego. Sometimes you need to put them in check a little bit. You kind of have to be annoying. It’s the only way to get into the newsfeed of another 10,000 or another 100,000 people.
3. Influencer outreach is a form of sales. Internally, we train our employees to have a sales attitude during influencer outreach. Rather than “Hey, post about our product when you have some time,” our employees really sit on each influencer until we “make the sale.”
4. A/B test email templates. We’ve got a folder full of email templates that work for us – but getting there wasn’t easy. You need to A/B test your outreach just like you would your paid ads. Word-of-mouth marketing has huge ROI potential, so treat each email like it’s got a big dollar value on it.
5. When you’re choosing influencers, think outside of the standard box. Some of our most successful marketing plans have been partnering with influencers like photographers and models, not just Instagram stars.
Instagram ads are another really scale-able tactic, but you need to get it right. Instagram ads work really well when you’re promoting a single product with one image and the link goes directly to the product URL.
While we also do carousel ads to create stories, branding, and lifestyle ads, when you do that, you need to make sure each carousel ad goes directly to the product you’re selling.
Remember: no distractions. Your ads on Instagram need to keep consumers’ interest, get them to the right page, and push them towards purchase.
We’re a far way from the days of general lifestyle ads – today, you need to be a bit aggressive in order for it to work.
When you’re growing, it’s hard to stay nimble. But in order to succeed on social, it’s a must.
The network of the moment isn’t the same one it was yesterday, and it’s not going to be the same tomorrow.
When the reach of one network goes down, you have to bounce to the next network. You can only play on a social network’s field for a certain amount of time before organic reach goes down and you have to keep up.
This flexibility also applies to your strategy: you don’t just build a strategy and step back and that’s it – social commerce trends are always evolving.
The number one most important rule of social is that you need to keep your audience interested. If people are watching a boring channel, they’re going to change it.
Social media moves fast, and you need to too.
