By ALIEFYA VAHANVATY
Since Instagram opened up for business in India in September, its strength as a visual medium and offering of 30-second videos have made their mark. Combined with link to mother brand Facebook, do these offer marketers more bang for their social media buck?
It was in September this year that Instagram opened up for business in India, allowing brands to advertise on this Facebook-owned photo and video-sharing network. Financial and tech analysts are predicting that Instagram advertising is going to become a $1 billion business by 2017 and by 2020, it will exceed $4 billion. It’s easy to see why. Instagram has more than 400 million users globally, giving parent company Facebook a run for its money. So how are marketers in India making use of Instagram?
Number game
On April 9, 2012, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger sold their 13-person start-up, Instagram, to Facebook, which bought the photo filter app 18 months after its launch for a whopping $1.3 billion.
Instagram today is the second largest social networking platform in terms of monthly active users — 400 million globally. While it’s still some distance away from mother brand Facebook which has 1.5 billion active users per month, it may not be long before it catches up, given that in the past five years, more than 40 billion photos have been shared on Instagram and 80 million more are uploaded daily. While Facebook’s potential organic reach to adults has decreased 60% since 2012, Instagram’s organic reach to adult users has actually increased 200% according to e-commerce consultancy selfstartr’s recent analysis of the two platforms.
Hoping to increase the number of businesses in India that use Instagram and preferably Instagram plus Facebook, advertising was opened up on the network, targeting 5.9 million active monthly users, a figure estimated by digital agency Interactive Avenues.
Instagram, on its part, doesn’t give out any figures, but says that its monthly active users in India have more than doubled over the past year. Instagram’s Indian users are mostly young, mobile-first Sec A category people, according to a study conducted by Nielsen about ‘Indians on Instagram’. It is the 18-24-year-olds that are most active on Instagram. Indian Instagrammers are also avid travellers, with 50% of them having taken an average of four vacations over the past year, the study revealed. More relevant for marketers, more than 50% of Indian Instagrammers have frequently bought products and services from the brands they follow, using the platform to keep in touch with the latest products and learn about deals too.
What’s in it for brands?
No doubt, the ubiquity of camera phones and the enduring popularity of photo-friendly social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have made images and videos the most shareable content on the web. But to engage with their audiences, brands today need more creative visual strategies, and Instagram is arguably the front-runner to help brands with their picture perfect moments. While Facebook is a place for social connections, news and information sharing, Instagram is more of a visual ‘eye candy’ for consumers. The platform works at a more personal level, where users can discover what a brand or business is about, and can view actual products or work in progress. This emotional connection is what sparks interest for a potential buyer as they follow the “stories” behind a name or company. “Instagram has proven to be a powerful canvas for advertisers and people who want to be inspired, with the ability to shift metrics that marketers care about. With one in five mobile minutes spent on Instagram and Facebook (Nielsen Mobile Netview, June 2015), advertisers and people want ways to learn more, see more or even buy a product from their favourite brands or neighborhood restaurant,” said Kirthiga Reddy, Managing Director, Facebook India when Instagram announced its advertising plans in India.
“One of the main benefits to our brand is a perfect match to our target audience. Secondly, an Indian user on Instagram follows trends and brands religiously and it allows us to advertise without being intrusive. The platform itself is so visual that it allows us to think out of the box and to create quality content. It forces us to be creative in order to get into a user’s newsfeed. It’s challenging but also really rewarding at the same time,” says Vimoha Bagla Shah, Head of Content, Truly Madly, a dating and match-making app. “In terms of advertising, we’ve seen our reach has gone up significantly, almost 13%. Our cost per install has gone down, almost 19% less, which also means we are spending less and reaching more people,” she adds.
According to Ashok Lalla, Digital and Marketing Advisor, Instagram’s integration with Facebook, where it gets a readymade audience, is one of the biggest advantages. “The other advantage for brands is that it offers video as well as still pictures and that’s where it scores big time over Pinterest. So fundamentally, its strength as a visual medium combined with the new offering of 30-second videos and of course its integration with Facebook are some of its key advantages as a marketing platform today.”
Nimesh Shah, Head Maven, Windchimes Communications, agrees and says that the digital space is all about the first-mover advantage. “Instagram is a mobile-first platform, it has always attracted a vast audience, especially among the younger age group, which is comfortable with its particular format and screen size. Secondly, it’s also very easy to use right from uploading content to getting people to engage (likes, comments, follow) with brands they like. So it’s successfully managed to create a level of stickiness with its users. Which is why it has as many as 60% of people logging in everyday which is a very high statistic. This makes it by default a great platform for brands and is a scoring point in favour of Instagram,” Shah comments. For him, the stickiness of the platform, coupled with the kind of reach and interactivity that Facebook allows, is a winning combination. “Somewhere when Facebook was looking at buying the platform, they would have kept all these aspects in mind and it’s that vision that we are seeing unfold right now,” he adds.
Made for each other
Many brands such as Truly Madly, Paperboat and Grofers are using Instagram advertising to reach out to their target audience and build a loyal online community. But there are also a host of upcoming, innovative brands that are using Instagram to quickly proliferate and compound their organic growth by partnering with strategic Instagram influencers.
Experts say that one of the top categories on Instagram is travel, fashion and lifestyle brands. This is because the photo-centric app that enables these brands to feature a rich image of their finished product, and/or up to 15 seconds of video that features quick how-to's and DIY branding opportunities. “These brands are using Instagram to create a community of followers who are not only using it to follow their images but are also looking for interesting ideas. For example, fashion brands use Instagram to share ideas and create a community of influencers and thus tap into a wider audience. And Instagram influencers (instragrammers) also help with getting the target audience to act on the links and on the visual commentary which in turn creates great engagement with users,” explains Rajiv Dingra, Founder & CEO, WATConsult.
One such brand that is currently on Instagram and is considering signing up for the advertising soon is SaffronStays. “For us, a picture is very impactful when it comes to communicating what kind of experience one might have at a SaffronStays holiday. No words can create the same impact. We aim to inspire travel and people respond better to visuals than words. We are able to reach out to an audience far and wide and as a result, we get good engagement on Instagram and so even though we are not presently advertising on the platform, we are exploring using this opportunity soon,” explains Aakanksha Shad, Marketing Manager, SaffronStays.
“To me, the categories that work best on Instagram are F&B, travel and hospitality and fashion. These three categories really lend themselves well to the platform because of the sheer visual appeal that these categories have with them. For example, Paperboat in the F&B category. The way they have done their creatives make the brand appear seamless with their products and stories. It’s an ideal way a brand should be leveraging this platform,” says Shah of Windchimes.
“Users on Instagram in India have doubled over the last year. And the 18-24 age group which uses Instagram the most is also our primary target. Plus everyone is consuming content on mobile which makes it even more vital to our brand. The best part is that it facilitates a lot of quality content and visual story-telling which makes it a beautiful fit with our brand because our brand is all about dating and the youth and their experiences. Instagram helps us convey our brand story perfectly,” adds Vimoha Bagla Shah of Truly Madly.
For Grofers, an online delivery service that connects consumers with local stores, Instagram is the best medium to reach out to their target segment. Says, Sharad Harjai, AVP, Marketing, Grofers, “Instagram behaves in a very different way compared to other social media networks like Facebook, Twitter etc. We are design conscious ourselves and Instagram is a design or visual-led platform where customers basically engage with brands and other people through visuals. So that’s the main focus we have and we use Instagram mostly for engagement purposes and it has shown pretty good results so far.”
Beverage brand Paperboat too finds Instagram a very natural fit for its category. “Instagram is a very happy place and it’s a place where people come and share a slice of their life. It’s used by people who are creative and are looking for something happy and engaging. It was a natural fit for us to actually come on that platform and freak out a little,” says Parvesh Debuka, Head Marketing, Paperboat.
They’ve got the look
Brands, both big and small, have found great success with Instagram marketing, both with content marketing and the brand new Instagram ads. Some of the brands that have had the most success with Instagram have come up with unique strategies, or strategies they customize, to fit their brand.
“We’re one of the first few brands in India to advertise on Instagram. Instagram is a lot of native advertising and so it doesn’t feel intrusive. As far as strategies go, we are one of the first brands in India to use ‘cinemagraph’, a tool which allows a part of a still image to become a moving image. It’s something that has attracted users immensely and has worked really well for us. Some of our cinemagraphs have got over 10,000 likes which is really good for Instagram. We’ve rolled out a whole campaign based on that. We also use the tone of voice of the youth of today and include funny anecdotes related to dating which engage our target viewers. We also have vector images and fun infographs, all of which work towards making our brand connect with our audience. We are also leaning very heavily now towards animated content through GIFs or videos,” says Shah of Truly Madly.
For Grofers, Instagram is an engagement medium and the brand uses it to talk to its customers on a daily basis. “Any highlights that we get on a daily basis, if there’s something interesting coming up, if there’s any launch or partnership that we have with a particular brand, we talk about that. All our campaigns on Instagram are only to drive engagement,” states Harjai.
Outside the box view
Today, more than ever before, content is consumed through pictures and videos and Instagram positioned itself early on as a pure play visual platform. According to experts, unlike the way the other social media platforms have evolved, the objective of Instagram has always been to share stories through pictures and videos and this format itself makes it much easier for brands to tell their stories. That’s one of the main reasons why people are using it so much and coming on to it on a daily basis and this also poses a big challenge for many other social media networks as well as brands.
“It’s challenging because it takes a lot more effort. Instagram is not about text updates and stock images. It involves production costs for brands. And until the platform reaches a tipping point in terms of numbers, brands will resist investing that kind of money in producing content on a platform that’s still emerging and is not as mass as Facebook or not as buzz-oriented as Twitter. But it is definitely evolving and brands will take to it faster compared to the time it took them to get on to Facebook or Twitter,” explains Dingra.
For Shah of Truly Madly, it took a while for the brand to get the numbers in terms of followers. She says, “We did a lot of AB testing and some of our campaigns didn’t work as well as we anticipated and we got our learnings from that. We learnt the nuances of Instagram while on the job and also learnt how to engage better to get more followers. We learnt that this is a very different platform compared to Twitter and Facebook, so something that worked well on those platforms may not work at all here. It took us a couple of months to figure out what works on Instagram, but within the last five months our followers have more than doubled. We’ve also got a lot of engagement and traction on all of our posts.”
Grofers too faced a few hiccups initially on the platform. “We had to ensure that firstly, our design language is consistent and secondly, the kind of communication we sent out had to be very concise and clear to our customers and they would want to engage with us through those posts.”
On the other hand for Paperboat, it’s exhilarating to have a platform like Instagram for brand evangelism. “We’ve just scratched the surface and there’s a lot more to be explored for us as a brand. And that’s our challenge going forward,” states Debuka.
“Fundamentally, the mix of media and advertising budgets of brands might change when options such as 30-second videos are offered by Instagram. So currently if a brand spends 20% of its overall budget on digital and couple of years ago it distributed that between display and search with little bit left over for social, now that mix would be changing and might move towards Instagram from YouTube and even from mainline television. This will certainly be the case for younger brands with audiences which don’t consume content on television and look to go onlin. I think it’s just a matter of time before they monetize it to a greater extent and brands look at it in the larger scheme of their budgets. So it will not necessarily be about Instagram, but rather what’s the best bang for my advertising buck,” says Lalla about the road ahead for brands wanting to advertise on the platform.
Shah of Windchimes cautions brands against using Instagram to upload brochures, press releases and pics of hoardings. He says, “Things that you can’t do in a regular TVC, you can do on Instagram. Use it well to leverage your brand presence. People on social media consume content more rapidly and in larger quantities. So a lot of investment must go into developing that kind of depth and breadth of content.”
While it may be early days for advertising on the platform, experts are convinced that all it requires is one 'Oreo moment' for brands to insta-like Instagram.
An Instagram success
Souvenir store turned lifestyle brand Chumbak recently introduced its first clothing line, 'Collection One' with a 10-day teaser, without any indication of what 'One' meant. #WakeUpToOne was conceptualized as a hashtag to hint at something coming up very soon and Chumbak got followers on social media to share what they would love to wake up to. The Instagram campaign asked people to post their pictures with #WakeUpToOne & #Chumbak to showcase things, food, places, moments and anything that they loved waking up to and got over 500 submissions. Users were invited to upload images that typically consist of their shoes/feet in front of something amazing that they loved waking up to. Over 500 photos were submitted using #WakeUpToOne, and one user was featured every few days on Chumbak’s Instagram handle. This buzz was furthered through a one of its kind #WakeUpToOne Instameet that saw 25+ top photography enthusiasts and influencers in Bangalore spend a Sunday morning taking pictures of beautiful things that they would like to wake up to across the centre of the city and ended with a delicious breakfast spread!
“Chumbak as a brand is very visual and the platform is the perfect complement for it. Now, with advertising, we are able to reach out to a much larger audience and in a much more targeted way,” says Somanna Muthanna, Head of Marketing, Chumbak.
Feedback: aliefya@exchange4media.com
