Tools and Tips to Help Marketers Inspire and Engage on Instagram
This video for marketers showcases how some of the best brands on Instagram—@nikerunning, @generalelectric and @benandjerrys—bring their stories to life and constantly connect with their communities.
When it comes to brands and businesses, our goal is to help companies reach their respective audiences through captivating imagery in a rich, visual environment. One way we can do this is by providing new resources and tools to educate and inspire marketers.
So today we’re publishing the first in a series of blog posts aimed at helping marketers showcase their best creative work on Instagram, and we’re also announcing the launch of the The Instagram Handbook for Brands.
The Instagram Handbook for Brands
This book profiles eleven brands on Instagram that post incredibly engaging content. From @patagonia to @disneyland to @chobani, these accounts bring their unique identities and values to life through captivating imagery and a focus on their respective communities.
The book also features Instagram’s brand values and ten popular hashtags that highlight the collaborative creativity within the Instagram community, such as #chasinglight and #thingsorganizedneatly. Though the book isn’t broadly available, you can expect to see content from it featured right here on our blog.
Tips for Brands
We learned a lot from these brands about what makes for great creative on Instagram. Here are five tips you can start acting on now, based on their work:
- Be true to your brand: Ensure that your imagery expresses a clearly defined personality and voice. Photos from eyeglass retailer @warbyparker, featured in the handbook, never feel overly staged or serious, but instead draw from trends in the Instagram community to reflect the company’s quirky creativity.
- Share experiences: Offer a view into the world or lifestyle that your brand makes possible through the eyes of the people who use your products and services. The customer images and videos shared by @gopro prompt viewers to wonder what moments they could capture with a GoPro.
- Find beauty everywhere: Show how your company sees the world and make it meaningful to people. @generalelectric showcases the beauty of their technology by transporting people to giant jet engine factories and remote wind farms, capturing the machines with elegant symmetry and imparting the grand scale of these man-made wonders.
- Inspire action: Start a movement around your brand, whether that means inspiring people to capture photos while running like the #runfree campaign from @nikerunning, or to celebrate a delicious yogurt concoction, as @chobani has done with their #creationaday hashtag.
- Know your audience: Learn what people love about your brand, and explore how can you capture the imagination of new customers. @missionbicycle takes the beautiful simplicity that customers love about its bicycles and uses imagery on Instagram to turn these everyday objects into works of art.
We hope this material inspires you to be creative and compelling on Instagram. Make sure to keep a close watch on this blog; we’ll share more soon.
Building a Message Map
This is a brilliant article and piece of advice I’ve come back to a few times, it lays out the process of building a message map. After looking at it, the process seems so obvious but sometimes its easy to get caught up in just one or two of the steps.
Bookmark it or save it to Evernote and reference the process when you’re working on a new campaign.
Customer service isn't a department
So far during my time at Teespring, my most striking observation has been the importance of great customer service. Every conversation at work is laced with the subtext of improving customersâ…
More and more companies are singing the gospel of being really good at customer service. Those that do are successes in their markets and have the customer service as a fundamental role of the organization, not some department.
7 Critical Mistakes You're (Almost Certainly) Making On Social Media
If you are marketing on social media and you should be you are probably making some of these mistakes. Here’s how to recognize and fix them—from the…
3 Ways to Take the 'Boring' out of B2B Content Marketing
B2B marketing has a reputation for being boring, but these B2B content marketing case studies prove it doesn’t have to be the case.
Sure B2B marketing can seem all sorts of boring, perhaps this is why so many marketers go the B2C route* for the glamour and excitement of Facebook promotions, but its not always the case.
These examples might not work for every company, but you never know where inspiration will strike.
*I went B2C for awhile and ended up running way too many Facebook promotions and other giveaways to feel like we were doing anything smart. Overall I find B2B marketing to be more substantial and rewarding.
Just another reminder just how important mobile is for marketing, as if you didn’t know this already.
GoSquared Adds E-Commerce Analytics To Help Smaller Online Stores Take The Data-Driven Fight To Amazon | TechCrunch
Data! Data! Data!
Anything that can help small businesses capture and understand analytics is a good thing, and will be tremendously helpful. Competing against Amazon isn’t easy but its very achievable, especially with the right data.
7 themes content marketers should embrace in 2014
- Recognize that content is multifunctional and can play many different roles in marketing communications, including branding and customer acquisition
- Focus your budgets first on content, not on the medium
- Go for the Long Idea
- Embrace new technology
- Use content to beat the ad blockers
- Connected consumers
- Watch Coca-Cola
Squarespace: A quiet success story
Hands down, Squarespace is my favourite site building tool. Its absolutely gorgeous to use and the results are equally stunning; all without being complicated.
I hadn’t realized they were a bootstrapped start-up for so long, its impressive. But I can’t say I’m not appreciating all the advancements they been able to push out thanks to the investments they finally accepted.