Kiehl’s starts to engage Instagram
How can it leverage Instagram to achieve its business goal, instead of falling into platform FOMO?
Kiehl’s is one of the beauty brands that has pretty impressive social media engagement throughout the world, partially because of its brand image and product appeal. Kiehl’s originated from New York, attracts women in urban area who value the concept of nature (naturally-derived ingredients for all products), original, simple, trustworthiness (apothecary root of the brand). Kiehl’s encourages its customer to enhance and create Kiehl’s stories by actively involving in brand activities and sharing their experiences. #MaskMoments campaign well represents the concept.
Interestingly, I found out three weeks ago Kiehl’s just launched its Instagram account. Until today, it published 39 posts, attracted 1331 followers — not an impressive amount, but something worth paying attention is that Kiehl’s has pleasantly surprising high engagement rate on Instagram, around 3% per post. The stats showed that Instagram has the right audience Kiehl’s is chasing after, so the interesting question becomes how can Kiehl’s use Instagram to achieve its business goal, instead of falling into platform FOMO?
Starting with the platform characteristics, the slogan of Instagram is “Life Sharing Through Visuals.” Kiehl’s has no issue at all to produce intriguing and high quality visuals, and based on the engagement rate just mentioned, Kiehl’s fans love it and are likely to engage more in the future. Yet can these tactics help Kiehl’s to achieve its business goal?
In the 15.S10 Social Media Management class, we analyzed and evaluated which social media platform the company/brand should engage by the framework “Platform Fit Test” — by looking at “Audience Connection, Brand Association and Goal Alignment.” Starting with Audience Connection, Instagram undoubtedly has the right target audience Kiehl’s aims for — audience skewed to younger age, strong international exposure, audience sought for infotainment through visuals. Brand Association — Instagram is a platform from my perspective, encouraging you to express the “real you” and your unique identify through visuals and videos, which is a sweet match with Kiehl’s brand essence to be natural, close to customers, and customer-involved.
Then, Goal Alignment. Thinking about Kiehl’s business goal that it wants to achieve through Instagram, I would imagine it would want to increase customer loyalty and stickiness to the brand, at the same time increase conversion rate from visits/views in social media platforms to actual sales in e-commerce and physical stores. From here, I believe there are two social media strategies that Kiehl’s can consider:
Promote campaigns by changing the URL in the description
One of the limitations of instagram is that it provides little space to put campaign URLs, website links and other referrals, which makes it difficult to become a “call for action” platform. What I referenced from Starbucks Instagram strategy and maybe something Kiehl’s can try doing is to plan their social media campaign calendar in advance, align the posts with the focus of other communication channels (let’s say #MaskMoment is the campaign Kiehl’s wants to promote for the week) and leverage the description URLs accordingly.
Diversified contents — those in-the-know, intimate moments
Currently, Kiehl’s posts mostly product-related images which are in high quality, visually appealing but lack of some surprises or the hook that would bring audience back constantly. I would suggest Kiehl’s bringing in contents covering different spectrums — it could be the off-the-stage moments of the Kiehl’s spokesperson, behind-the-scene moments of campaigns, more video clip etc. For sure, product should be the main focus but by creating the contents a little bit more diverse and intriguing, a stronger user attachment and engagement can be foreseen.
This is Michelle Shih, first year MBA student at MIT Sloan. I am originally from Taipei, Taiwan, working in the marketing field most of my career but making a career switch to management consulting now. I am a social media addict myself, and I am very excited to share my point of views of social media by this write-a-blog-everyweek homework in my Social Media Management class this semester.
