Instagram Marketing Masterclass — Part 1
Volunteering at HelloMeets’ last meetup in Chennai, hosted at Pickyourtrail , was a golden opportunity for me. A couple of weeks back, I got connected with Sahiba, Founder and Community builder at HelloMeets, and learnt what HelloMeets has been doing is something unique and highly impactful for the Community. Sahiba and her team organize a series of Meetups and workshops across india, building a strong vibrant community of like minded people. This excited me so much, and made me to volunteer and contribute for the Event. Here I am, sharing with you the takeways of the 3-hour session in three-part series !~
First-up in this series is my learnings from Ranjani Shanker, Head of Marketing at The Quad.She shared her Masterclass thoughts and insights on how she and her team leaverged the Instagram to build their business.
“Being able to understand the content and the brand at a very basic prespective should help you succeed at Instagram” says Ranjani.
Journey at The Quad:
There are chances that if you are a fitness freak, you may have heard about The Quad. For the ones who’re unfamilier to it, The Quad is a 7 year-old fitness startup founded by two passionate people Arvind and Raj. The Quad is currently redefining fitness and highly impacting the people with many personlized ways to stay fit and healthy.
“Leveraging the instagram”, explains Ranjani, “The Quad is able to create a community and have constant engagements with their clients”.
According to her,
“A community is something that comes essentially together for a purpose and that engages constantly with the brand.”
Here are the key topics Ranjani discussed during the session:
1. How to stand out in a crowded Instagram world?
2. Top 5 Instagram trends of 2019 and how you can leverage it.
3. Case Study: How The Quad leverages community and expertise to create authentic Instagram content.
How to stand out in a crowded Instagram World?
- Be real, be trustworthy-biggest trend of 2019!
One of the important aspects to be successful in social media for long time is being real and trustworthy. It is very important to identify influencers for your brand who are real, and whom large audience can trust and attract on. These days, customer expectations from the brands have changed. Also the engagements of users with the brands in social media is rapidly increasing.
“Be real. Be Authentic.
Be a brand that someone can trust.”
- Focus on stories, not selling
From the manufacturing factories that are selling spare parts to whatever brands you belong to or whoever you are, you always have stories that are worth telling.
Brands need to spend more time in creating impactful stories. It is very important to create stories that resonate with your brand .
“ Hence, selling follows stories.”
- Consistency is key!
This will look hard at the beginning but has quintessential outcomes for your brand. It is very essential for you to have a calendar, and stick with the plan. There are no tricks/shortcuts to take you through a big leap.
“Have a plan.
Have a schedule.
Have a calender to keep track of those.”
- Invest in high-quality content
High-quality content refers to the photographs, videos, and especially words in high quality format. And more importantly Captions can trigger the external vibes. She shared that
“the high quality content created by her team on Instagram are packed and heavy to engage with the users.”
“All the instagram posts are created to trigger the trigger among the users.” — says Ranjani
Finally, be patient to get the sustainable results.
Top 5 Instagram Trends and how can you leverage it:
1. Authenticity:
“People look for authenticity in a brand in this current trend.
- Restore trust in social networks by being honest. It may take some time.
- Understand your brand values, its uniqueness and then share with your customers. It may disagree with some people but can reflect your brand authenticity.
- Expect authenticity from your partnerships and the influencers. Return the favor in ways that impact them greatly. This helps them to talk about your brand.
Eg. Check out how Jenna Kutcher upped her followers from 166k to 700k in 1 year by being real and authentic
2. The definition of Engagement has Changed! Its not just about feed posts anymore
“The current instagram Engagment is a lot more than just the double tap likes.”
- Instagram engagement now involves stories, stickers, filters, comments and impressions. Move away from the ‘double tap likes’ to explore more.
- Start identifying new features to leverage and capture the attention of your users for better engagements.
3. Stories are here to stay and how!
Behavior is heading in such a way that Brands needs to stay consistent with it. Start using Instagram Stories as seperate Social Media Network.
- Stories are being viewed by over 400 million people everyday — tapping over scrolling!
- Take advantage of apps like Canva for mobile, Inshot, Later, Splice to make better stories.
4. Make your Content Personal:
5. Hashtags are going nowhere:
So many new features have been introduced on Instagram but the Hashtags continue to remain a favorite and are used widely by Instagram users.
Here are some questions answered by Ranjani:
How many hastags per post?
Anywhere from 8–10 hashtags are optimal and choose them wisely for better engagement.
What type of hashtags?
Brand Hashtags - Empowering your brand and making it integrated for yours users to use it. Eg: #iamthequad used by the The Quad.
Campaign Hashtags - Create an hashtag that is specific to the campaign to drive engagement and creating buzz around it.
CASE STUDY: How does the Quad do it?
Here is how ‘The Quad’ plans and takes actions:
- Planning,planning and more planning:
The first step in planning involves understanding your brand and then followed by planning to acquire user engagements.
At The Quad, themes and topics for each posts are planned earlier and timelines are maintained to gather the photos and the content. Calender apps can be used to maintain the time schedules.
- No room for meaningless posts:
The content that you share should have expert advice on it rather than sharing the random suggestions. This approach is followed at The Quad to deliver high quality content on Instagram.
- Stand out from the crowd:
The content you deliver should have an acceptable tone and should reflect the brand’s value, strength,and its inclusivity. This will help you to achieve consistency and to stand out from the crowd.
- Leveraging Community:
Focus on creating opportunities and platforms for your audience which will make them to talk about your brand. For example: Create some custom hashtags and ask your customers to share a post on your brand. This automatically helps to grow your community and customer engagements
Whatever you say about your brand will not matter unless your customers are saying about it.
This is Part 1 of 3 Series blog. Subscribe to HelloMeets publication to get notified as soon as Part 2 is live! Stay Connected for the updates.
