The Marketing Essentials: Instagram & Social Commerce
Let’s revisit a company I wrote about in a previous blog, home décor company Lulu and Georgia. In that blog, I delved into its website design and UX and described its effectiveness and what we can learn from it. In this blog, I will explore a different aspect of the brand’s marketing: social media. More specifically, its use of Instagram.
Upsides of Instagram Highlights
Lulu and Georgia’s primary social media platform is Instagram, and it makes extensive use of Instagram’s Stories Highlights. Instagram Highlights is a feature for creating and organizing stories on your Instagram profile — think of them like folders. Once saved in a Highlight, that Story will display right under the bio indefinitely (unlike regular Stories that appear on a feed, which disappear after 24 hours).
This feature is valuable because it allows brands to easily curate and showcase content that users can tap into and watch any time they like. It’s a creative way to express the brand, showcase products, and drive traffic. Additionally, users may be looking for something specific from a Stories post, like information about a new product launch or a sale.
Highlights work well for Lulu and Georgia because it can pin various stories, such as specific collections and collaborations with designers to mood boards, team faves, holiday decoration, outdoor, style tips, and so many more. As a home décor company, organizing by product, room, collection, vibe, and more is a clever tactic to streamline the user’s exploration and consideration of its products.
Whether you’re looking for a new couch for your living room or inspo to spruce up your bedroom, Lulu and Georgia has the Highlights that’ll have you consider becoming an interior designer and redecorating your whole home. And your friends’ homes. And your parents’ home.
Downsides of Highlights
However, the downside with Highlights, especially on this brand’s account, is that it can become very cluttered and irrelevant. Lulu and Georgia currently has 19 Highlights (that’s a lot!). As a user, seeing so many Highlights can become overwhelming.
Furthermore, any Story saved to a Highlight can be viewed forever. If a brand has a Highlight with a Story posted 135 weeks ago, that Story is highly likely to be irrelevant to the consumer’s current concern or interest. This can be frustrating to consumers who tap on a Highlight to see the most up-to-date information yet are met with a series of 15–40 stories from just a couple of weeks to as much as three years ago (this is the case with a few of Lulu and Georgia’s Highlights). To get to the most relevant information, the user must tap through Story after Story to reach the most current information and posts. This process wastes the user’s time, annoys them, and may cause them to stop researching the brand’s offerings.
This is detrimental in the case of Lulu and Georgia, which regularly turns over new products and collections and must continually post new images, videos, and stories that stay up-to-date with furniture and design trends. Content showing out-of-date and untrendy products does not make for a conducive shopping experience for consumers.
Tip for Brands
One tip for brands is to clean out and organize their Highlights regularly. And not just the Highlights themselves, but the Stories within them. You can pin the most incredible and product-purchase-inducing Story to a Highlight, but if you have too much old, cluttered content that stops users from viewing that Story, then no one is going to bother with it. Any CTA’s are negated.
Social Platforms turned E-commerce
Last but not least is Lulu and Georgia’s use of Instagram Shopping. Instagram Shopping is a type of Social Commerce, which is the use of social networks and interactions to assist online selling. Users shop a brand’s products through a Product Tag, a shopping bag-shaped feature that highlights the products shown in a post. Users see content featuring a product, tap on the Product Tag, and seamlessly arrive at checkout. Brands that use this feature create more customer experiences, have greater reach, and, in turn, achieve higher sales.
Lulu and Georgia takes advantage of social commerce in almost every one of its posts. Whether its posts contain an entire collection, a rug, or a room of products, consumers have quick and easy access to purchase them.
This feature is great for home décor companies like Lulu and Georgia. They can showcase the many different products and show users how its furniture and décor pieces look styled in a room. This kind of visual marketing is imperative in social media’s saturated environment. When you create shoppable posts, you’re not only enticing a user to buy the product but also strengthening your brand as a valuable and aesthetic option.
With Instagram’s social commerce capabilities, it’s easier than ever for consumers to be linked to their new favorite products and be one step closer to their final purchase.
