Jewelry ECOMM Tech

How to Use Instagram to Grow Your eCommerce Jewelry Brand April 15, 2018 (0 comments)

Instagram is one of my favorite social media platforms for advertising eCommerce retailers. To start, it is one of the few platforms that can still generate organic growth. Unlike Facebook, which requires spending money to build engagement, Instagram can attract users by simply following, liking, or commenting on their accounts. I’ve seen accounts growing significantly overnight just by doing this practice. It is time-consuming, but it can generate affordable results in a short period of time. A Forrester report showed that Instagram had the highest interaction rate per follower, with 2.2%, compared to Facebook’s 0.22% interaction rate per follower. This high engagement is especially true for jewelry, which is one of the hottest industries to promote on Instagram. The platform is all about beautiful photos, so, naturally, fashion, accessories, and beauty brands perform exceptionally well in this community. Here, we’ll go over best practices to increase that organic power and grow a jewelry brand on Instagram. Let’s get started! Instagram by the Numbers Before delving into details, let’s go over the platform to better understand the users behind it. In that way, you’ll be able to craft more persuasive messages to appeal to your target audience. See statistics below:

1. 59% of users are under 30 years old. Make sure to keep your language fresh and up to date to appeal to this young audience. Learning trending slangs and hashtags is a must.
2. Most users are women. A Pew Research Study found that 38% of users identified as women, compared to 28% as men and the rest as non-conforming.
3. Users are 70% more likely to make a mobile purchase. This means your mobile site should be fully optimized to facilitate a good mobile user experience.

Instagram Best Practices

It’s time for the fun part! Follow these best practices to grow your jewelry brand on Instagram. Optimize Your Look & Feel You’ve probably heard this a lot. Your feed’s look and feel are the most important components of your account—but how can you achieve the consistent and attractive look and feel every brand dreams of?

• Use the same filters or editing style. Testing different filters and looks can be tempting, but, in reality, that practice doesn’t perform well on Instagram. It’s recommended to stick to one filter or to one editing style and apply it consistently to every post. This is the only way to achieve a consistent look and create a cohesive brand image. See below how jewelry brand “frankly my dear” achieves a consistent look by applying similar filters.

Don’t worry, Photoshop is not necessary. There are many apps that can help you get the job done. One of my favorites is VSCO. They have many cool filters, and you can create presets to apply to all your photos.

• Combine different types of posts. Don’t make every post a sales post. From time to time, it’s good to post about other things that are relevant to your audience and which can generate engagement while keeping your followers entertained. For instance, use quotes or user-generated content around your brand. To make this type of post look more appealing, use tools like Canva or Spark by Adobe. They have preset templates that can be edited in minutes to provide a post that looks like it took a lot of work to produce.
• Consistent Image Proportions. Another important tip is to have the same proportions on all images. Whether you’re leaving white space on the sides or cropping the images to a square, these decisions should be planned beforehand and applied consistently. It may sound silly, but there are brands that have been able to create a unique look and feel just with their cropping style.

Set a Posting Schedule & Frequency

Instagram is a very active platform. It demands a constant and consistent posting schedule to keep followers engaged and drive results. Marketers debate on the best times and amount of times to post. I recommend all new brands to post about 1-2 times per day, every day. Fortunately, there are artificial intelligence or AI social media tools, such as Project Maia, that are taking the guesswork out of it and helping businesses create a thoughtful posting calendar. Such tools analyze such data as existing post history, competitor posts, and industry standards to generate a posting schedule that works. Other useful tools are scheduling platforms like Hootsuite or Onlypult. Using them increases posting consistency and saves you time by giving you the ability to schedule all posts at once. Onlypult can even schedule Instagram stories in advance.

Use Influencers to Amplify Your Reach

Leverage the power of influencers to build trust in your brand and attract more users to follow your account. Influencers already have a trusted following, so having a promotion in their account works like a seal of approval for your brand. It’s important to choose influencers which are aligned with your brand’s image and that speak to your target audience. For instance, if your jewelry brand resembles Kate Spade, you may not want to have someone like Hulk Hogan as your influencer. He wouldn’t embody your ideal customer, and, therefore, wouldn’t attract the right type of traffic to your store. See below how Tiffany’s uses Gal Gadot to appeal to their target audience. Once you’ve identified the qualities of your ideal influencer, how do you go about finding them? There are tools that can help optimize the discovery process. I usually use BrandSnob to find influencers because I can have them contact me instead of taking the time to try to find them one by one. All you need to do is post a job with your post details, and influencers can apply for the gig. Once you have gathered interest from candidates, evaluate their accounts’ quality by verifying that their engagement and followers are real. Compare their number of followers to their engagement in likes and comments to find any discrepancies. For example, if the account has tens of thousands of followers and only a couple of likes per post, the following may not be accurate.

Use Instagram Stories to Sell

Creating a posting feed schedule is just half the work—then you have to create a schedule for Instagram story videos and images. They are becoming increasingly popular, battling with Snapchat for users to post instant updates. See two examples of jewelry brands using Instagram stories below: You can create polls, promote new products, and even remind followers about a new post published in your account. In that way, users become aware of the new post and can go back to the account’s feed to like or comment on it. Stories can also help sell products with the help of ads. This is a relatively new placement for Instagram advertising and can be found in Facebook’s business manager under placement. Their objective was initially only set for reach, but now they can be used for other marketing goals like conversions.

Sell with Shoppable Posts & Other Tools

For a long time, Instagram was not sales friendly. The only way to link to a product page was by adding the URL to the account’s profile. Even then, it was a mess because the URL had to be updated all the time to promote new products posted on the feed. Luckily, now we have shoppable posts and other selling apps that make Instagram much more sales-focused. Shoppable posts appear as tags on product posts. They can be tapped to open links to product pages and check out in seconds. All you need is an Instagram and Facebook business account, among other minor requirements. Besides shoppable posts, it’s also convenient to offer followers a destination where they can shop exactly what they see on the account’s feed. This can reduce the confusion and frustration that can come from trying to find on the website the products they see on the feed. I hope these best practices help you grow your jewelry brand on Instagram! Comment below if you’ve used any of the tips here or if you have any questions.