Once upon a time there was the Polaroid camera. Judged purely as photographic tools, the Polaroid was no great shakes but what it did offer in the pre-digital age was a means to snap a picture, print it out from the camera body in a matter of minutes and then pass the results around to anyone present in the room. It was a social lubricant.
It’s no accident that looking suspiciously like a Polaroid device provides Instagram with what has become an instantly recognisable Icon. As with the Polaroid, Instagram is all about taking pictures on the fly and sharing with a community – although in this case that community spreads beyond friends or relatives in a room to a worldwide registered user base of more than 200 million, between them posting some 60 million pictures a day.
So for individuals, it’s a social lubricant taken to the nth degree. For brands and marketers it offers a hugely effective platform to harness the power of the visual image to engage existing and potential customers.
That is, of course, if you can generate the kind of imagery that attracts followers and encourages ‘likes’ and comments
And there are essentially two ways to generate images for Instagram. You can do it all yourself by setting up an Instagram account and posting pictures taken in-house by your team or marketing agency.
Alternatively, you can encourage your customers and potential customers to join the party by contributing their own Instagram snaps. The second approach might be described in terms of ‘crowdsourcing’ or as good-old-fashioned ‘user generated content’ but the terminology doesn’t really matter. What it’s really about is about drawing on the enthusiasm and creativity of your customers to create a real buzz around the brand and its products.
Encouraging Creativity
That doesn’t necessarily mean inviting your customers to contribute pictures of your products, enhanced by the various filters that Instagram provides for its users. You certainly can do that, but some of the most successful Instagram campaigns have been much more tangential.
Witness Mercedes’ campaign to promote its CLA coupe. Working on the premise that the four door vehicle had eschewed convention in favour of a wilder and freer approach to car design, the company invited Instagram users to submit photographs on the theme of untamed, with the best being put on show in an installation constructed in Paris. It was a campaign that related directly to the branding of the car itself while inviting digital photographers to interpret those values through their own choice of images linked by the ‘untamed theme’.
There’s no one way to approach this. For instance Red Bull has also encouraged instagrammers to get creative by submitting pictures featuring the brand colours of red blue and silver, with the best results appearing on billboards around Britain.
Product advocacy
Not all Instagram campaigning is quite so indirect. Arguably one of the best ways to drive interest in a brand is to encourage customer advocacy and once you turn to the currency of visual imagery an obvious step is to invite consumers to picture themselves (or their friends) with your products
For instance, US clothing manufacturer Levis came up with an interesting variation on this theme a couple of years ago in 2012 when it launched its “IamLevis” campaign. This invited Instagram users to send shots of themselves wearing the company’s garments. In addition to the ‘bragging rights’ associated with posting a cool, Levis themed picture, all participants were entered into a competition to models to front the company’s upcoming TV and press campaigns.
Incentivising
The truth is that Instagram is fun and lot of consumers will post pictures to take part in campaigns simply for the joy of taking part. However, a few incentives never do any harm and one of the most effective ways to drive participation is to offer prizes. That could be a chance to become a Levis model or a financial incentive. For instance, when Sony invited instagrammers to submit photographs on the theme of Love, winning entries were rewarded by a $50 gift voucher.
User-generated pictures are the lifeblood of many Instagram campaigns. The key to success is giving the target market a real reason to take part.
