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Instagram: nine different ways to market your brand

Photo-sharing app Instagram has long since left its hipster roots behind and is now a social network for the masses, which inevitably means that marketers are looking at ways to exploit its popularity.

According to the platform’s own statistics, Instagram’s 130 million active users share 45 million photos every day so there’s plenty of opportunity to gain brand exposure.

We’ve previously looked at nine brands making good use of Instagram and four others rocking the app’s new video feature.

And on that theme, here are nine ways in which brands can use Instagram for marketing…

The ecommerce treasure hunt: how to breathe serendipity into your site

Conversion optimisation is great, but to some extent it works on the premise that customers know what they’re looking for. Ok, checkouts, calls to action, merchandising should always be finessed, but optimisation is a means of squeezing more from specific intent.

But what if moving the customer towards the magpie psyche is the future of selling online?

A new ecommerce model is emerging and it works on the premise that customers can be encouraged to ‘bag at will’. All retailers need to do is surface rarer, quality products that are socially proven and most importantly look great.

Three important marketing lessons from Apple’s latest iPhone adverts

The next few years will be interesting for Apple. With innovation inevitably slowing and consumers becoming aware of its incremental design tactics there will be worries in the camp.

But regardless of these growing concerns, there is no question that Apple is still marketing in a way which is incomparable to any other brand.

While the company is still innovating in its marketing output, we should take a second to learn a thing or two… 

Nokia comes second to Samsung for online video shares, sadly not for sales

If online video shares translated to sales then the mobile landscape would look drastically different, but unfortunately for Nokia its phones haven’t proved to be as popular as its ads.

New research from Unruly shows that Microsoft’s most recent acquisition received 17% of all online video shares among smartphone brands, second only to Samsung which dominated with more than half (52%) of shares.

Apple came a lowly third with 9.4% closely followed by Sony (7%) and Blackberry (6.7%).

However Samsung’s impressive performance is thanks to the high number of videos it has launched over the years, so it’s potentially a case of quantity rather than quality.

Can web technology help to save the high street?

Bill Grimsey, who we interviewed on this blog, presented his Alternative Future for the High Street review to ministers and business leaders at parliament yesterday.

I’ve been taking a closer look at the review, and its recommendations on the ‘Networked High Street’ in particular. 

While the web is clearly a factor in the travails of high street retailers, there are other issues, such as rates and the general state of the economy. 

So how can technology help? 

50% of businesses believe that social offers greatest marketing opportunities over next year

Digital marketing offers greater opportunities for businesses over the next year than more traditional channels, according to a new report.

When asked to identify which three marketing channels offer the greatest opportunities, half of brands (50%) mentioned social media followed by email (43%) and websites (35%).

In fact the top 10 most cited channels are all online, with the most popular offline channel being direct mail at 8%.

The findings come from the new Econsultancy and Responsys Cross-Channel Marketing Report 2013, which contains a comprehensive analysis of the use of online and offline marketing channels, integration of display advertising and use of mobile for marketing.

Ralph Lauren and other luxury brands prove to be blasé about Facebook timeline

When Facebook timeline was first unveiled the general response from users was one of annoyance and anger at why the social network would bother to change a winning formula.

But after it was forced on everyone last year the complaining quickly died down and changed into a feeling of indifference as people realised it had little impact to how they used Facebook.

Brands were really the only Facebook users who jumped at the chance to fill out their timelines as it was a chance to trumpet their heritage, but even then the excitement was limited to a few notable examples.

Does Google’s authorship integration affect search rankings?

It would not be a big surprise if Google was using information from Google author profiles to influence how pages rank in searches., but as yet there is no evidence to show a correlation between author profiles and better ranking URLs.

Google’s authorship markup feature allows news, other online publications and blogs to use the rel=”author” tag to connect their authors’ online articles to official author profiles on Google+.

The profiles include a profile photo, biography, information about their activity and followers on Google+ as well as  links to other articles by the author.

Travel aggregator sites dominate airline brands in Google results: report

Travel aggregator sites dominate airline brands for both natural and paid Google rankings, according to a new report looking at search visibility.

The analysis by Searchmetrics also found that brands achieving high natural search rankings are taking the opportunity to limit their investment in PPC.

The study is based on analysis of how airline brands performed on Google for the 1,439 most popular search terms relating to flights. It examines results for the US, France and Germany, but for this post I’ll focus on the UK results.

And for more information on this topic, check out the Econsultancy Paid Search Marketing Best Practice Guide or our UK Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report.

Do Twitter images really increase engagement?

With more than 9,000 messages being sent every second, Twitter can be a noisy place, so it’s always important to distinguish yourself from the crowd.

Luckily, Twitter has a few features that can help, including Twitter Cards, promoted tweets and images. 

Over on Facebook, posts that include optimised images receive around 120% more engagement. Research suggests that the same is true on Twitter, so I decided to test this out.

Why mobile is key to an effective multichannel strategy

Mobile is often cited as the glue that holds together the multichannel experience as the technology is able to bridge the gap between in-store and online channels.

And it tends to be the retailers that were quick to embrace mobile technologies – such as local search or a mobile optimised site – that have continued to thrive and stay in tune with consumer behaviours.

For example, the new Econsultancy Multichannel Retail Survey shows that 44% of smartphone owners have used their mobile to find details about a retailer (e.g. nearest outlet or opening times), up from 32% in 2012.

But as we’ve previously seen, many businesses are failing to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the increase in mobile search.

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