According to Instagram founder Kevin Systrom the photo app now has over 90 million month users who on average post 40 million photos per day. That’s pretty impressive for a company that was only launched in 2010. Those kinds of numbers are also the reason why Facebook was willing to pay $1 billion for the young business.
The success of Instagram is in part due to the quality of the product, the concept itself and of course fortunate timing. The other crucial factor in Instagrams success is its marketing strategy. In this article we will be looking at how Instagram has positioned itself in the market. We will also example the specific marketing strategies that have enabled the app to go viral.
Here are the top five marketing lessons from Instagram.
Make Your Users Feel Special
It is naturally for Instagram users to want to share their photos with their friends because it makes them look great. Nobody wants to share photos of themselves if they aren’t looking their best. But Instagrams filters can transform even the most unflattering shot.
This is not the only reason that Instagram users like to share their photos. Instagram allows you to let your inner artist shine. Even if you are not a naturally talented photographer, you can become one with Instagram.
When you combine these two elements you have photos that people are eager to share with their friends. By piggy backing on the Facebook and Twitter platforms, Instagram allows you to easily share those photos with people in your network.
This is a lesson that any business can learn from. The social web has made word of mouth advertising more effective than ever before. If you can make your users feel special or look good they are far more likely to talk with their friends about your product.
Have An Interesting Back Story
The media has done a good job of marketing Instagram for it. The story of Instagram is an interesting one. It includes the fact that Instagram has only 13 employees, that Kevin Systrom working as a barista only a couple of years earlier and that Mark Zuckerberg made an early offer to Systrom while he was still serving coffee only to be rejected. And of course there is the massive $1 billion price tag that made Systrom so immensely rich seemingly overnight.
All of this has become part of the legend of Instagram and the media has been happy to spread the message. If you want to get the media to talk about your business you need to craft a story about your business. This doesn’t mean making things up. Instead it means taking the elements of your background and how your company got started and putting them into a compelling narrative.
Create Something Remarkable
The marketing expert Seth Godin states in his book “Purple Cow: Transform Your Business To Create Something Remarkable” (that in order for businesses to be successful in the 21st century their products must be remarkable.
In the past it was enough to create an average product and then simply outspend the competition on advertising in order to create a success story. These days’ consumers are increasingly able to choose which advertising they will absorb and so this strategy is losing its effectiveness. As Godin describes it you must create “something worth talking about. Worth noticing. Exceptional. New. Interesting.”
In essence the product is the marketing. There are few better examples of this than Instagram. With only 13 employees they did not have the resources for a massive advertising campaign. The product needed to be unique and exceptional enough that it marketed itself. The intuitive design of Instagram combined with its highly attractive filters and easy to use social sharing functions make the app immensely appealing.
If you want your business to be successful in the 21st century marketplace it is no longer enough to produce something that is a little bit better. The product needs to be truly remarkable if it is to achieve the kind of momentum that Instagram has.
Don’t Create Barriers To Use
Instagram could have charged for their app and monetized it early on. While this may have been met with approval from certain business analysts it would surely have stunted its growth and never allowed it to achieve its $1 billion acquisition price tag.
By making the app free rather than charging a few dollars for it, Instagram has sacrificed early revenues for faster growth. It is has allowed the app to quickly spread because there is no barriers to download and use it.
This is not to suggest that all companies should avoid monetizing their products immediately. However it does show that if you want to create a product that spreads virally you should look at what barriers to use your users may face.
Solve a Big Problem
The reason that Instagram is so popular is that solves a massive problem that smart phone users encounter on a weekly and sometimes daily basis: the photos that they take don’t always look that great.
By creating simple to use filters, anyone could create expert looking photos. Even photos which would otherwise look quite unexceptional could end up looking very appealing once the correct filter was added.
Not having great looking photos may not seem like a particularly serious problem but it is a very common one. Virtually everyone with a smart phone uses it to take photos at some point. And no one wants their photos to turn out badly.
This was not the only large problem that Instagram solved however. Because iPhone is a closed network sharing photos across other social networks was complex. While there were other photo apps such as Hipstamatic they do not have the same social sharing capability as Instagram.
Instagam allow you to share your photos easily on Facebook and Twitter and at the same time gave you the ability to create the kind of photos that were photo share worthy.
When you solve a big enough problem the marketing for that product is relatively easy. The value proposition of Instagram doesn’t take a lot of explaining to anyone who has taken and tried to share photos using iPhone’s inbuilt photo app. If you want to build a massive business like Instagram look for a problem that millions of people are suffering from.
Author Bio:
Tom writes for www.valuator.com.au – click here to learn more about what your website may be worth and what it may fetch when selling.
