Posted by Do You Know Why So Many Brands Fail at Instagram Marketing? Here’s Why!
You’ve probably heard of the famous fashion brand Dolce and Gabbana, right? If so, you might have also witnessed how this famous brand became the target of an infamous controversy back in 2017 – their apparent “Fab” marketing strategy led to one of the most epic Instagram marketing fails.
Back in 2017, Stefano Gabbana, the cofounder of Dolce and Gabbana, posted the following photo on his official Instagram page:
It wasn’t long until netizens called Gabbana out on the insensitive Instagram marketing campaign that proudly flaunted – “I’m thin & gorgeous!”
Naturally, this sparked a rage of controversy as netizens started taking offence on the unabashed proclamation that hinted on body-shaming and fat-shaming women. The issue took a turn for the worse when Gabbana took it to another level and started bickering with Insta users in the comments section –
Woah!
This is just one example of the many, many, Instagram marketing mistakes by companies. While brands are ever so enthusiastic about leveraging Instagram for marketing and brand promotion, they often fail to create well-rounded, inclusive, and engaging Instagram campaigns, which ultimately hampers the company’s reputation.
But the more important question is:
Why do brands fail at Instagram marketing?
Social media platforms can be potent marketing tools when used right, and Instagram is no exception. However, the key is to know how to correctly leverage it for brand promotion, brand outreach, and marketing.
Although most marketers are now heavily invested in Social Media Marketing, not everyone is successful in their marketing attempts. Here are a few reasons why:
1. Incomplete Marketing Strategy
Marketing is a highly complex and dynamic domain. It is not as simple as it looks – just brainstorm ideas and put them into action. It is the path in between that makes all the difference between a successful marketing strategy and a failed designing the marketing strategy.
If you have great ideas, you must have a clear vision and plan to bring those ideas to life. This is what constitutes the strategizing part. You need to research and learn about the successes and failures of your competitors; you need to delve into the mindset of your target audience and understand what they want; you need to understand what kind of content is relevant to your industry, and so on. Once you have these insights in place, use them to your advantage – craft out Instagram campaigns that’ll work for your audience and your brand image.
Companies who have a clear and focused marketing strategy tend to stay ahead in the competitive curb:
2. Undefined Target Audience
Often brands tend to shoot out arrows in the dark – they don’t make efforts to identify who their target audience is. Such wrong and vague marketing efforts are what lead to Instagram fails.
For any business, irrespective of the industry, the foremost priority is to identify its target audience and create individual buyer personas. Why so? Because you are creating content and marketing strategies for an audience, but how will it reap results if you don’t know who your audience is?
Thus, before you undertake and implement any Instagram marketing campaigns, you must make sure to know who is your target audience, who is interested in your brand, and who is interacting with your brand regularly.
For social media channels like Instagram and Snapchat, the majority is the youth. So, you need to create such content that will appeal to the younger mindset.
3. Unappealing Content
The online domain is swarming with brands who are ever-ready to sway your customers their way with innovative products and unique content. What do you do then?
You amp up your game by creating quality content that’s both appealing and relevant to your brand image and industry. Nobody wants to read content that’s boring and is available by the bulk – people are always looking for something innovative, creative, engaging, and useful.
Once you understand your audience’s mindset and what appeals to them, you have a unique opportunity to create tailor-made content to suit their specific tastes and preferences. The moment you start doing that, you are already a winner. If people can relate to your content, they will inevitably share it and spread your brand influence further.
Mix up your content as well. Use both viral and trending content, evergreen content, video content, etc. Create content that can inspire people and spark a discussion on Instagram. Hire your content team carefully and train them for diverse content creation.
4. Lack of Good Promotions Strategies
Merely creating content won’t help you reach your brand goals and extend your brand reach. You must share your content on Instagram, Facebook, and other social media channels.
Content promotion is as important as content creation and marketing. Choosing your channels wisely is an essential factor for content promotion. As for Instagram, live videos, short video ads, video tutorials, and picture posts, work exceptionally well. Make sure to include and promote these kinds of content in your Instagram campaigns.
Also, make sure you are consistent in your social media promotion efforts.
5. Overlooking Analytics
How will you measure your success if you don’t invest your time in studying the analytics of your business?
After everything is said and done, it’s time to measure the success of your Instagram marketing efforts. You must pay attention to all the KPIs and see how each of them is performing. To understand the overall success of your marketing efforts, it is essential to monitor and measure multiple metrics.
Now that you know the reasons behind Instagram marketing fails, how do you prevent your Instagram campaigns from failing?
The answer is simple – you need to deploy a robust marketing project management software!
A marketing project management software offers you a platform to manage and monitor your marketing strategies on a single, integrated dashboard.
Here’s how a marketing project management software like ProProfs Project can help prevent Instagram marketing fails:
One-Place Strategy Management
Project management (PM) software gives you the flexibility to integrate and include all your team members within the same platform. This facilitates better planning and strategy management as everyone can discuss marketing strategies, make changes to marketing strategies, add their comments, and see every alteration made in real-time. Thus, PM software makes the entire planning and management process more seamless and transparent.
Tracking Abilities
PM software comes equipped with tracking abilities that can monitor the individual progress of each team member as well as the overall progress status of a project. It can track the amount of time taken by each member to complete specific tasks, and can even offer useful insights that allow team members to get back on track if ever they get derailed from their project goals.
Strategy Planning With Relevant Teams
A project not only involves team members of different teams within a company but also involves clients, suppliers, etc. Hence, the success of a project depends on the smooth collaboration and interaction between all the stakeholders. Thanks to PM software, you can easily bring in all the relevant parties on the same platforms to discuss the project needs, goals, timelines, resource requirements, financial strategies, and more.
Collaboration is Easy & Efficient
By now, this is clear that PM software is an excellent tool for collaboration. Since project stakeholders can communicate with others, track project progress, discuss requirements, etc., in real-time, the process only gets more streamlined and efficient. Members become more responsible and productive.
Insightful & Detailed Reporting
Project management software and tools offer an added visualization advantage – they analyze data to generate detailed, presentation-ready reports on strategy performance, project performance, key business metrics, Instagram campaign success, and a lot of other things. These reports give you a fairly visual insight into the success and failure of your marketing plans and help you understand what works for you and what doesn’t.
All the insights and tips we’ve provided in this post should be enough to help you get started in creating successful Instagram campaigns. If you walk on the path we’ve shown you, there’ll be no scope for Instagram fails.
David is a technical writer, his works are regularly published in various papers and top-notch portals. His rich experience in project management software helps him offer a latest and fresh perspective on improved efficiency in workflows across organizations. His informative works on similar lines can be viewed on ProProfs Project. Follow David on Twitter @davidmiller4312 or connect on LinkedIn.
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