You should never underestimate the power of co-branding. Whether it is internally within your employees and your marketing team or with email and Instagram, working collectively has a lot of good things to offer. However, making two or more things work together in unison to achieve the desired results is not an easy task. You will need a lot of preparation to do for it as well as ensure that all rules and guidelines are set according to the requirement of your business and as per your marketing strategy.
In most cases you will see the business owners and marketer team up often with other influencers and brands for the desired results and to offer wider and more varied range of benefits to their customers as well as their business on the whole.
However, whatever you do you must always keep your followers for Instagram on mind so that you can give them what they love and want from you. You must give them proper value and the best prizes but things will never splash out on its own without proper preparation.
Follow the right dynamics
Proper and effective marketing through emails and integrating with your Instagram account is all about the dynamics and it all depends on how exciting a dynamic you choose in the end. You should not ask or rely heavily on asking your users to follow you, or repost photos or even to spam their friends.
In fact, these and especially reposting photos are overtly banned in Community Guidelines of Instagram. Therefore, in practice, it all comes down to the difference in techniques and approach.
There is a lot of difference between sharing the photo of a single followerwith the original copy as well as proper creditand asking your followers to post multiple grainy screenshots of your posts.
- Instead of such an approach, you must try asking the users several open-ended questions.
- You may also try and encourage them to share an original content.
This type of approach will be more effective and at the same time it will help you a lot in improving level as well as the quality of your interactions. This eventually is the goal of gratifyingyour active followers. This in turn will reduce spams and will help you to create better usergenerated content for your benefit that you can easily and effectively repurpose.
Use of UGCs
You will need to use the user generated contents for your Instagram posts but for that you will need to create the perfect setting as well. Ideally, there are only two types of UGCs that are helpful on Instagram namely the posts and comments.
You may argue about the Stories with polls or the question stickers as these are often considered to be the quickest and easiest way to hear the opinions of the users. However, there are several reasons not to consider these for your prep work for integrating email marketing and Instagram. These are:
- This is much difficult a process to record the responses of the specific users or to share them with the others.
- On the other hand, if you use the right tools such as the Instagram API it will allow you to collect the comments, the posts, as well as the usernames accountable.
- If you consider the Stories, these are good for boosting shortterm engagement but not as effective for a longterm engagement as the comments, posts and the datadriven social media strategies are.
Therefore, you must consider the posts and comments only and know about these well.
Comments:
You will find that there are several brands that ask their users to tag their friends with their comments. This helps in several ways such as:
- It helps to attract new users
- It helps to solicit more information and go further
- It helps in knowing how a follower use the particular product
- It helps to find their opinion about the latest releaseand
- Why they love the brand.
All these facts and info helps the brands to create a list of followers as unofficial focus groups and product designers.
However, you must also take at the real picture here as well. It is not uncommon for brands and influencers to follow a “like and share” type of engagement. This has been a cheap practice for a long time now. Here the followers are not used to sharing any real and meaningful content and asks for incentive to do so as well.
If you follow the same route then you will need to first know about the populargiveaways and discount codes and offer these to your followers to encourage them to share.
Posts:
Just like the comments, the original posts from users are also the significant form of the usergenerated contents. Once again you will see a lot of brand use the content of their followers for many different purposes such as:
- For photo posts
- For product design
- For promotional materials and much more.
Until now it was very easy to collect these user posts by simply asking them to share their content using a branded hashtag. However, of late the Instagram has planned a major change to the API as its ongoing effort to improve privacy and quality of engagement across all social media networks.
It is expected that when the complete Instagram Graph API will come into effectcollecting user contents by simply using branded hastgas will be nearly impossible. However, this does not signal the death of usergenerated content,though Instagram has introduced these changes in API much earlier than expected.
The bottom line
Therefore, if you want to make the best use if Instagram for your email marketing, make sure that you work within the limitation of it and not against it. This will provide you with an opportunity to build and maintain a good relationship with your email subscribers as well as your followers.
Make sure that you use the updated apps to collect user content, up-to-date permissions and other contextual information such as the email addresses.