Instagram produces first results for brand performance on its platform

Released yesterday (31 March) after Instagram’s ‘Inspiration Beyond Words’ event in London, the photo-sharing platform said that UK Instagram campaign performance has produced three times higher levels of ad recall against the Nielson Online Ads average.

Since Instagram introduced promoted brands on its platform in September 2014, John Lewis has received a 10 point lift for ad recall, 14 point lift for purchase intent amongst 25-34 year-olds, and a 3 point lift for brand favourability for 18-24 year olds.

Using Nielsen Brand Effect, Instagram measured each brand for different metrics and has only provided information on impact for selected brands. It is not yet known how other brands such as Burberry have faired on the platform.

Alastair Cotterill, creative lead for Instagram EMEA, told Marketing Week: “This is about us looking at what CMO’s actually really care about, which is their core brand metrics. It’s about reaching the right amount of people so there is impact on scale, but then its about who sees the right messaging, are they remembering it, and is it shifting their emotion.

“How they feel towards the brand that’s the real thing we’re focused on whether that is consumers seeing a message association or their likeliness to recommend,” he adds.

Channel 4 was looking to drive awareness of Gogglebox and Educating the East End as the programs were set to air on TV, as well as building association of the Channel 4 brand on the platform.

During its Instagram campaign the broadcaster received a 19 point lift in ad recall, 7 point lift in channel association and 3 point lift in consideration to watch, after the brand borrowed a trend from the Instagram community and created a series of ‘things organised neatly’ using props that represented the various stars of Gogglebox.

Meanwhile, as part of the on-going advertising campaign running across TV and print, Cadbury Dairy Milk also wanted to leverage Instagram to help build on its core brand message ‘Free the Joy’.

The brand received a 20 point uplift in ad recall and 8 point uplift in campaign message association for the tagline ‘Free the Joy’.

Despite the success that brands have achieved on the platform, Cotterill told Marketing Week that brands’ use of Instagram for campaigns is still relatively new and there is room for improvement.

“Over the next 6-12 months you will see brands start to understand what their visual language is on Instagram. Some brands could spend more time to understand the community and understand the platform.

“It’s about playing a bit more, experimenting more and finding a brand’s voice takes a lot of time,” he adds.

Cotterill told Marketing Week that Philips is a good example of a brand that has created a clear strategy for Instagram. The technology company solely refers to the many ways that light plays a part in people’s lives and this “single-minded approach” is something that Cotterill says is impressive on the platform.

A clearly defined strategy is also important for the knitwear brand, Wool And The Gang, who use the platform to engage with consumers and post 2-3 times a day with new content.

The brand has over 57,000 followers and speaking at the event, co-founder Jade Harwood said that in the case of hashtags it’s best to keep it minimal for better results.

“Don’t use too many, get a clear and strong hashtag rather than many of them that confuse your brand message. In total we have three,” said Harwood.

In December 2014, a Socialbakers report highlighted that brands gain nearly 50 times more engagement on Instagram than Twitter, with Instagram showing higher average profile interactions with over 19 million interactions on brand profiles.

Jan Rezab, CEO and co-founder of Socialbakers told Marketing Week: “The results these promoted pages are seeing aren’t surprising at all – Instagram has been outperforming every other major social network for engagement by a huge margin.

“It’s actually a bit more complicated for media…media and brand pages both got much more engagement on Instagram than on Facebook or Twitter, but on Facebook media gets more than double the engagement that brands do.

“For media pages that want to promote content, it might not make sense to try and fight it out with brands for eyes on Instagram just yet, when they can still get great organic reach,” adds Rezab.