Great content can be your best marketing. There has to be a balance between the overt sales message and the interesting post. The key is to make it compelling to the point where people want to share it. All marketers hope their posts are good enough to go viral. The challenge is to stand out. There are many savvy marketing teams out there who are competing for the eyes and hearts of their customers. My thought is to try and not outdo the competition, but to be different than the competition.

Yes instagram is incredibly valuable for retailers who do focus on the efforts described above. In addition, we have had tremendous success inserting video email messages into the marketing plan of retailers whom we have consulted. These weekly or biweekly emails feature a 20 to 35 second video of an excited personality from the store, on the floor, featuring some new product(s) with invitations to come and see. This email with video (and very minor copy under the video) appears “above the fold” to minimize having to scroll down endlessly.

I make a distinction between advertising/marketing and sharing. Somebody sharing a thought or an opinion or a “like” of some kind is born of a genuine or authentic point of view. A paid shill is still a paid shill, not necessarily an influencer. Yes, they get the eyeballs and therefore impact sales. That’s part of the way the world works these days. Yes, I am a Baby Boomer and I don’t interact with social media the way millions of other consumers do. I just want “real” and “authentic” and “genuine” to still count.

The future is now, and the percentage of sales being driven from Instagram and social sites are on the rise. The visually rich social platforms are an outstanding forum to also build your brand, connect with the community, and build a relationship with the customer beyond the product itself. Shopping and engaging with brands has become a 24/7 proposition, and is not limited to brick-and-mortar and e-commerce/mobile apps.

Things are dynamically changing as brands are taking an increasingly direct-to-consumer path via Instagram, eliminating the middleman and engaging directly with consumers, which has traditionally been dominated by the wholesale/retail model.

The challenges for both retailers and brands are to remain authentic, and choose their influencers and micro-influencers wisely without overextending themselves.

There is no denying the power of visual platforms but, when it comes to unlocking their full potential, digital anthropology may be more important than savvy marketing. Instagram, et. al. — at least in the minds of the users — did not grow up as commercial sites. The were places for individuals to show off, keep a visual record of the trivial and the profound in their lives and … oh, yes … keep a photographic log of everything one ate. So … while sales off these sites may be significant today, my bet is that people will keep migrating away from the most blatantly, “camouflage commercial,” sites in the same way users migrated from MySpace to Facebook and from Facebook to Instagram. Maybe it should have been obvious to users that these platforms were commercial from the beginning, but it wasn’t. So — longterm — it seems there are a couple of viable options for branders — keep hopping from site to site or establish platforms that are clearly commercial from the beginning so… Read more »

Visual platforms are great marketing tools for retailers, but we are still at the dawn of the commerce age for these platforms as relatively low adoption rates seem to prove today. While I believe this is just the beginning and we will definitely see growth here, it’s still early to tell how successful this channel will be compared to others. The challenge will be in retailers’ ability to generate a constant flow of fresh, appealing content for these mediums, but so far we are seeing many examples that prove there is a strong future here.

For visual products, Instagram has quickly become the go-to source for consumers looking for design ideas. This has propelled the social commerce opportunities for Instagram and retailers have jumped on the bandwagon. While Instagram is the hottest social media platform for visual images and products, other platforms may be better suited for more complex or technical products. For consumers looking for more details and research, Facebook still has an advantage for certain products. This model challenges retailers to publish or die. What better way to leverage their marketing spend.