This is the continuation of my annual Daily Golden Nugget "Holiday Run-Up" series loaded up with step-by-step explanations of how to make the most of your holiday season advertising. The focus of this Run-Up is how to make the most of your product advertising to attract customers through multiple media methods. This is the 13th installment of the Run-Up, and this series still has a few more days before I finish all the topics that should make a positive impact on your profits this season.
You can read this overview to understand the overview of this Run-Up.
The goal of this Run-Up is to illustrate how to create a micro-campaign around a single product. The campaign feeds different details about the product on each social network, thereby allowing the customer to slowly discover it throughout their online travels. Each small detail is part of the overall product story.
The point of a micro-campaign is that you're likely to have the same followers on different social networks, so don't bore them with the same social posts everywhere.
In this previous installment, I gave a few details about Instagram and the type of users expect, which I'm expanding on today.
Instagram Overview
Instagram is yet another photo sharing social network that allows you to share either a photo or a 15 second video. It gained popularity quickly because of its built-in ability to apply filters to photos taken on your smartphone. Within 2 months of launch, that filter feature was turning otherwise drab photos into professional looking photos for 1 million happy users.
Different industries adopted Instagram more quickly than others. While retail jewelers still lag far behind in its usage, jewelry designers thrive on it by engaging their audience, showing creation steps for new jewelry designs, and getting feedback on their ideas.
While other social networks allowed any photo ratio, Instagram initially forced you to crop your photos as a perfect square. In the summer of 2015, they started allowing any size photo to be shared. They also limit the ability to upload photos from most smartphones and Apple mobile devices only, which prevents a lot of the social spam that all other networks have fallen prey to with robots set for web-based attacks.
Instagram now allows different image sizes other than a perfect square.
Socially share product photos to different networks, but don't worry about telling the whole story of the product in every post. As a branded micro campaign, you can use every social post to tell part of the story for that particular product. All the parts of the story come together when the person eventually navigates their way back to your website.
Instagram Photos
In that previous nugget I gave some ideas Instagram photo taking. In addition, you should create videos and animated photos to get attention.
You can shoot a long video of someone modeling the jewelry, walking on a runway, or just a simple video of your ring on a turntable. Don't worry about how long the video is while you're shooting; just concentrate on holding your smartphone steady and framing the video appropriately for your campaign. The video framing will depend on which part of the product story you are telling.
For my ongoing example, I want to use a short video on Instagram to show followers that the special Casuso Designs ring comes in two parts that are worn together. I took a few simple photos in my PhotoCubics Flashbox and brought them together to make this video:
I used PhotoShop to crop and clean up each photo a little bit. I also centered all the photos so the animation would match up. I then emailed the 4 images to my smartphone and use the free GifBoom app to create a 5 second video. I then shared the video to my Instagram account as you see here:
You'll have to experiment with creating the animated GIF on your smartphone and saving it as a video. You could also create a video on your computer and email it to you phone.
Final Instagram Tips
If this video idea frightens you, then just stick with posting normal photos to Instagram. Instagram is heavy on the hashtag usage for searching, so make sure to use a few in the description of your photo.
For the purposes of the holiday micro-campaign, when posting to Instagram you should not cross-post to other social networks because that would break the idea of posting unique images to the different networks.
