People like to spend money on dad.
Sure, they don’t spend quite as much on him as they do on mom. But Father’s Day still presents a formidable haul for brands, retailers, and marketers (anyone with something to sell, really).
According to the National Retail Federation, Father’s Day spending was tracking at $15.3 billion in 2018. More than 77 percent of Americans celebrate the holiday, with consumers spending an average of $133 per person.
Being the most visual social media platform in town, Instagram offers a unique avenue for Father’s Day marketing. The addition of its new “shopping” feature only makes it more appealing.
According to Wired, the new feature turns an Instagram account into “a storefront in a shopping center” where the customers who are most likely to buy from you are automatically directed to your front door.
Here’s a look at five ways you can use Instagram to create, build and grow a successful marketing campaign.
1. Create an audience
Don’t waste time marketing to people who aren’t interested in your message. If you’re selling fishing poles, you want to market to outdoor enthusiasts. Use your existing data to create an audience, and then, once you find success, create a lookalike audience around what’s working. (Here’s more information on how to create an audience.)
2. Use organic content to create a gift guide
Use the weeks leading up to Father’s Day to post a steady stream of dad-friendly gifts on your account. This content can be a part of a larger “gift guide” initiative. This will allow you to see what’s gaining traction, and if you see success with a certain post, you may want to put money behind it and promote it to the audience you created.
3. Use giveaways to provide user-generated content
Instagram is ideal for photo contests that you can tie into your product. For example, a store that sells grills can invite participants to post pics of Dad barbecuing (which, for many dads, is their natural state).
4. Court influencers and dad bloggers
If you’ve ever spent more than five minutes on YouTube, you’ve probably seen at least one influencer unboxing a promotional package. Savvy marketers send these gift packages out to the most influential performers on social media, in return for free publicity generated by an appreciative box opening. Other times, they pay.
By researching Instagram audience segments and comparing them to your customer data, you can reach out to the Instagram influencers who can generate the most interest for your product or service. In recent years, dad bloggers have come into their own on social media. If you decide to pay for a sponsored ad with an influencer, here’s a guide for determining how much to pay.
5. Use identity resolution to effectively market across channels
An Instagram campaign might only be one facet in a multi-channel marketing effort. In addition to other social media platforms like Facebook, you might be running display media on desktop and mobile, targeting people’s inboxes with email, or even marketing to them offline.
If this is the case, you’re going to need to make sure that your message is hitting the right people across devices. The key to this is identity resolution, a data management process through which an identity is analyzed between data sets to find a match. It’s how you match an offline persona (someone’s home address) with online personas (their mobile habits, Google searches, what apps people use, etc.).
With more than a billion active monthly users, Instagram provides a huge platform that allows you to sell your product through storytelling and visual imagery. And as long as you stake your marketing campaign firmly in the ground with data, your message will get to people who are shopping for dad.
