You Ask, I Answer: Instagram Content Strategy and Following?

In today's episode, Rachel asks, I'm working with a new client in the wine and spirits industry. Currently, they're following everyone under the sun like Justin Bieber. Who would you recommend they do follow? For example, because they're a cocktail mix brand, they're following liquor brands that people mix their cocktail with. So thinking about who to follow, I presume is to try and better understand the customer and perhaps look for a source of inspiration for what you should be posting on your Instagram account.

I don't know that's going to provide a lot of insight because you're looking at it from the business perspective. You know, what do similar businesses do? And I would focus on a different kind of analysis. I would turn my attention away from similar businesses, at least right now, and look more carefully at the customer. Who is the customer?

Uh, who are uh what do they like, what do they read, etc.? And the easiest way to get started with is with uh using Facebook's audience insights. So let's uh go ahead and bring this up here. So here we have Facebook Audience Insights. Uh I'm gonna make sure it was clear out all my stuff here.

And let's say that I'm interested in the people who like my page, right? And so take that out of there. These are the pages I run. And what I see here is I see rep equal gender representation, which is interesting, and I see a definite age skew in the 35 to 54 range, right? And I also see uh disproportionately married, uh, disproportionately higher educated.

So that gives me a sense of who my audience is. So if I go into the 35 range up here, and let's go ahead and do advanced here, education, graduate school, relationship status, married. Now that that's essentially my audience. What is this audience like? Actually, let's narrow that down to 54 on the upper end.

There we go. So I just want that segment, which we saw was overrepresented. This gives me a sense of the other things that this audience of mine tends to like. We have some politicians, we have some podcasts, that might be a useful place for me to do some advertising. We have shopping and retail, uh, we have uh TV networks, media, uh TV shows, and this level of information now tells me more about my customer uh in to a fair degree, right?

People who are similar to my audience. What I should be doing is looking at every one of these brands, particularly ones that where there's a lot of overlap with uh or some connection to the the product or service that I that I work it with and find ways to analyze the followers of this brands on Instagram, even though I'm using Facebook as the triangulation here. Uh want to go and follow those accounts on Instagram, see what is in the media diet of my audience, what are the things they're seeing over and over again and engaging with a tool like Facebook's crowd tangle would be a good tool to get a good sense of sort of the top 10% of engaging content, and then with this information, I might want to then try and narrow down uh even further. So let's take a look through here really quickly and see what are the things that uh are there any things that strongly overlap. Um I want to do, let's look at people who are interested in podcasts.

Right. So now we've cut that audience down significantly, but now we have some different podcasts, and we have all these different types of interests. This is what you would call a double unicorn strategy. Uh this is uh term Larry Kim uses over uh mobile monkey, he said mobile monkey. Um and the the double unicorn strategy essentially says find different things that allow you to create content that just speaks out to that audience so strongly because your content that you'll post on Instagram or wherever seems like it's tailor-made for that audience.

So let's look at a couple things here. We have uh some parenting stuff, we have REI, we have the points guy. So if I was creating uh interesting creative for my stuff, I would be looking at uh how can I weave in ideas about saving money on travel? Uh I'd be looking at weaving in how to to get some time outside. And since I run a uh marketing uh podcast, I might be thinking about how can I either weave that in as segments on to m or sh the show or in Instagram content, maybe some tips.

Hey, while you're traveling for business, here's some ways to save some money. While you're traveling for business, here's ways to get outside and save money, right? You got that intersection of those of those interests, and that kind of content when somebody who's in this audience sees it goes, You understand me, you get me, you know what I'm all about. So the same thing that I just showed here is what I would do with this uh cocktail mix company. Who's your audience?

What are those demographics? Start building a a a look-alike audience, essentially. Uh, and what are those interests? What are the content that's in there? What are the ideas that you can pull out of there?

Again, using great research tools. You can use uh Crowd Tangle, you can use Talk Walker, you can use any of the major social media monitoring tools to extract out from uh Instagram. What are the what's in the media diet of those people that they engage with and then use that to build really strong campaigns that are organic in nature? Uh you can and should put some paid dollars behind it as well, but it'll dictate very clearly how to go after an audience based on what it is that that audience wants to see, not necessarily like what other liquor brands are doing, but what other brands in general are doing that can appeal to that you can weave your product and service into uh very well. When you look, for example, let's go ahead and clear all this out here.

Uh I have a suspicion. Let's look at people who are interested in Peloton, right? The uh product or service or the business. When you look at this audience, if I then put in who this audience is and we take out these interests, and look at people who just like gin, you see some of the very same brands like Blue Apron, like Whole Foods, and things like that. So when we talk about you know how how clever it was for Aviation Gin to go after the Peloton ad, we're forgetting the data side of things, right?

There was a clear overlap in audiences. They knew that that was their audience, and so a rapid response campaign obviously did very well. Have this had this audience been very different, it might not have worked as well. But knowing your audience allows you to do some of those really creative uh activations. So give this a shot.

Uh again, this is all free, it's all b based on your existing data, and try and find those overlaps. As always, uh please subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter, leave your comments below, and I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit trustinsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.