Introduction 

Instagram has come a long way in a short span of time and proved its potential by being one of the popular business marketing platforms. In the year 2018, it gained recognition as a business marketing platform owing to the 800 million users it has to its name. Instagram has come up with many new features and all of these are focused on enhancing the marketing related operations in a business. It was in the year October 2013 that Instagram came up with its monetization agenda that included introduction of advertisements into the user feeds. From that year September onwards the application took an initiative to act as a support for UK’s small and medium scale industries that were already a primary part of the parent company Facebook (Burns 2016). The Instagram Stories have been a popular tool since its inception in the year 2016. There are almost 400 million accounts that are making use of Instagram stories in their daily life.  In this paper, a campaign plan will be provided that can convince 25,000 Instagram business related mainly to the beauty and fashion sector to adopt Instagram Stories as a medium to promote their products and services. This will mainly focus on UK businesses and it will also include a creative strategy.

Campaign Plan

Name of the Campaign	Objectives of the Campaign	Duration of the Campaign	Components of the Campaign	Target Audience	Key messages	Goals of the campaign	Budget of the campaign	Expected ROI
InstagramStories to revolutionize the marketing industry.	To convince Beauty and fashion businesses of UK to use Instagram stories for promoting their products and services.	The campaign will be conducted in a span of six months.	The main components in this marketing campaign are Market Research, Attention seeking content,Data Analytics, Buyer Personas and Search Engine Optimization	The target audience in this case is the 25,000 UK businesses mainly the beauty and fashion businesses that use Instagram for promoting their products and services but do not use Instagram stories as a part of their promotion strategy.	Importance of Instagram stories in aiding business promotion.	To make the stakeholders understand the way in which Instagram stories can be a perfect feature to promote their business.	£155,000	7X

Table 1

Some stats about Instagram 

As per the statistics of 2018, Instagram was the second-most downloaded free application in the play store which indicates that Instagram has been able to capture market and attract more users.  It has been the 10^th most popular query on Google and has made its place among the generic terms and well ahead of other such social networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube and many more. Almost over one billion people use this social networking site each month. Among all the users almost 500 million people make use of Instagram stories each day (De Veirman, Cauberghe and Hudders 2017). Thus stories have a lot potential to serve as the marketing medium for brands. 89 percent of the users stay outside the United States and this statistics about the number of users in different countries helps in getting a clear idea of the target audience. In this particular campaign the fashion and beauty businesses of UK using Instagram are the main target audience. For example beauty brands such as Kester Black popular for selling vegan nail polish and soap without palm oil have 27,169 followers and their Instagram account is colourful and has a lot of artistic imagery. Similarly, Jane Iredale is known for its pure mineral skin products and images in their Instagram account are aligned to the brands’ aesthetic value (Veissi 2017). These businesses make use of Instagram stories to enhance their marketing. 63 % of Instagram users log in to this site at least once in a day. 200 million of the Instagram users check out at least a business profile in a day.  62 percent of the users are of the opinion that their interest in brands have increased after knowing about the same on Instagram. In the beginning of the year 2019, it was estimated that there are 24 million Instagram users in United Kingdom which constitutes almost 42 percent of the total population of the country. Talking about the gender split it was seen that 54 percent of the users are females. As per the research done by Faßmann and Moss (2016), there are almost 22.22 million Instagram users in the United Kingdom till May 2019 and 25.7 percent of these users come under the age group of 18 to 24 years. Some of the tips that need to be considered while considering Instagram as business marketing platforms are making use of appropriate hashtags, knowing the correct time to post, creating attractive visuals and working with influencers. Its success in being the best platform for business marketing can be understood from the fact that almost 25 million firms are making use of this social networking site for promoting their business with almost 200 million of these users visiting at least a single business profile each day.

Figure 1: Instagram users in UK till May 2019, versus the age of the users (Faßmann and Moss2016)

 

 Key challenges in the campaign

To make the Instagram stories a part of business marketing there is a need for the users to understand the scope of the same and know how to use this in a proper way so that the target audience can be reached. In the newly added feature one needs to understand how it works and in what way it can help in brand promotion. It is just that when a user can post pictures or videos in this section and this content will be available for 24 hours. If it is a picture then it will show for 5 seconds and if it is a video it will show for a maximum time of 15 seconds. The content share on this section stays for 24 hours unless deleted by the user before a time span of 24 hours. The technical requirements as specified by the application must be adhered to while posting stories. This feature allows the users to make use of different filters, texts, GIFs, freehand drawing, stickers and polls. The users having a verified account in the social media platform or those who have more than 10,000 followers have the provision to add links in their story section (Macarthy 2018). The major challenge in this case is that the content should be attractive and tag lines used should be catchy enough to attract the users. Blurry image or video many create a bad impression on the users and they avoid viewing the stories more often. It is challenge for the marketers to come up with story contents that attract users due to the high level of competition on the platform. Instagram stories can be viewed for a time span of 24 hours which is a disadvantage in case a business marketer has uploaded a great content. In this case he has to keep on reposting it or save it to his profile page. The time span being short one requires to post in a frequent basis. It does not necessarily suite all types of businesses but can be used by almost every business to highlight the various positive aspects of product and services. The challenges in the digital campaign can be related to budget. The biggest concern in case of digital marketing campaigns is to beat the competitors without exceeding the budget that has been decided for the purpose. Segmenting the audience is mandatory with a small budget and in case of digital marketing maximum return on investment can be obtained through proper segmentation of audience (Muñoz and Towner 2017). The campaign needs to reach the target audience and hence segmenting the section of audience properly is important. The campaign should be well targeted and reach those who are supposed to be the stakeholders of the same.

Direct and digital strategy

Objectives

1) To create brand awareness- In order to convince the businesses it is essential to understand the extent to which these businesses use Instagram to promote their product and services. The businesses need to be aware of the fact as how Instagram stories can be the best option to help promote their product and services.

2) Increase in the size of the social communities and target the appropriate audience- The relevant key performance indicators in this case are community performance, share of the community voices, share of the voice by different channels and number of visits on a regular basis.

3) Monitoring feedbacks- In order to connect well with the target audience and convince them it can be done that polls be conducted focusing the businesses’ audience so that their view can be shown to the businesses and the way they are indulged in stories (Evans, Phua, Lim and Jun 2017).

4) Focus on the engagement strategies- The campaign will be focusing on the strategies which can help in engaging the target audience with the campaign. This can happen by choosing the target audience correctly.

Acquisition strategy

A customer acquisition strategy is combinations of media along with engagement tools that help the businesses attract new customers by targeting the appropriate audience selecting online channels. The basic step in case of developing a customer acquisition strategy is to get a clear idea of who are the audience, places they belong to, their interests, their requirements, their workplace, informations related to their products and services. In this case the target audience are the fashion and beauty businesses in UK those who are already using Instagram but still have not used Instagram stories in their product and service promotion. In order to convince the audience and make them realise the effect of Instagram stories in marketing, the campaign can make use of Instagram stories itself (Salleh, Hashima and Murphy 2015). The target audience will better understand the usage in this way and thus many will be attracted towards this. The trust of the fashion and beauty brands can be gained by citing examples of the successful brands in this domain that have once trusted Instagram for their marketing and are now flourishing in the market. The example of the fashion company ASOS can be referred to in this context. The company managed to get most comments in a set period and their idea was making people follow their profile, tagging a friend and winning a gift card (Veissi 2017). Though sounding easy, it needs a high budget to give away gift cards. In this case Instagram stories can be implemented and it can be done this way whenever a exiting user clicks on the story he or she is asked to tag a friend and if the friend follows they can get discounts on the products.   The campaign can be made to reach the UK businesses through catchy taglines in the story section itself that will help them to understand how this feature can help them in understanding the market conditions or cater to the needs of the audiences.

Picture 1: Customer Acquisition Strategy

 Communication plan with proposed weight of paid, earned and owned media

Paid media is considered as a good way that can be used for promoting content to drive earned media at the same time directing traffic to the owned media properties. In order to make the campaign popular paid media should be given more importance as paying for product promotion can helps in creating more exposure. The campaign can be promoted on other social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter as these can be effective in boosting the content of the campaign. Under the purview of paid media Pay Per Click or PPC and other such measures such as display advertisements can be used to drive the users to the owned media that in turn will help in increasing the traffic or more specifically conversions (Çukul 2015).

Earned media are considered to be as the vehicle which aid people get to the owned media. A website or any new venture on social media would get popular if it is watched and shared by the users. The campaign needs online word of mouth that can be in form of shares, reviews, mentions, recommendations and many more (Agam 2017). In this case first page rankings along with quality content are considered to be as the biggest drivers. This is the reason for having a good search engine optimization strategy.

Owned media for the campaign can be email marketing which can be sent to the target audience. Blogs can also be created for the purpose of attracting the Instagram businesses.

In order to be successful to reach the target audience it is required that all the three that is paid, earned and owned media are introduced in a balanced form.

Picture 2: Digital Marketing

Roles	Functions	How frequently communicated	Medium of communication
Chief Content Manager	Developing content strategy, editorial board, planning and execution, assuring quality and keeping coordination.	Once a week	Meetings
Content program management	Project management, Editor, Creating support.	Every alternate week	Face to face meetings
Marketing automation	Lead generation, data scoring, lead reporting, nurturing.	Once in a week	Meetings or messages
Online digital copy	In-house staff, emails, quality assurance.	Alternate week	Messages and notices
Digital Optimizer	Acquisition optimization	Once in two weeks	Emails
Chief of digital marketing	Development of vision	More frequently	Board meetings

Table 2: Communication Plan

Buying Persona

The brands that are already using Instagram such as Superdry and Shell and ASOS can be the buyer personas in this case as the campaign focuses on the fashion and beauty businesses of UK. The media plan will include targeting these small and medium sector businesses and in order to promote the campaign offline as well as online ways will be used. In the offline ways print advertising, direct mailing, associations and trade shows can be made use of (Drummond and Hill 2010). In the online ways the campaign can be posted on social networking sites including Facebook and Twitter, press releases, starting a blog and many more.

Marketing budget to breakdown and ROI

Marketing return on investment or ROI needs to be well analyzed for attributing profit as well as revenue growth to the activities involve in marketing. By keeping a track on the marketing ROI, the success of the campaign can be understood. It helps in justifying the amount that has been spent on marketing along with budget allocation strategies for such type of initiatives in future (Ting et al. 2015). In the campaign, calculation of marketing ROI will help in decision making at the same time bringing in optimizations in the efforts made towards marketing.  In this campaign understanding the marketing ROI will help in many ways that are as follows:

1) Justifying the amount spent on marketing- This is required so that budget and resources can be secured for future campaigns. For instance having knowledge about whether local ads are driving good conversions as well as ROI while the display ads are not working that well can help in allocating the budget in a proper way.

2) Distribute Marketing Budgets- For the purpose of this campaign there is a need to understand what are those online or offline efforts that are driving maximum revenue which in turn can help in allocating budget to such activities (Todor 2016).

3) Measuring the success of campaign and establishing deadlines- It is vital part of any successful team of marketing to have the ability to measure the success of campaign thus establishing baselines which in turn can serve as references for similar future efforts (Diez-Martin, Blanco-Gonzalez and Prado-Roman 2019). Getting a better understanding of the campaign, it will be possible to channel efforts in the correct direction.

4) Competitive Analysis- Keeping a track of the ROI of the competitors permits the marketers to understand their performance (Todor 2016).

Sales Growth – Marketing Cost= Marketing ROI

Breakdown of the budget

Items	Cost (in £)
Overhead and internal expenses	50,000
Agency fees	15,000
Media buys	10,000
Creative	40,000
Online and offline promotion of campaign	40,000
Total	155,000

There are many challenges in measuring marketing ROI that include:

1) In order to be accurate in the work the internal as well as the external factors that have a significant effect on the campaign need to be identified.

2) Marketers should analyze the long term results as it is important for the marketers to align themselves with the main goals and time duration of the campaign (Järvinen and Karjaluoto 2015).

3) For the campaign ROI measurements will consider all the channels that have been chosen to promote the campaign.

4) Having clear goals help in determining the ROI and disgracing from set objectives has a bad impact on the promotion of the campaign.

Some of the metrics for measuring ROI are as follows:

i) Cost per lead- It is important to know the cost of each lead and the price of each lead should not exceed closing leads because that indicates backward return.

ii) Lead Close Rate- This helps in understanding whether digital marketing efforts are being able to deliver the leads profitably.

iii) Conversion by the different channels- The channels form where the traffic is being generated should be known (Saura, Palos-Sanchez and Correia 2019). It should be clear whether this is coming from paid, social media or any other such avenues as this information will help in recognizing how far the campaign has reached to the target customers.

Big campaign idea and recommendations 

In order to reach well to the 25,000 businesses an effective strategy is required. The steps in the campaign idea are as follows:

1) Building buyer personas- It is considered as the best digital marketing strategy as it specifies the recipients of the service or the target audience (Veissi 2017). In this case the campaign has to reach the 25,000 UK businesses already making use of Instagram thus they are the targeted audience. These can be developed by conducting surveys, researching and conducting polls that will help in getting hold of real data.

2) Demographic information- in order to reach the appropriate audience web analytics tools such as the Google Analytics can be made sue of to understand where from the website traffic is being generated from (Chen 2018).

3) Understanding the campaign objectives and associated challenges- In order to lead a successful campaign it is essential that throughout the campaign its objectives are aligned to and the challenges are faced and mitigated.

The more number of shares of the campaign and number of the businesses talking about using the Instagram stories can help understand how far or to what extent the campaign has been successful. The campaign needs to be well directed in a specific direction and keep itself aligned to the objectives that were set previously (Kingsnorth 2019). The campaign should focus on its main aim that is reaching the target audience that are the 25,000 companies of UK already using Instagram for business promotion. The main aim of the campaign should be to analyze the market conditions and the way in which Instagram is being used by the businesses. Thus it is required that data analytics is made use of in the process to understand the conditions and the traffic being generated from.

KPIs to track success of the campaign

Digital marketers rely on the marketing KPIs that help them to take decisions as well as assess the data that is related to their marketing in an organized and informative way. Key performance indicators’ dashboard can be made use of to get a comprehensive overview of marketing performance and take crucial decisions so that desirable results can be obtained (Saura, Palos-Sánchez and Cerdá Suárez 2017). There exist five different categories of marketing key performance indicators that are as follows:

1) Generation of lead- This helps in understanding how many new people have get to know about the content and this gives a hint as to whether the marketing efforts are proceeding in the correct direction (Hofacker and Belanche 2016).

2) Qualified leads month wise- In order to understand whether the marketing campaign is aligned to its objective, the number of the qualified leads can be monitored. It can well understand from this whether the campaign is generating inappropriate traffic (Robertson 2018).

3) Cost per generated lead- Cost per lead reveals the cost of acquisition of a new prospect. It is associated with cost-per-conversion metric and thus can help in evaluating whether the marketing activities to promote the campaign are working as per the effort being put in the same and the resources being spent (Taiminen and Karjaluoto 2015).

4) Cost per conversion- Marketing key performance indicators reveals how much did it cost for acquiring a lead that could converted to gain clients or fulfill its purpose. This can be tracked with a two-month time gap (Yasmin, Tasneem and Fatema 2015).

5) Average time of conversion- If the leads are monitored in a proper way then these can be converted into paying users showing how effective was the promotion of the campaign.

6) Rate of retention- This key performance indicator of marketing shows or gives information about the number of the clients that are interested in the campaign and want to adopt Instagram stories as a part of their marketing strategy (Nummila 2015).

Test and learn plan, including how Instagram could use the UK pilot to inform global roll-out

The success of the campaign can be tested by data analytics that focus on the UK statistics and the businesses that are already making use of Instagram. This is the only way to test that the campaign is successful in its venture. Polls and surveys on the platform can be conducted to check that the campaign is reaching its target market (Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick 2019). This can be the best way to test the successful implementation of the campaign and to understand whether the campaign has reached the target audience. As the businesses of UK need to be convinced for using Instagram stories in the marketing venture thus the data should be focused on the statistics of UK.

Conclusion 

It can be concluded from the above discussion that in order to reach out to the target audience a thorough analysis should be done of the target audience. In the above report it has been seen that how Instagram has taken over the market and attracted the businesses to make use of the platform in their marketing venture. The campaign plan and communication plan give the details of the project and the key performance indicators must be kept in mind while analyzing the effect of the campaign. The use of Instagram’s new feature that is stories in promotion of product and services has been discussed. The features that can be made available to the users by using stories has been effective in proving that these can help businesses in capturing the market in a much better way. Thus, the customers can be attracted to different brands and products by seeing the stories of the same on the social networking site.

Reflection

After being a part of this campaign formulation I understood the importance of Instagram in the marketing sector. The way it has grown since its inception and the frequent update of the features that has helped in capturing the market. The statistics show that it has been the second most downloaded free application after YouTube. This proves that the application has been able to reach a position in the market. The statistics show that the application is not limited to chat and entertainment but has proved itself to be one of the best platforms for the promotion of different brands. The key performance indicators in case of digital marketing have given me an insight how these have a significant effect on the business of any online business. The campaign idea needs to be clear so that throughout the campaign the objectives are adhered to. In the report it has been given that the Instagram stories can be a better way to connect with the customers. The innovativeness of the application and its urge to bring in frequent updates can be attributed to the success of the businesses. Thus, according to me it will be a better idea to go for Instagram stories as a marketing campaign.

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