Tony Bianco digital marketing manager Beth Auty reveals how the brand dominates the Instagram game.
How did Tony Bianco track during the lucrative boots season?
For our autumn/winter campaign, from March to now, 5% of our website traffic is from social media. For the total revenue generated by social advertising campaign, 20% came from Instagram.
Why does the brand use Instagram?
Instagram is a really great tool because it gives us a way for customer to connect with the brand in a visual capacity. So we use Instagram to show our customers how to style our shoes and what they look like on people. It is fantastic to drive better brand awareness and importantly, share content with our followers.
What is the split of paid to unpaid?
I can't give you a statistic on our direct split on Instagram, because it is mostly not sponsored but we do run advertising consistently. For example, if it's getting a little bit colder we will switch ads to be ankle boots. Or we will start pushing our other categories such as jewellery or handbags. It's difficult to say how we split it because we have got ads running constantly. What we do is we change that regularly to deliver relevant content to our customers so it looks native in their feeds.
What posts work best?
The posts that work are absolutely lifestyle imagery. Products that are in the moment, that are on the person or flatlay imagery, definitely works more for us.
What doesn't work?
It is definitely just a flat, plain product shot. That doesn't sell the product. It has to be something that is styled and is on the foot, with an outfit that goes with the shoe. That definitely works better.
Are there any figures available on your engagement rates?
Again, it's a similar statistic to the percentage of revenue. 31% of our impressions would come from Instagram.
Are there any challenges in that space?
I think challenges with Instagram would definitely be, you can't put links on a post. Eventually, and we've been talking about this internally, Instagram images will soon be shopable and I think they've actually rolled that out. We've just seen a retailer in the US who had that feature. So you can tap and shop the image itself. We definitely think that is somewhere where they are going to move forward.
What are the opportunities?
Definitely. We always like being one of the first to trial things. I know that we love being involved with beta programs and we find that is a really great way for us to be seen as a brand that is forward thinking. We are very much experimental internally in terms of what we want to do and what we can do.