Instagram Marketing Techniques for Online Store: A Descriptive Study
Abstract
Social media has become the newest form of marketing for companies, organizations, individuals, and also for small business and entrepreneurs. These small stores are growing rapidly in Indonesia; they’re usually called—‘Usaha Kecil dan Menengah’ (UKM) or in English ‘Small and Medium Enterprises’ (SMEs). Most of them create innovative and creative products or services such as fashion using traditional Indonesian fabrics, creative and delicious instant foods, drawing services for art and logos, etc. Many of these entrepreneurs choose Instagram to promote their product and services. Instagram is one of the most popular social media for photo sharing in Indonesia. It gets more attention because it is indeed a shopaholic photo sharing, not social networking such as Facebook or micro-blogs like Twitter. As we know, people like visual more than text. For the shopaholics, Instagram feeds simple forms of collections of photographs that make Indonesian people like Instagram as a place to shop. There are specific marketing techniques to practice on Instagram, such as posts showing celebrity endorsements, customers wearing a company’s product, hosting Instagram contests where a consumer will post photos for a chance to win a giveaway, etc. The aim of this study is to collect and describe the marketing techniques used by Indonesian online store owners to promote their store, earn more followers, and get good number of transactions.
Keywords: social media, Instagram, marketing, promotions, online stores, entrepreneur, small and medium enterprises, consumer behaviour
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