On Instagram, our objective is to inspire customers with fun, unexpected creative that builds our brand. Instagram is a place where we can be playful with images and copy. Our hope is that each post causes customers to pause when scrolling through their feed. Compelling visuals are the primary goal, but we create them with the customer lens in focus. Content should be engaging, relevant, and on-brand. We focus on interesting, aspiring content over price or promotion, so that each post is a welcome addition to our customers' feed.
At Meijer, we want our presence on Instagram to create a bridge between our customers and ourselves. It is a way for us to communicate with them, to build our brand, and to show our breadth of product in fun, unexpected ways. We create striking, aspirational visuals that celebrate food, fun, family, and fashion to grow our audience and delight them with images that strike the perfect balance between familiar and fresh.
A key feature of our strategy is color blocking. As a supercenter, the focus of our social posts often spans across the large variety of products in our inventory. We highlight everything from vitamins to pet toys, to fashion and grocery, and everything in between. Using a color to tie all of our content together has been a successful way to create continuity between posts that cover a wide range of items.
We create images and animations that are bold, bright, and not overly busy. Our creative should be fun and full of color. Compositionally, having a singular focus helps customers consume our content more quickly, however, we are always looking to create art and copy that has that special "wink" to our customers – something a little unexpected, something that causes them to pause scrolling and engage.
In the fall of 2017, our Instagram account didn't have a creative strategy. Photos and copy often came from different teams with different voices and different visual approaches from one another. There was no continuity in the feed, and no through line from one post to the next.
When we began implementing our new Instagram strategy in December 2017, we gave ourselves parameters. All art and copy started to come from the creative team, with our social media team directing content. We used color blocking to help us bring unity to otherwise disparate subject matter. All images were shot in a studio with professional lighting. We stripped back compositionally to make clean images with a singular focus. We concentrated on the fun, the bright, the unexpected. And since then, we've started noticing a change.
Since we began implementing our revamped Instagram strategy, we've seen our overall number of followers grow 34%. Customers are seeing our content, and then deciding that they want to see more. We have also seen engagement grow by 10%, with more fans liking and providing commentary on our posts.
