Instagram Marketing Strategy & Marketing Mix (4Ps)

Published in Services category by MBA Skool Team

Marketing Strategy of Instagram analyzes the brand with the marketing mix framework which covers the 4Ps (Product, Price, Place, Promotion). These business strategies, based on Instagram marketing mix, help the brand succeed in the market. Let us start the Instagram Marketing Strategy & Mix to understand its product, pricing, advertising & distribution strategies:

Instagram Product Strategy:

The product strategy and mix in Instagram marketing strategy can be explained as follows:

Instagram is essentially a service that allows users to share content with other users much like how any social media platform works. Over the years, people have been using Instagram as a means to promote their business ventures to increase sale of items through the platform. What separates Instagram from other social media websites is the functionality it offers apart from just sharing content with users. The diverse offering in its marketing mix can be covered as follows.

Photos:

Photos can be uploaded on Instagram as a single or multiple shot as a part of a single post, where in users can tag other users through the tagging feature, much like Facebook. Other functionality includes the use of geotagging, which allows users to specify the location where a picture was clicked. This geotagging feature can later be used to access all publicly accessible content at one place. Similar to the geotagging feature is the hashtag feature on Instagram.

Users can caption content with hashtags to collate them at one place, a place which is accessible by users across the globe when they search for the particular keyword. The Explore tab on Instagram allows users to witness popular media including videos and photos which is trending, customized by an algorithm which caters to the searching choices of a user.

Videos:

Instagram offers use of video content by users. Video can be uploaded or they can stream live videos using their device. IGTV & Reels are the most popular categories to share video content on the brand.

Stories:

The Stories feature allows users to upload stories for 24 hours, much like Snapchat which get deleted automatically after the timeframe gets exhausted. Live Video, Augmented Reality stickers and Face filters are few of the newest addition to the Instagram package.

Instagram is offered in 30 different languages all across the world.


Image: flickr.com/photos/jasonahowie/


Instagram Price/Pricing Strategy:

Below is the pricing strategy in Instagram marketing strategy:

Much like other social media, Instagram as a service if free of cost. The application available for Android and iOS is free for download.

Majority of the revenue that Instagram earns is through its advertisement services. Hence, ad revenue is the backbone of the pricing strategy in its marketing mix. Posts may be by users which are not charged or sponsored which are sponsored by the organization wishing to promote itself. The annual revenue of the brand is close to $10 billion.

Instagram Place & Distribution Strategy:

Following is the distribution strategy in the Instagram marketing mix:

At present, Instagram offers its services worldwide through various operating systems like iOS and Android absolutely free of any charge. It is present across mobile applications, web and Internet based servers. It is used either for promotional purposes by businesses to promote their brands or by users to make their posts. There are over 1 billion registered users and counting on Instagram at present. This makes it one of the most popular social medium in the recent times.

A recent study found that Instagram is the fastest growing social media website with its active user base which has increased by consistently.


Instagram Promotion & Advertising Strategy:

The promotional and advertising strategy in the Instagram marketing strategy is as follows:

Instagram, like its parent Facebook relies heavily on word-of-mouth marketing, which is called Viral Marketing. Like other social media, the more the number of users who sign up for the Instagram service, the better it is for both the users as well as the Instagram service. Instagram relies to a certain extent on Direct Marketing as well. Instagram engages in directly recommending advertising models and options to businesses and independent users looking to promote their ventures. Instagram has also tied up with a number of partners that facilitate the use of Instagram as a medium for business promotion. They offer valuable insights and technological know-how to capture the right set of audience for the business, users are looking to promote.


Since this is a service marketing brand, here are the other three Ps to make it the 7Ps marketing mix of Instagram.


People:

When it comes to the demographics of users hooked onto Instagram, close to one-fourth of the adult population presently use Instagram as compared to the half of the users engaged in using Facebook. Demographics data also reveals that majority of the Instagram users are women and when it comes to the age-wise segmentation, a total of about 30% users are in the age groups between 18 to 29 years, making it evident that social media is popular with the youth.


Physical Evidence:

Instagram engages in frequent up gradation of its logo to stay modern, edgy and connect with its users much better. The work Instagram is actually a combination of two words: Instant Camera and Telegram. Instagram has established itself as one of the most prominent photo sharing apps of all times. It even released three additional apps, to complement the existing photo sharing app. These are called Bolt, Hyper lapse and Boomerang. While Bolt is essentially a messaging app with functionality, Boomerang allows users to create short videos that can be played over and over again in a loop.


Process:

To get onto Instagram, and be a part of the photo sharing trend, users need to sign up for an account using existing Facebook account or the email-id. Users are then prompted to put up a profile picture, logo or website URL that they wish to share as a part of their bio. By connecting Instagram to other existing social media channels, users can connect their social media accounts and integrate them into one so that whenever they make a post in Instagram, they can easily share it elsewhere as well. Hence this gives an over on Instagram marketing strategy & marketing mix.


About Instagram:

Instagram is one of the world's leading social media platform with more than a billion users. There’s no denying the fact that Instagram is now the formidable new player in the social media market. Instagram, now a part of Meta, was acquired in 2012 but it still competes with Facebook app.

Closely following Facebook, Instagram is a photo-sharing application that allows browsing and access through mobile apps, web or internet. Instagram is available in more than 30 languages.

This article has been researched & authored by the Content & Research Team. It has been reviewed & published by the MBA Skool Team. The content on MBA Skool has been created for educational & academic purpose only.

Browse marketing strategy and 4Ps analysis of more brands similar to Instagram. The Marketing Strategy & Mix section covers 4Ps and 7Ps of more than 800 brands in 2 categories.

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The names and other brand information used in the Marketing Strategy & Mix section are properties of their respective companies. The companies are not associated with MBA Skool in any way.

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