Marketing in the age of Instagram: Olapic’s Jose de Cabo talks visual marketing, the future of earned content and what’s so special about the colour blue
"Brands are not what marketers say they are anymore. They’re what consumers say they are,” says Jose de Cabo, co-founder of visual marketing platform Olapic. “User-generated content performs better than brand assets because it is more authentic.”
Launched just as Instagram was starting out, Olapic uses software to root out hashtagged photos and videos from Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter which showcase a brand being used or enjoyed, then repurposes that content to engage customers and boost conversions.
He tells City PM why the colours yellow and blue are more lucrative, and why more “likes” doesn’t necessarily mean more sales.
What is visual marketing?
Olapic helps brands by harnessing earned content from passionate consumers who are freely generating photos and video about their products or services and discussing them authentically, as a means of reaching new consumers.
People are spending more and more time on social media, which is inherently visual. And images and video can be consumed much faster than text or any other form of communication. We understood that brands need to be talking the same language as their customers, and we could help them pick out and repurpose that content so they can join in the conversation.
Visual marketing obviously works best for brands with social consumers who are prone to sharing. We work with many L’Oreal brands and others in the beauty sector, and with retailers, consumer packaged goods, automobile companies – any brand the consumer really loves.
How has Instagram’s “shop now” button, which allows consumers to link through to buy products showcased in photos, changed things for brands?
It’s exciting that Instagram has opened up for advertising, because it allows brands to go beyond their own followers on the platform to reach 400m monthly active users.
The risk on Instagram is that most of the content has quite an artistic look, so if brands just use a standard looking banner advert, it won’t resonate well with the community. We identify the best content users have generated, and use a budget to boost it so it is shared even more widely. It’s a huge opportunity to leverage content in a way which you can’t on Facebook, Twitter or on the advertising side of any other social media network.
How can you tell which photos will be effective?
It’s an algorithm tool which helps our clients identify and display user-generated photos which are most likely to drive conversions.
We extract more than 40 data points from every photo we analyse: the colour; who took the photo; how many followers they have; what’s featured in the photo, and more. There are a few characteristics of photos which brands should look for when they want to optimise sales.
The University of Wisconsin performed a study using our data and they found that photos containing a lot of yellow or blue positively affect the likelihood of a purchase, and blue actually encourages more interaction with the content. Filters don’t have any impact.
Photos with longer captions were also found to positively impact the shopping rate. While captions with one or more question marks may increase overall engagement, they lower the rate of sales, as do exclamation marks.
On Instagram, there is no correlation between how well a photo performs socially – how many likes, comments or shares it gets – and its sales performance.
What benefits can brands expect to see?
If the customer discovers a brand through social media, it is four times as likely that they will make a purchase than if they hadn’t.
Seeing a photograph from another consumer endorsing a product gives reassurance. Fully 63 per cent of consumers postpone a purchase because they don’t have a useful photo featuring the product which they can relate to. And within the brand’s own website, those who click on user-generated content are twice as likely to convert.
Where will visual marketing go in the future?
The power of earned content is going to be realised not only on social media, but every single channel.
Video is another interesting area, and we are currently working on a video algorithm. Brands already see video as a key part of their social media presence, and many have their own YouTube channel. But it is very costly and time-consuming to produce this type of video. There is a big opportunity for user-generated content to disrupt video creation.