By, The Curator
Your Purpose
Before you start your Instagram page, you need to determine what purpose it is going to serve. For you two it will likely be to promote your clothing brand, for me it is to advertise and promote The Curator Blog. It may seem like a good idea to wing it, jump right in, make a profile, and start posting, but trust me everything is smoother when you are strategic about it. Knowing what purpose your page serves helps you to determine other things like your target market, what type of content to post, and so on.
Target Market/Audience
The next thing you need to do is determine your target market. If you aren’t selling a physical product, I like to call it target audience because then what you are selling is content. Your target audience is the demographic of individuals that you are trying to pitch your products or content to. This part can take some research because you want it to be fairly specific.
For a clothing brand your target market should not be “all people who like clothing” because that is extremely broad. Let’s say you are selling men’s clothing and the style and designs appeal more to a younger group of people. Your target market could potentially be “Males between the age of 17 and 24”. That is better, but you should get even more specific if possible. To do so, get in the head of your customer. What do they do in their free time? What TV shows do they watch? What music do they listen to? Do they shop online, in stores, or both? How often do they use social media? What times of the day do they use it? Answering questions like this and creating a profile for your market is extremely helpful because it aids you in determining how, where, and when to sell to them.
Content
Once you figure out what the purpose of your page is and what type of people you are trying to reach with it, you need to decide what type of content to post. This comes back to the purpose of your page. If the purpose is just to build a social media presence you will focus on more common visuals. If your purpose is to make sales, you will have to use more specific and exclusive content that will draw people in and make your product or services intriguing. This is where finding your target market is helpful. If you did it the right way, you know what they enjoy seeing so that’s the type of content you should post.
I think the best way for me to describe content is to explain what I am doing with The Curator’s page. The purpose of The Curator’s Instagram page is to aid in building an engaging audience for The Curator Blog. My target audience is small and upcoming brands as well as men and women (but stats show primarily men) ages 15-22 and 25-30. Mine is more complicated since there are two aspects of The Curator so I have to deal with two markets. One market is the upcoming streetwear brands who I want to promote and interview, and the other is the streetwear enthusiasts who enjoy discovering smaller brands, but have a hard time doing so. There is one thing that each of these markets have in common though, they both enjoy the streetwear culture. To reach both of these markets I have been posting higher quality pictures from the community featuring bigger and more hyped up brands. That sounds hypocritical considering my purpose is to aid smaller brands, but I am doing this to build the audience first. I can’t pitch to the audiences of these small brands because those audiences are almost nonexistent. This is why I decided to go the “traditional” way of starting a streetwear page (at first) so that I could build the initial audience. Then from there, people will decide whether they want to stay for the small brands or not. I’ll talk about my long term/ideal and original content plan another time.
One last thing that you need to keep in mind when deciding what type of content to post is unity. You want your feed to have a sense of unity so that it doesn’t look extremely chaotic. If you post high quality darker pictures of BMW’s you should not throw in any low quality bright pictures of Hyundai’s. Being inconsistent with the type of content and look of the content that you post will confuse your audience and make things more difficult. Once you’ve identified the purpose of your page and have planned it out, then you can start creating it. I’ll cover that next week in The Curator Show EP10.
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