The Secret To Maybelline’s Success On Instagram

The popularity of Instagram among young people in Indonesia has skyrocketed, putting it in second place behind Facebook. Instagram users in Indonesia between the ages of 16 and 35 spend more time ‘exploring online purchasing’ than they do visiting friends’ profiles, much to the joy of advertisers. Instagram also has the highest interaction rates of any social media platform for beauty firms. When you put all of this together, you can see why Indonesian customers on Instagram are so appealing to beauty businesses.

Because of this, Maybelline Indonesia collaborated with Lion & Lion to develop a content strategy for the brand’s Indonesian audience that would increase engagement and new followers. The brand’s new content strategy was a huge success, resulting in a 7x increase in average interactions per post and a nearly 2x rise in the monthly follower growth rate. The company currently has double the engagement and monthly follower growth rate of its nearest competitors, as reported by Unmetric, making it the best performing beauty brand on Instagram in Indonesia.

Unmetric helped us identify emerging trends, conduct experiments, and fine-tune our content strategy using actionable data. Here are four takeaways from our achievements.

1. Instagram marketing using influencers is crucial. Digital influencers like Maybelline brand ambassadors and local beauty aficionados were frequently included in the company’s most successful social media postings. According to Unmetric, Maybelline Indonesia’s re-gram of Pevita Pearce was one of the most popular Instagram posts of the week in Asia and one of the most popular Instagram posts by a beauty brand in Indonesia in 2016.
2. Lifestyle User interaction is increased via Instagram-friendly content. Although influencer material performed better, product graphics still drove connection with followers when they were created in a lifestyle format. Product-related content was the second top performing category in terms of engagement. Product-oriented material, whether branded or user-generated, regularly attracted a lot of attention, especially around the time of product releases. The majority of responses were directed towards recently released goods and greatest sellers, with many users inquiring where they might get them and how much they cost.
3. The results of local content are better than those of global assets. Better results should be expected from content that features local faces and popular local products than from modified worldwide assets. This pattern is also true with international ambassadors, with local influencers typically receiving almost twice as many engagements per post as their international counterparts.
4. The quality of videos never seems to improve. Consistent with L2’s findings, video is less engaging than still images. Videos that feature influential people or centre around a particular product tend to do better than those that don’t. Repurposed TV ad announcing the release of a new lip cream performed surprisingly well, going against the global tendency of poor performance by repurposed TV commercials on Instagram. In regions like the United States, where the product had already debuted, the announcement of its impending release on Instagram was welcomed with great enthusiasm from customers.