Case Study: Winning With Instagram for Business

Instagram crossed 100 million monthly active users in February this year, and added 15-second video in June, a direct response to Vine, which Twitter had launched just months earlier. What Instagram still doesn’t have, even now, is any advertising option a small business can buy. The first native ads went to a small handful of major brand partners in November: Michael Kors, Levi’s, Lexus, Ben & Jerry’s and a few others. Everyone outside that list is working with organic reach only. Here’s an illustrative look at how a small business did that well this year.

The starting point

Picture a small home goods boutique with one physical store, a modest email list and no meaningful social following beyond a Facebook page used mostly for store-hours updates. The owner opened an Instagram account in the spring, with no budget for photography equipment beyond a phone, and no ad spend available even if Instagram had offered it.

What got posted

Rather than photographing products against a plain background the way a catalog would, the account leaned into how the products looked in use: a ceramic bowl on a real kitchen counter mid-recipe, a lamp switched on in a dim room at the end of the day, a stack of linens half-folded on an unmade bed. Alongside product shots, the account posted process content, a new shipment being unboxed, a display being rearranged, the owner’s dog asleep under the front counter, the kind of unpolished behind-the-scenes material that a big brand’s marketing department usually wouldn’t bother with.

How discovery happened

With no ad budget, growth came from three places: hashtags relevant to the specific product categories rather than generic ones, following and engaging with local customers’ and nearby businesses’ accounts rather than mass-following strangers, and encouraging customers to tag the shop in photos of purchases they’d taken home, which the account then reposted with credit. None of this was novel, but doing it consistently, several times a week for months, is what most competing accounts weren’t willing to sustain.

What changed by year’s end

By autumn, a meaningful share of new customers walking into the physical store mentioned finding the shop through Instagram, and the owner started noting Instagram as a source when asked. No individual post drove a dramatic spike. The pattern was closer to compounding: each week’s posts built slightly on the audience the previous weeks had built, and by the time the account had a few thousand followers, the store had visibly more new-customer foot traffic than it had a year earlier.

The lesson underneath the story

Instagram in 2013 rewarded exactly what this account did: consistent, honest, specific content posted often enough to matter, aimed at real local reach rather than vanity follower counts. With paid ads still closed to everyone but a handful of major brands, organic execution isn’t just the affordable option this year, for most small businesses it’s the only option there is.

---

More on Marketing Strategy, or browse everything from 2013.