New live event series on Instagram shows brands how to market for holidays

Sahail Ashraf posted on 7 November 2022

With the holidays approaching, marketers need all the support they can get. It’s difficult to be on top of the work you need to do to create high quality campaigns for Christmas. Instagram has just announced something admirable in this area. A short series of live events is about to be broadcast on Instagram from 1st to 3rd November. And each of the live events will go through how to get ready for the holiday season on the platform.

It was announced with a post as follows:

“Join us live on November 1-3 for the Instagram for Business Holiday Market: a series on how to drive sales with your shop on Instagram this holiday season. ?

Tune in to hear @chefanienass, @littlewordsproject and @hanahana_beauty share how they’ve set their shops up for success and the ways they use Instagram Shopping features and Boost to reach new potential customers.“

So, three accounts that are obviously doing well on the platform will show brands how to emulate their success.

By the time this post goes live, the event will be over, but what is interesting is the rationale behind it. We think it points to a great new direction for all the major social media platforms. There is a lot more education for marketers out there, and much of it is being provided by the platforms themselves. And the live stream approach is just, well…cool.

What are the events about?

The actual events or presentations have a detailed outline. And dipping into those outlines gives us an insight into what Instagram thinks of businesses and brands. It actively wants them to succeed.

• Episode 1 ‘Reaching New Customers with Your Shop’ with chef Stephanie Nass of @chefanienass. Using shoppable content and Boost/Ads with Product Tags to drive discovery and reach new customers
• Episode 2 ‘Your Last Minute Holiday Checklist’ with Founder/CEO Adriana Carrig of @littlewordsproject. Last minute actions you can take to get your shop ready for Holiday shopping, including catalog best practices, creating shoppable content, using Boost to reach new users
• Episode 3 ‘Break through the Holiday Noise’ with Founder/CEO Abena Boamah of @hanahana_beauty. Storytelling and deepening engagement with your audience through Reels/Shoppable Reels and Live Shopping

Note how episode 1 of the series is helping brands reach new customers through the app. Shoppable content is really taking off, and brands obviously need to be pushed in that direction.

More intriguingly, the second episode gives you a last minute checklist for making sure your online shop is ready for the holiday season. This again covers boosting, but also catalog best practices. This is useful for any brand wishing to make an impact during the holidays.

The natural final part of this series is all about storytelling. Using Reels and Live Shopping, brands should be able to deepen engagement. This part tells you how.

Live shopping

The events are live, and that’s the truly interesting part. Instagram is really pushing Live Shopping. Using a live steam to sell products is becoming easier on the platform. 

Maybe your brand isn’t really well placed for live streaming. However, if it is, the tools available on Instagram are easy to use and you can get into streaming quickly. With good timing, you can set up what are essentially live streams of discounted offers prior to the holidays. 

As Instagram says:

“With live shopping, you can sell products directly from the app, instantly interact with viewers, engage with potential customers in real time and save your videos so customers can continue shopping featured products after the live broadcast.“

This is the prize for most social media platforms. Having a user base that accesses live shopping and buys directly through it is something TikTok really wants to get on top of in the West. 

The events are an inspired move, because they showcase the platform playing to its strengths. In addition, the holiday checklist is going to be published by Instagram for Business shortly. It’s worth checking out. 

We can see Instagram (and other platforms) holding other ‘live TV’ events soon. It’s exciting, and even though you can normally access the broadcasts as saved streams afterwards, the fact that we are all getting used to tuning in at a certain time on a social media platform is truly the shape of things to come. 

So if you have some products or discounts you need to push for Christmas, go live. 

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