Big-name CRM software provider Salesforce has added Instagram to the portfolio of social channels that can be managed through its Marketing Cloud suite. The company says its tools for social publishing, analytics and audience data management can now address Instagram users, increasing the scope of its cross-channel social offering.
The news is more evidence that Instagram has grown beyond a stage for niche and one-off campaigns, and is becoming a key component of marketers’ overall digital strategy. Though social management dashboards like Sprout and Cyfe have long been able to publish and analyze Instagram content, CRM is a whole different ball game. Salesforce says by hooking up its Active Audiences data management platform to Instagram, it can put marketers’ first-party data to use targeting customers with paid ads, as it currently does on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
In a release, L’Orèal CRM director Marco Ruschioni talked up the benefits of pairing a visual platform like Instagram with the data targeting tools of a CRM platform. He said Salesforce’s paid social campaign management app, Social.com, “enables us to be hyper-targeted in our social media buying, and serve the right message to the right audience. This is particularly relevant for retargeting on Instagram, as the platform is 100% visual.”
Beyond data targeting for paid ads, Salesforce has also added tools for Instagram publishing and analytics to its Social Studio platform. It says the new tools let marketers and community managers track the performance of their posts, measure engagement and share assets with other platforms where they’re running campaigns.
Instagram now has more than 300 million users globally. A recent report from eMarketer estimated that by 2017, its mobile-only ads will bring in $2.81 billion in global sales and make up 14% of Facebook’s mobile ad revenue.
