6 Tips to Grow Your Business on Instagram From Sarah Jessica Parker and Glossier's Emily Weiss

Glossier founder Emily Weiss created an Instagram account for the brand a month before the direct-to-consumer beauty brand launched. Weiss already ran a popular beauty blog, Into the Gloss, but she wanted to start a dialogue with consumers as soon as she could so that they'd be involved in the process and growth of the brand. "Glossier was created to make a new conversation happen around beauty wherein it could be very much democratized and very much celebrated as an element of personal style," said Weiss at an Advertising Week panel in New York on Wednesday. "If you have an account on Instagram then you are already global. You are available to the world. At Glossier the way we think about that is that all of our followers are already customers, they just haven’t purchased yet." Weiss continued: "We just turned three and we’re a direct-to-consumer company shipping only in the U.S. and now to Canada and soon, in October, to the U.K. Forty percent of our Instagram followers are in other countries; 60 percent are in the U.S. It’s incredible that you can build a brand, platform, or personality that’s truly global." Instagram does offer brands a great opportunity: 80 percent of the platform's 800 million monthly users voluntarily connect with a brand. Weiss and fellow businesswoman, actor Sarah Jessica Parker, explained how they use the platform for their brands and what they've learned along the way. Here are six tips from Weiss and Parker on how to use Instagram to grow your brand: 1. All of your customers are influencers With Glossier, Weiss wanted to create "a living, breathing company" which is "a huge departure from the beauty companies that I grew up with," said Weiss. "They were very much about 'brand knows best' or 'brand appointed expert knows best.' In the age of Instagram, every single customer is an influencer. You are influential to your five, 50, 500, 5 million followers no matter who you are. That’s why they follow you because they care who you are, what you post, what you think." 2. Authenticity is key If you're going to launch a business just to make money people will see through that and be less likely to engage with your brand, especially on a platform like Instagram. "Try not to actually focus on results," said Parker. "If you’re backing into a result you’re not making a thing that is most authentically yourself. If you’re looking at content and trying to figure out what they want, well, what do you have to offer them that is uniquely yours? A lot of people are trying to mimic things that they see experience success and we don’t need that." [kickout id="1"] 3. Customers are educated and informed. Treat them that way. Traditionally, brand messages had to do with, well, what the brand wanted to say. But as brands become more and more accessible via social platforms it's important to keep that dialogue open, listen to consumers and treat them with respect. "I think it’s really good for business, to feel that the business is always being scrutinized by a very informed consumer, an educated consumer," said Parker. "The higher the expectations, the better for us. The customer is such a huge part of the business." Parker continued: "It’s very different from what I feel the retail experience used to be, where you create something and you offer it up and there were expectations that therefore you will buy it. Now consumers are part of the design process and you’re constantly considering what they need, what they want. Without that exchange, I feel you’re left with no business." "The conversation is actually integral to the creation of our company," said Weiss. "We’re the first beauty company that’s being built in real-time in collaboration with our community. That conversation is happening in real time on our platforms like @Glossier on Instagram of Into the Gloss or our one-to-one editors, our store in Soho, and it informs and fuels everything from our product decisions to our future retail locations to who we hire." [kickout id="2"] 4. Instagram captions should be informative Instagram captions are hard for brands and people. Glossier found that though the brand loves to write witty captions, it's best to be thinking about what the consumer needs to know. "The onus is on us to be really clear," said Weiss. "A lot of what we do is anticipate questions we’re going to be asked. ... Your responsibility as a company is not simply to entertain but to really deliver the information." For Parker, "we really labored over those captions, every word" for her brands' Instagram posts but the most important lesson was to figure out the story you're trying to tell and be honest about who you are. 5. Customer service on Instagram matters Instagram allowed Parker to recognize how necessary it is to have conversations in business. "The thing that we’re most proud of in terms of our businesses is our customer service, which is for the most part conducted through Instagram," said Parker. "We take it really seriously. We’ve learned from other small businesses." "We’re sold exclusively through our own platform," said Weiss. "All of the questions that are on Instagram posts we answer. We get a lot of order questions through Instagram and I think as a brand there’s never been a time when saying, 'The customer is always right' has been truer. Today, we have to meet her where she wants to be met. If that’s through Instagram, email, or however else she reaches out to us, we have to respond and deliver a best-in-class experience." 6. Get your customers involved in product creation Glossier's Milky Jelly Cleanser is one of the brand's most popular products and it came from a conversation with its consumers. "It started off as a post on Instagram on Into the Gloss," said Weiss. "'What’s your dream facewash? Who would play it in a movie?' People answered that. 'Eddie Redmayne, Emma Stone, Julianne Moore.' Redheads. So we cast a redhead in the campaign." Weiss continued: "So that was a funny way of personifying this product but more importantly we learned what [our consumer] was interested in, what she did not want in this product, benchmarks of things she liked but weren't quite right, all of this led to a brief that we gave to our chemist and resulted in a product that, as I said, is one of the best-selling products at the company."

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6 Tips to Grow Your Business on Instagram From Sarah Jessica Parker and Glossier's Emily Weiss

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Kristina Monllos

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