Shareablee Exclusive Series: Daniel Wellington Watches
Launched in 2011, Daniel Wellington, a young, leading global watch brand, has seen massive growth both in social engagement and followers on Instagram in the past year-- total actions grew by a staggering 1,149% from June 2014 to May 215, and the brand recently reached more than one million followers. What’s driving the brand’s social success? In this week’s Shareablee Q&A, Christopher Löfgren, Daniel Wellington’s social media manager, shares the social strategies and practices that have driven the brand’s impressive growth.
To celebrate its success, Daniel Wellington is giving away free watches during the month of June. Read through to the end of the post to see how you can enter to win!
- What are the metrics used to define Daniel Wellington’s success on Instagram?
After having partnered with Shareablee, we have a ton of useful metrics that we use to help measure our success. The overall engagement rate is usually a fair representation of your overall performance, but we also pay close attention to the tone of voice our followers use, live feedback, interactions between followers, and the different types of engagement in relation to the content featured.
- What are your goals in promoting Daniel Wellington on Instagram? Does this differ on other social platforms?
Our biggest goal is to maintain an environment that excites past, current and future customers on a daily basis, and to add depth to the brand. Because we barely do any traditional marketing, Instagram is where our brand comes to life. As a young company (established in 2011) that has grown incredibly quickly, it’s important that people can come to our page and immediately get a sense for what we are about.
- What is your advice for brands to maintain a consistent following on Instagram?
Listen, much more than you ever talk, and give your followers what they want and enjoy. While we have seen steady and enormous organic growth in the past year (+950k followers over 13 months), a big reason we’ve grown is because we’ve been able to keep the majority of the followers we’ve gained. It’s one thing to get them through the door, but something completely different to get them to stick around and become active members of the community. While we curate the page, 95% of all of our content is user generated. Our followers have a clear and loud voice, and they get to help build our brand, one photo at a time, every single day. One of the best things you can do is to have your actual customers and fans represent you and your brand by giving them a voice and a forum. It builds brand loyalty and creates a genuine sense of community.
- Which Instagram accounts do you use for inspiration?
We don’t want to single anyone out because we have an absolutely world class network of influencers and contributors that to this day continues to be excellent brand ambassadors and supporters. As cheesy as it may sound, we definitely look to our followers and ambassadors for inspiration, much more than we ever look at other brands. We encourage you to visit our Instagram page ( https://instagram.com/danielwellingtonwatches/ ) to get a sense for the people that inspire us; their content is all over our page!
- From your standpoint, what is the importance of Instagram as a social platform and to Daniel Wellington’s marketing strategy?
As far as social marketing goes, nothing is currently more important than Instagram. It put us on the map and helped launch the brand. It is, to this day, our far most popular platform. It’s unrestricted, organic, visually stimulating, engaging, simple, free and loved by users. It also has a massive user base. You can’t ask for much more.
It’s at the heart of our marketing strategy and we wouldn’t want it any other way. While changes will be made to the platform moving forward (it’s inevitable), we are still very excited about continuing to build our brand through Instagram.
Join Daniel Wellington in their “ Month of a Million ” celebration by using the #DWMOAM hashtag when posting photos on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest during the month of June!