Trophy Wife
Chelsea Bagan the owner of the Melbourne nail art salon Trophy Wife and Anna Ross of the nail polish brand Kester Black used Instagram to promote the nail art tutorial book that they had created together . That was going to be the beginning of a huge increase in customers for both businesses . Bagan now has 35,000 followers on Instagram – not bad for a small local nail art salon .
“ I feel like Instagram was the beginning of my business ,” – Chelsea Bagan
In the beginning , Chelsea was just doing it as a hobby . Then a friend recommended that the website Three Thousand should do a story on her business which made her sit down and set up a proper business account on Instagram . And after this , it started flowing .
“ With Facebook , there ’ s a lot of text that goes with it and I feel like sometimes we don ’ t even need to explain what we ’ re doing , we just need to post the photo .” – Chelsea Bagan
And this is exactly what Trophy Wife does so well – capturing beautiful images of the work it does . And Instagram followers do translate into dollars and cents for the small Melbourne salon .
“ Ninety percent of my customers come to me from our Instagram or from seeing their friends sharing photos of their own nails .” – Chelsea Bagan “ When we did our book we put an ad in Frankie magazine , and maybe only one person came to me and said they had seen us there ,” – Chelsea Bagan
Both Chelsea Bagan and Anna Ross agree that without the app their businesses and their friendship wouldn ’ t exist . As both businesses are small and operate on a tight budget neither would be able to pay for much conventional advertising . And conventional advertising is not in their interest either as this is not where their customers are .
+ 90 percent of customers come from Instagram + 35,000 followers on Instagram
Gelato Messina
Sydney-based gelato brand Messina claims paid advertising is a “ waste of money ”.
The local ice cream brand relies on local , social advertising instead . The business is taking advantage of the trend of taking pictures of food and posting it on social pages ( foodie trend ). It may be simple , but it is very well-received . And the success has been achieved without paying a single dollar for the advertising . Gelato Messina boasts a queue out the door most days and nights and has nearly 150,000 followers on Instagram , several thousand likes per post and the Messina hashtag has more than 300,000 photos tagged with it . It has almost become a status symbol to be seen eating
EMERGENT CONSULTING AUSTRALASIA PAGE 14 - 20