Laurel & Wolf founder and CEO Leura Fine explains why Instagram is the perfect fit for her visually-driven business.
In this series, Instagram Icon, Entrepreneur speaks with the individuals behind popular Instagram accounts to find out the secrets of their success.
Leura Fine says she wants to help her customers change their lives through great design. As the founder and CEO of online interior design service Laurel & Wolf, Fine’s mission to take the uncertainty, cost and sunk time out of space makeovers. Her company’s customers pay a flat fee to receive multiple design ideas from licensed interior designers and then they decide which designer’s vision best fits.
Since launching in 2014, the Los Angeles-based business has grown to a staff of more than 60 employees and raised $25.5 million in funding. It has an impressive 60.6 thousand followers on Instagram.
Fine says that given the integral visual component of her company, building a following on Instagram made sense in the startup’s growth plan. She says that Instagram allows her and her team to tell stories that draw customers in by inspiring them to take the leap for their own design projects — and to seek out Laurel & Wolf’s help.
We caught up with Fine to get her take on how to authentically connect with your audience and why imperfection is an important part of figuring out your brand’s voice.
How did you get your start with Instagram?
From day one I really loved the platform, because being an interior designer, I’m very visually driven. Being an interior design brand, I thought it made sense. I think like most businesses, [we started] by just playing around with a bunch of different things, posting a lot of things that I’m sure [we] would be completely horrified about today. Nothing that you do in the early days of a business is as glossy or beautiful or strategic as you’d like it to be.
I think in the earlier days of our business, we definitely thought of Instagram as just another social media platform, a place where we could connect with people on a more personal level. We could be posting things every day and it wouldn’t have necessarily a long-term impact or effect of something like a web site, for example. So I think that we just kind of jumped on it and started playing around and started trying to figure out how we were going to grow our overall presence.
What other platforms do you use and what percentage of the time do you spend on them vs. Instagram
We are on Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram. I think we spend about 30 percent of our time on Instagram vs. the other platforms. We definitely have a very engaged audience there. It’s a really exciting place for us continue to play around with different formats. And for example video series vs. stories vs. still images. We’re definitely spending a big chunk of our time on Instagram.
What makes Instagram a better platform than other social media?
We really feel like there’s just this amazing diversity of storytelling opportunities on Instagram that allows us to tell a deeper brand story or figure out a way to connect in a more authentic way. So much of what we do is about changing people’s lives through great design. The gallery views allow us to show before and after shots. The videos allow us [to incorporate] design how-to’s so we can [teach] our consumers, which is something that’s important to us as a brand.
We can tell clients’ stories and have them talk about what it’s like to work with Laurel & Wolf. It also gives us the opportunity to leverage other people’s followings, [like our] celebrity and influencer clients that we’ve [worked with], and have them cross share [posts] with their audiences.
We’ve also started to play around with the Instagram Live and Stories. I think what’s fun about that is it’s not permanent. It’s something that you can continue to fine tune to see how your audience engages with it. Because it’s not permanent, I think it allows us to just play and test out new marketing hypotheses.
From a brand perspective, we do want to have a certain amount of polish and sophistication because we are a professional service. [We want our social presence to say] we’re here to solve the problem of making your space what you want it to be and making it beautiful. I think that you need the credibility of beautiful imagery to reinforce that.
How much of your time do you devote to it?
I would say that we actually spend more time as a team on producing Instagram content than we do for any other platforms outside of our own site. We have a really incredible blog that we’re publishing to seven days a week, which is where a lot of our time and energy is spent.
Our team has done an amazing job of thinking about — essentially because Instagram is such a big, important channel for us — how is this content going to perform, not just on the blog, but how could we also leverage it for our Instagram audience?
I would say it’s definitely a big percentage of what our team is thinking about in terms of general content strategy. How is our Instagram audience going to react? And not just from a content perspective, but even from a partnership or influencer perspective. Facebook is probably our number two platform that we spend a lot of time thinking about. Luckily they’re in the same family.
How do you promote your account? What’s your number one way to gain followers?
We are using Instagram insights to track what what our clients really like and what they don’t. I think that that’s a really helpful tool because, for example, we’ve seen that our audience prefers certain types of photos in terms of composition. Lots of white, the millennial pink, we can’t get away from it — as much as we try. They just love it. Some of those analytics are really important for us…
