Dive Brief:

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud introduced a fresh set of new marketing tools for publishers and advertisers on Instagram.
• The new integration tools will allow marketers to advertise, publish, engage and analyze content on Instagram within the Marketing Cloud.
• This week, Instagram also opened up its API to all brands, big and small, to advertise on the social photo-sharing app.

Dive Insight:

Until Instagram entered the digital and mobile scene, "there has never been a channel at scale to rival TV in its ability to powerfully engage consumers with the beauty of the visual image," Salesforce's Scott McCorkle wrote in a blog post about the announcement.

Today, Instagram boasts 300 million monthly users around the world, 70 million daily photo uploads and 2.5 billion likes per day. The photo-sharing site's social reach is expanding, and according to eMarketer, is poised to represent almost 56% of the social media audience by 2019. Instagram is also expected to account for more than 10% of parent company Facebook's global revenues by 2017.

As one of the fastest-growing social networks, Instagram poses an attractive advertising opportunity for marketers. In flicking on its API, the app now allows brands to automatically schedule ad campaigns, and signifies brands can begin buying ads similar to how they do through Facebook. Per Instagram, its users recall brands’ ads 2.8 times more than online advertising -- that, coupled with its targeting capabilities, makes it a lucrative investment for marketers.

With the Salesforce product offering refresh, it means marketers can manage ad campaigns using Social.com; tap into CRM data in Salesforce using Active Audiences; and utilize the Social Studio to engage with customers as well as track analytics.

"Salesforce is now excited to offer marketers the opportunity to extend their reach to customers on one of the most engaging channels in mobile, and coordinate those efforts with every other channel in the customer journey," Salesforce's McCorkle wrote.