Instagram Social Media Strategy of Brands: Revolut
We keep on analysing Instagram accounts of different brands to see how they perform and learn from them. In our previous post on this matter, we had a conversation with the LALAL.AI social media manager about their Instagram marketing strategy.
💡Suggested read: Instagram social media strategy of brands: LALAL.AI
The current post touches on the prominent online banking service Revolut and its Instagram marketing efforts.
About the Brand: Revolut
Who it's for and what it does: Revolut is a fintech company based in the UK. It offers banking services, such as credit and debit cards, insurances, investment services, banking services for travellers, financial business solutions, and more.
As the brand claims, 'We are building the world’s first truly global financial superapp to connect people seamlessly across the world'.
Considering that banking services are a mass product, the target audience of the brand is diverse – these are people of different ages, occupations, and locations (though this one is limited to the areas where Revolut is valid).
Social platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. In this piece, we'll talk about their Instagram marketing with a precise focus.
Instagram Marketing of Revolut
Instagram marketing efforts of Revolut are mostly organic; they promote the brand on Instagram by creating multifaceted content and designing appealing visuals.
Based on the Socialblade analytics, the followers growth of the Revolut Instagram account is gradual, with similar amounts of users following the account each month, which indicates the organic means of promotion.
This is unlikely that the brand uses mass following or mass liking techniques to grow their account performance – you can also see this by the slow following growth, which is about 50 accounts a day; the growth mostly results from content creation.
You might say that the engagement rate is too low for an account as big as this. It is, indeed. Yet, as a matter of fact, the engagement rate of close to 1% is a regular thing among brand accounts, not personal blogs of influencers. So this is not a tragedy if the ER of your company account is about this digit.
💡Suggested read: How to track the effectiveness of your Instagram marketing – main Insta KPIs.
Now let's analyse Revolut's audience's quality with Combin Growth. We searched for Followers of Revolut on Instagram with a Search by Users within Combin Growth. When the tool loaded the first thousand of results, we updated the page to get as many search results as we needed.
After we got the required amount of search results, we sorted them based on various parameters to get the most active and relevant followers. This allows us to interact with these users (like, comment, follow, and mass view their stories) – a useful feature when you want to find the most relevant audience of your competitor or other accounts and draw their attention.
To get even better results, start the search by Users within the software, but instead of Followers, choose Likers or Commenters since such audiences are more active on Instagram in general, which means they'll be more likely to engage with your account.
Bio & User Picture
The first things you see on Instagram are the profile picture, handle, and bio of an account. In the case of Revolut, they use a minimalistic logo with the LGBTQ+ colours since it's the LGBTQ+ Pride in June and have a brief slogan in their bio.
They don't use much text in their bio, for there's a link in the bio that leads directly to their website and the native Instagram description – Finance. Revolut keeps its bio minimalistic and laconic, considering that the given details are enough to tell what the brand is about.
The handle is the brand name with the app tail so that people can easily find their account, searching by the company's name.
Revolut's bio also has a linktree with multiple links leading followers to their website and pages with new services/features.
💡Suggested read: How to increase your website acquisition from Instagram
Content & visuals
Let's start with the visuals since Instagram content is, first and foremost, about images. According to our designer Sasha, 'I like that all posts are of a coherent visual concept – they look clean, simple, and minimalistic. Even colours correspond with the Revolut's philosophy – they are restrained yet friendly. It's great the profile's visual concept correlates with the way how interfaces and the website look'.
Some more pros we found after analysing Revolut's content on Instagram.
- Lots of videos (even super short ones) which is great for engagement and drawing attention.
- A mix of educational content, product-led content, and memes. In other words, the content is multifaceted with educational and entertaining posts.
- The most important posts are pinned!
💡Don't forget about the pin function on Instagram: if you want to highlight something so that your followers don't lose it, pin it!
As for cons, we'd assume Revolut is not a big fan of Reels. So our advice here is to post more Reels to get an organic promotion by Instagram. Besides, they share stories often, which we'd suggest they should. Feed posts sometimes get flooded in the content flow and stories draw more attention.
As part of their Instagram growth strategy, Revolut also leverages competitions. See how they did it:
Voice & tone
Revolut talks to the customers and followers in a friendly voice using word plays, jokes, and colloquial language. Which is quite unusual, considering that Revolut is a banking service, and there's an unspoken rule that companies that provide financial services should sound serious and respectful.
Revolut is different; we give them that. It doesn't mean they sound disrespectful, though. They've chosen a different strategy and a way of communication with their customers, as a friend would, not an establishment providing financial assistance.
Here are a few examples of their posts captions:
As you must have noticed, they don't use lengthy captions but keep them brief instead. Besides, Revolut tailors content to their target audience and a specific service: the caption announcing the feature for Ukrainian refugees was localised into the Ukrainian language.
Revolut's tone and voice are consistent on all of their platforms and across the entire Instagram page.
From this perspective, Revolut is a perfect example of how even a 'serious' service can sound friendly and easy, joke, use memes, and be ironic. But to do so harmlessly and without disrespect, you need to know your target audience rather well.
Paid ads
Revolut launches several different paid ad creatives a month that run across various countries and are localised into several languages: apart from English, there are ads in French, German, Spanish, Polish, Greek, Japanese, and some others.
💡If you run a global business, you should tailor your offers to the markets where your company is present.
Speaking of the ad formats, the majority of creatives are videos or images with some text on them.
Meta Ads Library, where we found the ads, doesn't show you the performance of the creatives, so we can't be sure which of them works better. Yet it's great that Revolut makes multiple variants of the same creative, mixing visuals, captions, and calls to action.
Revolut runs its ads not only on Instagram. Beside Instagram, there are also Facebook, Messenger, and Audience Network.
💡If you can, use as many platforms to run your ads as you can, especially if you're sure your target audience is there.
To find which ads your competitors or any other Instagram accounts create, you can use Meta Ads Library. There, you just need to enter the name of the account whose ads you want to see and filter the results by country.
Apart from paid ads made on behalf of their own account, Revolut also has sponsored ads partnered with bloggers.
The Bottom Line
Revolut's Instagram marketing is performing well – it grows gradually and organically; they post diverse content and don't forget to educate and entertain their audience. They share many videos but only a few Reels, which is a drawback. Besides, the brand doesn't leverage influencer marketing a lot, so this is also a place to grow. But generally, Revolut is definitely a brand to look up to when it comes to Instagram marketing.
⚡️You can have your profile audited as well! With InstaCheck, our personalised Instagram audit, you can get a detailed picture (a lot more detailed than this post) of your current Instagram marketing strategy and get individual advice on how to improve it in a PDF document. Audit your Instagram account and fuel it now!