How I Used Instagram to Make $1 Million Flipping Sneakers

Mastering the art of knowing what content to post on social media for KickBackz was directly tied to the audience research I completed. (Disclosure: I had a strategic advantage of being in the same age, demographic, geographic location, and shared some of the major interests that my target audience did. While this helped me concoct sound campaigns, I still invested energy into fine-tuning my audience’s thoughts.) I made it a point to understand their lives on multiple surfaces. Proper audience research meant learning how their experiences, both psychologically and culturally, made them the ideal targets of my brand activations and campaigns. 

Here are some of the audience insights I uncovered that aided me in molding a local door-to-door sneaker concierge service into a premier sneaker powerhouse:

• While sneakerheads live around the world, customers with the highest average order value lived in major U.S. cities including NYC, LA, Houston, Chicago, D.C, and the Bay Area
• Gender breakdown was 80% men, 20% women
• Highest level of education completed was some high school
• The most highly engaged ages were 14 – 18. There was a drop after 18, which suggested that while college students were still interested in these products, they did not have the disposable income to purchase them, unlike high school students who could still expect their parents to make these purchases on their behalf.
• In opposition to the previous point, women’s names as nearly half the customer purchases. This shed light on the fact that mothers (and sometimes girlfriends) were responsible for making financial decisions.
• Interests included: hip-hop music (specifically mainstream artists like Drake, Kanye West, and Future, basketball (i.e., the NBA, LeBron James, the 2K video game series); and streetwear fashion brands (i.e., Supreme, BAPE, VLONE)

Delving into the mind of hypebeast required actively listening to conversations. As part of my audience research, I found it imperative to access deep levels of consumer signals beyond just the positive, negative, and neutral. I studied my competitors’ social channels and learned to classify the emotional sentiments that their fans shared in conversations. Doing so allowed me to launch click-based activations that saw triple-digit spikes in social engagement year over year. 

For example, I analyzed large-scale consumer conversations and discovered that sneakerheads did not mind paying shipping fees for highly coveted items as long as they were safely delivered. Historically, shipping and processing costs have always been understood as a cost of doing business for both consumers and brands. This was the de facto operating procedure until Jeff Bezos upended the retail market with Amazon Prime, introducing fast, “free”, 2-day shipping to consumers nationwide. 

Indulging upon this newfound convenience, customers began objecting to retailers who charged for shipping and handling costs as line items in their cart. Spoiled by Prime Shipping, customers would add goods to their carts, and reflexively abandon them at checkout when shipping costs were calculated. Stuck between losing entire sales or no longer charging for shipping, many brands elected the latter, eating the transportation costs.