The Impact of Instagram Marketing on Sale in the Fashion Industry

There is an ongoing debate on Instagram’s capabilities in sales generation as a social media-based marketing tool amongst business executives. Although an abundance of research was done to determine the impact of social media marketing on sales contribution, many of these studies have utilized purchase intention as a proxy for an actual purchase. This then creates a gap as purchase intention is merely the likelihood of an actual purchase and thus may be inaccurate when used to measure actual sales. This study then aims to investigate the impact of Instagram marketing on sales in the fashion domain via a data analytical approach to narrow the existing gap. A CRISP-DM framework is adopted, which includes a descriptive and predictive approach, in achieving the data mining goal of determining the impact of Instagram marketing on sales using Instagram and sales data of fashion retail in Klang Valley, Malaysia. The implementation of a data analytical approach in investigating the impact of Instagram marketing on sales was able to achieve all research objectives in determining the ability of Instagram marketing in influencing sales. In this line, both the XGBoost and LSTM models were able to predict sales using Instagram marketing factors, whereas the LSTM model performed better with lower MAE and RMSE values. In future, studies can be conducted with more Instagram features with additional modeling techniques to gain better results than those obtained in this study.