Influencer marketing, as always, is important on Instagram. Businesses and marketers use influencer marketing extensively for their business benefit. However, there is a strategic method to follow to find, select and use an influencer, whether micro-influencer or macro-influencer.
If you plan to use Instagram, you should make it a point to use influential users or influencers. This will make your promotion efforts of your brands and products better and much more effective.
If you are new to Instagram, you may wonder how to use the influencers to promote your brand or business on Instagram just like you do across all other social media channels. The process will be easy if you ensure these two points:
- You will need to have in-depth knowledge and look for influencers who can connect your brand with the right audience.
- You will need to know the ways in which you can run a successful Instagram influencer marketing campaign.
There is one more thing that you should know in the first place. That is why you should use the Instagram platform for influencer marketing. Here the reasons.
- First of all, Instagram campaigns perform better driving performance results
- Influencer marketing on Instagram is more effective for brand reach
- Integrating influencer marketing into your Instagram marketing campaign enables you to reach audiences on both a local and national basis.
Influencer marketing on Instagram will ensure a greater reach, high engagement rate, and better promotion of the brand.
About influencer marketing
In a nutshell, influencer marketing is making the best of the users of Instagram who have a large and more engaged fan following. This is because these followers of the influencers idolize them and respect their decisions and opinions. They listen to their tips and advice regarding a product or service.
Therefore, using them to promote your products and brand will provide you with great results. The entire process entails these basic steps:
- The brand’s partner with influencers
- The influencers promote the brand and products
- They also act as their advocates on Instagram
- They help in developing and planning social media posts
The primary reason these influencers have a large following may include:
- Their lifestyle
- Their job
- Their hobby
- The types of clothes they wear
- The stories they tell
There is a large and diverse pool of these influencers that most of the brands utilize on Instagram. The only thing to make sure is that the influencer is relevant to the industry as well as the target demographic.
The Instagram influencers have opened up better avenues and huge opportunities for social media marketing platforms such as Blastup.com and others. They ensure that the brand, product and business is marketed authentically and reach the right audience in the most effective way.
This gave rise to a new concept in business marketing: the ‘paid post phenomenon.’ The influencers now are not happy with just a free gift as before to promote a brand or a product. They have realized the huge potential of influencer marketing and charge brands for providing them with grid real estate on their profile.
Influencer marketing made easy
There is a step-by-step process to follow for influencer marketing.
- Research the various influencer marketing platforms and choose one that fits your needs and objectives. They are not all the same and have different aspects such as only focusing on a specific network, pay per post or as a management platform for influencers you recruit vs platforms in a marketplace.
- Make sure you understand what metrics are important for your campaign. There are new innovative influencer marketplaces such as Hoo.Be that go beyond pay for posts and likes and can generate leads, emails and coupon redemptions.
- First, you will need to create a campaign. You should collaborate with influencers and explain all details about your campaign to make the process fast, simple and relevant to their audience. When you confirm the post proposal, you pay for the service.
- Next, you receive the proposal from the influencers. Make sure that these proposals are creative and matches with your business needs. Therefore, you will need to do some reviewing and analyzing before accepting the proposals. You may even have to negotiate and deny proposals if it does not serve your purpose.
When you accept the proposal, you go live with your campaign. This means that your post and campaign is published by the influencers you have approved. Once done, make sure that you track the performance of the campaign in real-time and even review the influencers to gain better results and returns.
Working with micro-influencers
You can work with either micro or macro-influencers but it is recommended that you opt for micro-influencers. A micro-influencer is a social media content creator who has a smaller following, often ranging between 1,000 and 100,000 users. However, the small number of followers are highly dedicated and engaged on Instagram, and engagement is a more relevant than follower size when it comes to influencer marketing. This is because these influencers organically grow their following vs paying for them, and perform well in a specific niche such as:
- Food
- Consumer goods
- Fashion and
- Travel.
Add to that, the useful features of Instagram such as content, hashtags, and influencer discovery features make it easy for these influencers as well as their communities to communicate and engage in the niche topics. This is why you should use micro-influencers on Instagram to promote your brand. There are also other reasons for it such as:
- They have a more targeted audience
- They are more authentic and credible
- They give more attention to their followers which they have grown one by one
- They work hard to provide the best type of content which resonates with their community
- They are more cost effective
Most importantly, they will deliver higher rate of engagement among the followers and result in more conversions in comparison to big influencers who have less significant engagement and active involvement.
Finding the right partner
Since influencers are your business partners, sort of, you will need to find the right person to partner with to make your partnership more beneficial and long-standing. This can be a bit of a challenge, but with proper research you can easily find one who will match with your needs and set clear and achievable goals for your campaign. You must make a few checks for that matter such as:
- Check their engagement on Instagram
- Check their number of followers
- Check their quality of followers and
- Review the type of content they post.
These little checks will ensure that your posts go viral on social media making your efforts in influencer marketing most productive. Since you will pay much less as compared to macro-influencers, it will be high on ROI as well.
Author Bio –
Kristen Smith has been working on the importance of social media in marketing with thousands of real Instagram followers for her postings.
