Your Guide to Influencer Marketing on Instagram

With more than 800 million monthly active users, Instagram is the new go-to social networking platform for brands to reach their targeted audience, and influencer marketing offers just the way to do that. An influencer on Instagram is one who can convince their Instagram followers because of their credibility.
Influencers on Instagram already have an engaged audience of real Instagram followers, and they can get their Instagram followers interested in your brand. It’s a great way for brands to build brand awareness, increase sales, and accelerate business growth. Using influencer marketing, you can see a growth in the number of Instagram followers and Instagram likes your brand receives simply because the source is a trusted one, and the interaction happens on a genuine, casual platform such as Instagram.
Instead of spending heavily on conventional ads and marketing campaigns, you can get a lot more engagement through the use of engaging as well as authentic influencer’s voice to target the right users.

Pros of influencer marketing on Instagram

It’s a niche

Instagram followers can connect with niche content that’s in their interest area through hashtags, the Explore page, and thanks to the functioning of the Instagram algorithm. Branded hashtags for raising awareness or certain campaigns can help users to connect with what interests them while helping you experience business growth. Getting onto the Explore page with the help of an influencer can help you gain more Instagram followers and raise awareness for your own brand. The algorithm on Instagram ensures users see content that they’re more likely to be interested in, and since an influencer generally tends to work within a particular niche, it’s a great way for your brand to get noticed.

It provides an organic platform

With Stories, Live, and feed posts of high quality, Instagram followers have an organic way to engage with the content posted by influencers. Shoppable posts, product tags, and links for certain accounts have made it possible to experience growth in sales through Instagram posts.

It’s personal

The biggest advantage of influencer marketing is that you get to tap into the influencer’s Instagram followers purely based on the personal relationship created between them. Getting recommended by an influencer provides a stamp of approval to all their Instagram followers for your brand, and that kind of loyalty is hard to replicate through traditional advertising.

Types of Instagram influencers

Knowing about the different types of influencers on Instagram can help you make decisions about your marketing strategy based on their relevance, your budget, and your brand’s requirement.

Nano-influencers

Nano-influencers are those who have fewer than 10,000 Instagram followers and may resemble people like your friends and family. They offer authenticity in their interactions with their following, which may be a small but niche community. They’re also more cost-effective, which means you’ll get greater ROI.

Micro-influencers

Micro-influencers are those with less than 100,000 Instagram followers and they tend to be industry experts or topic specialists for a particular niche, giving you access to a focused audience.

Macro-influencers

Macro-influencers are those with Instagram followers between 100,000 and 1 million whose full-time job may be influencer marketing.

Mega-influencers

Mega-influencers, generally celebrities and public figures, have over 1 million Instagram followers.

Getting ready for influencer marketing on Instagram

Specify your goals and KPIs

Knowing what you want your influencer marketing efforts to result in is crucial before you get started, as everything about the rest of your campaign should be determined based on the goal you want to achieve. Even the performance metrics you will be used depending on the goals you decide upon at the beginning of your campaign efforts. You may have different goals for your brand depending on how it’s currently performing, which may include:

• Boosting reach and brand visibility
• Growing your base of Instagram followers
• Driving brand engagement
• Driving traffic to your website
• Promoting new product launches
• Promoting growth in sales

Setting KPIs will provide you with a means to keep a check on how your campaign is performing.

Aspects to consider when selecting the right influencer

Brand fit

In order for the influencer to be a credible and authentic voice for your brand, they need to fit well with your brand. Spend time on figuring out their niche from their posts and stories, while also checking out the comments section of their posts to see the type of conversations that results from their content.

Reach

Choosing the right influencer based on their reach depends on your goals. If you just want to create brand awareness, a top tier influencer would be the best choice, but if your goal is to drive engagement for your brand, a micro influencer will work better.

Engagement

Real Instagram followers help to drive up engagement rates, so be sure to check engagement rates on posts of potential influencers so that you can ensure greater ROI.

Voice

What personality do you want to be associated with your brand? Are you looking for an influencer with a more serious voice, or a casual / friendly voice? Do you want an influencer who can pack in a good sense of humor? Select an influencer based on the voice you think would best suit your brand.

Sponsors in the past

When you look into who an influencer has partnered with in the past, you’ll get a better understanding of how those campaigns performed, which will help you get an idea of what partnering with them will be like for your brand.

Love for your brand

Influencers who genuinely love your brand are likely to be more convincing in promoting your products to their Instagram followers than those who are doing it just because of an agreement.

Of course, you’ll also have to keep budget considerations in mind when selecting the right influencer for your brand.

Tools to find the right influencer

Some great influencer marketing tools that you can use to find relevant influencers include:

• Influence.co
• BuzzWeb
• Ninja Outreach
• BuzzSumo
• CreatorIQ
• Awario
• Klear
• BuzzStream
• Traackr
• Upfluence
• Hypr
• rewardStyle
• AspireIQ
• Julius
• Collectively
• NeoReach
• Open Influence
• Scrunch
• Hypetap
• Dovetale
• Takumi
• Onalytica
• Tapinfluence
• Tribe
• Famebit

Deciding a collaboration structure

• Deadlines for the campaign timeframe must be clearly communicated.
• Specify the kind of content you want them to produce and where on Instagram you want them to promote your brand (Stories, feed posts).
• Be clear about content usage rights if you’re planning to use the content for your social media posts or website testimonials, with the influencer retaining ownership.
• Make sure compensation has been clearly communicated to them, which may be in the form of free product compensation, paid compensation, or affiliate compensation. Clearly specify if a flat rate will be paid per post or payment will be based on the performance of the post. Compensation decisions need to take into consideration the level of complexity involved in the production, agency fees, travel expenses, as well as usage rights.
• Make sure you and the influencer you’re working with follow the FTC regulations for sponsored posts through a proper disclosure of all sponsored posts.

Choose the best type of campaign

Once you’ve decided on everything else up until this point, you need to choose the best type of campaign that can work for your brand and Instagram influencer from among the following:

Sponsored posts

Sponsored posts require you to pay an influencer to promote a particular product, followed by the hashtag #sponsored. Influencers can either feature your product through their content or even use it to tell a full story, depending on the agreement made.

Branded content

Branded content aims at subtly, including your product as part of the normal content of the influencer without coming across as pushy. You can also include influencers in your branded content which is created and published by you. Using branded content is a great idea when you want to target a new audience or promote the launch of a new product.

Contests

Sending products to an influencer to run giveaways is great for engaging a new audience, building awareness of your brand, and gaining more Instagram followers and Instagram likes.

Product reviews

If you want to build trust, see growth in conversion rates, or build awareness for your brand, getting an influencer to review your products is the best way to go. Unbiased, objective reviews of your products can help to build trust in your brand and help you gain more Instagram followers.

Influencer takeovers

Influencer takeovers of your account for 24 hours can get Instagram followers excited about the content being posted and drive up engagement rates for your brand.

Brand rep programs

You can even provide influencers with a code or custom discount link to share with their audience and pay a percentage from the conversions they help to generate. Such a campaign is helpful in building brand awareness and increase sales conversions.

Tracking campaign results

You need to check if your campaign has achieved its objective by tracking the outcome from the campaign. Metrics that you’ll have to track to measure campaign success include:

• Engagement – Instagram likes, shares, comments
• Brand sentiment
• Website traffic generated from the campaign
• Sales – conversions and revenues
• Effect on the number of Instagram followers

Besides tracking metrics, assess the relationship of working with the influencer to determine if a future partnership is worth it.

You can now go about planning your influencer marketing campaign to ensure your brand receives maximum benefit from it.