Influencer marketing hits its peak on THE social media platform: Instagram. Instagram influencer marketing can really help your brand!
- Why not Facebook which has millions of more daily users? Because people expect to check up on their friends and family on Facebook, not on brands.
- Why not Snapchat which is focused on the younger crowd? Because it’s more of a social platform than a selling platform.
Here are a few stats from influencer marketing on Instagram:
- 49% of people say they rely on influencer recommendations when making a purchase
- 40% of people say that they’ve purchased an item after seeing it used by an influencer on a platform such as Instagram
- 74% of people turn to social networks for guidance on purchase decisions
Additional influencer resources:
Instagram allows influencers to present an ideal lifestyle. The audience can see the feed post by post, or look at it as a whole which is much more appealing to an audience.
Everyone chooses how to do things based on the people around them who have good taste.
- You have a roommate who made an incredible dinner, you get the recipe from them and use it.
- One of your friends is the best dressed out of your friend group, you order clothes from the same clothing boutique that they got their outfit from.
This is how influencers work – we trust the people we know who have great taste in certain subjects. In order to get results from Instagram influencer marketing, you should follow these steps.
1. Choose The Right Kind Of Influencer
If your brand is something like Hello Fresh, a service that sends you boxes of food and recipes to make dinner easy, you don’t want an influencer who has a fashion focus.
Your brand will see more results and more revenue if you find an influencer that matches what your brand is trying to sell.
- If your brand sells only makeup – find an influencer that has a makeup focus.
- If your brand sells clothing online – find an influencer who mainly shops online.
- If you have a brand that caters to a lot of people – find a lifestyle influencer.
Additionally, make sure you like the style the influencer posts in as well.
For example, @elainerau is a travel and lifestyle influencer that likes to pair motivational quotes along with her photography. If you choose to partner with her, you get the original images to repost on your social media, but you must like how she posts on her own page first.
2. Choose An Influencer Your Brand Can Make Money With
It might be tempting to use a mega-influencer like Kim Kardashian, Gigi Hadid, Lauren Bushnell, etc. But if your brand is smaller, do not blow all of your budgeted marketing money on a mega-influencer.
Micro-influencers do work that is pretty close to, if not the same as (or better) than mega-influencers. Find smaller influencers with fewer followers and more engagement to promote your product(s).
Mega-influencers may have more followers, but micro-influencers have an audience that is much more dedicated to them because they seem more tangible and closer to them.
For example, Elaine Rau makes this Red Light Therapy company $3,000+ every single month.
Here are a few reasons why they work so successfully together:
- The brand has an affiliate program and is good at marketing to the people that Elaine sends their way
- They have worked together for almost a year now and both like long term partnerships
- Elaine’s audience LOVES high-tech beauty and has the money to afford it
- They provided her audience with a great incentive, with her promo code VIPLADYBOSS her audience gets a whopping 30% off (an exclusive deal you can’t find anywhere else)
3. Don’t Exhaust Your Audience With The Same Influencer
It’s good to have long term partnerships, but make sure you have a few on rotation. If your brand keeps using the same influencer to make posts once a week over a long period of time, both your audience and the influencer’s audience will get irritated because it’s content that they’ve already seen.
FabFitFun does a really great job of this. They’re a bigger brand so they can afford a few mega-influencers, but FabFitFun is a subscription box that only comes four times a year. So, these influencers can post about the box that they get each season, which doesn’t get annoying to the audience because it’s not constant posts.
For example, if @elainerau were to only promote one restaurant on her trip to Bali, her feed wouldn’t be nearly as interesting and she would lose the attention of her audience.
4. Borrow Your Influencers’ Content
After your influencers have posted about your product, repost it to your brand’s own Instagram page. This will do great things for your brand such as:
- Introduce your brand’s influencers to your audience
- Provide curated content for your brand’s feed
- Strengthen you and your influencer’s relationship by showing that you appreciate their creative content
What @LadyBossIllustrations has done is taken content from @LadyBossBlogger and illustrated the contents as a super creative spin-off of a repost which makes their clients really happy! Find out how to get featured here.
5. Track Your Results
It’s hard to tell if your brand is making money if you’re not tracking your results. It’s a MUST for your brand to track your results from each of your influencers and see how audiences and consumers are responding to influencer marketing.
Tracking your results is also a good idea because you’re able to see where your brand needs to make changes and improvements.
Here are a couple platforms that make it easy for you to track your brand’s results:
-
Grin
- Allows you to import your influencers so they can make a roster for you
- Connects e-commerce, email, and Slack
- Aggregates content, attribute revenue
- Help run campaigns
- Send products, manage payment
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BuzzSumo
- Allows you to enter a URL for a specific site and will give you the amount of engagement that site is receiving
- Allows you to see how well your influencers are doing alone
Follow this advice and you will see major results!
Additional blogs you may like:
- What Is Influencer Marketing And How Can Marketers Use It Effectively?
- 5 Tips That Will Help Your Brand Stand Out
Carly Hancock is a blogging and social media intern at LadyBossBlogger. She is looking forward to having a future in writing or social media. She enjoys learning new things about beauty products and fashion, and Instagram is her favorite social network!
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