A Guide to Instagram Marketing With the Help of Influencers
We will explain to you how Instagram influence marketing can help spread the image of your brand, i.e. build brand awareness. Also, in this text, we will reveal to you who the influencers on Instagram are and how to find the right ones to advertise your brand.
So, it is no secret that Instagram is an extremely popular social network (it is in the top five) just as it is no secret that influencers on this network make good money. Furthermore, they can also help you (if you own a business) to earn more. Therefore, there is no doubt that Instagram marketing is something you should definitely try.
How to Advertise on Instagram With the Help of Influencers?
There are several ways to do this but two are basic:
- You can (and should) have your Instagram page, gather people around it, and post videos and photos about your brand.
- You can also use others to talk about you (which is the so-called word-of-mouth strategy on which Influence marketing is based).
A lot of expert articles have already been written about advertising on Instagram in this first way: create a profile, build a community, post photos, boost some posts… Now we want to explain to you what Influence marketing is, with a special focus on Instagram (although you can basically apply the same tricks on other social networks).
It is true that Instagram is mostly used by younger generations but the fact is that more and more people are starting to use it. And where there are customers, there should be you with your brand and your products or services. This is one of the good marketing strategies for startups but also for everyone else. Instagram is a visual network and image and video formats are the basic formats of posting. However, the most important thing is that it is a social network. People connect through it, and people are the ones who buy your products.
So, how else to advertise on Instagram? Well, let’s say the solution is in this – let them talk about you. And for that very purpose, hire Instagram influencers.
Who Are the Influencers?
Instagram influencers are users of this social network who have a broad audience on Instagram and who are able to influence the people who follow them and their decisions with their posts. The name itself comes from the word influence. The logic is clear.
And how do advertising and sales work with the help of influencers? They can help build a mass audience in a relatively short amount of time and expand the story of your brand. But not only that – they can help you make more sales. Influencers can be divided into 4 categories:
- celebrities – over a million followers
- macro-influencers – about a million followers
- medium influencers – about 100,000 followers
- micro-influencers – up to 10,000 followers
When choosing influencers on Instagram to promote your brand, it is generally a good idea to follow this tip: avoid those who have a lot of followers and who advertise just about everything – from dietary supplements to baby diapers. With them, the advertisement has already become obvious. It is best to find someone who deals with your niche. So, if you are selling baby diapers, then find someone who deals with parenting and so on. In this way, you target an audience interested in your product.
Influencer-Assisted Marketing
Why is advertising through influencers a growing trend? Today, it has become commonplace for consumers to seek online information and experiences about a product before buying it. That is why user experiences, testimonials, ratings, etc. are becoming increasingly important. Advertising has long been not a story about product characteristics but a story about end-user satisfaction. Internet marketing tactics are constantly improving and need to be re-learned.
When you start with Internet marketing, Instagram marketing is only one part of the story. Influencers play an important role here because people would rather buy a product if it is recommended by a celebrity than just based on ordinary advertising. Ads don’t make sales, positive experiences and customer satisfaction make sales. And if we keep in mind that people prefer visual content to written content, then advertising with Instagram influencers is the right thing to do.
But the best is yet to come…
Who Are Micro-Influencers and Why Is It Good to Hire Them
Micro-influencers are a special type of influencers. While the bigger influencers belong to some elite and the famous people and celebrities, who live a high life (or at least pretend to live it), are not close to an ordinary person, micro-influencers are ordinary people. They lead a normal, regular, everyday life and have real problems. They appear as average persons, those who may become buyers of your products.
Micro-influencers are first and foremost people to whom the audience can more easily relate. When they recommend a product or service, it then appears as an ordinary recommendation of an ordinary person. It doesn’t look like an advertisement. And then the effects are better.
Why should you hire micro-influencers when these bigger ones have more followers? First of all, the engagement rate is much better with posts that are shared by the micro-influencer. In other words, that means they have more likes and comments on the posts. Secondly, this can be a relatively cost-effective way to promote your product. Big Instagram influencers can ask a lot of money for their posts. Micro-influencers are much cheaper and the effect (provided you find the right person) can be very beneficial.
But that is not all…
Some studies that have been done have found that the engagement rate on Instagram is dropping as the number of followers increases. In other words, influencers with a smaller number of followers, i.e. micro-influencers, have a higher engagement rate than those who have many followers. What does that practically mean? A post that is posted by a micro-influencer will be seen by a higher percentage of his followers than one that is posted by an influencer with a million or more followers.
What is the tactic then? Here is an example: Let’s say that an influencer who has over 100,000 followers asks you for $1,000 for a post and that his engagement rate is 3 %. It means that 3,000 people will react to his post. Let’s now say that micro-influencers who have up to 10,000 followers have an engagement rate of 5 % (because we said it is bigger in influencers with fewer followers). His post will be seen by 500 people. But the micro-influencer is asking for less money to publish. Make it $ 100. For a $ 1,000 budget you set aside for a big influencer, you can hire 10 micro-influencers and your ad will be seen by 5,000 people for the same money.
Famous people and celebrities have long been used in commercials, even on TV. And everybody already knows what advertising is. However, when something is recommended by an ordinary person in the form of a micro-influencer, the post will not act as an advertisement but as a friend’s recommendation, so the chances of conversions are higher. The result? The ratio between what is invested and what is gained is positive, and that is what you need. People buy four times more when they get a recommendation from a friend.
Where to Find Influencers?
There are two ways to do this. One is to do it with the help of some online tool that will give you statistics about the influencers. For example, try influence.co to get started. Here you can find suitable marketing people based on your product category and the country in which you operate with the help of Instagram influencers: data on the number of followers, engagement rate, in some cases even the price they ask for posting right away, contact information, etc. There are more of these tools on the Internet, such as Upfluence and many others, so choose the one that suits you.
Another way to find influencers is to search manually:
- See among your followers (if you have, and should have, an Instagram profile for your brand)
- Type in a hashtag with your brand name and see who the people who mention you are and how they talk about you
- Search for keywords related to your brand. Choose specific hashtags and keywords that your audience might be interested in and find influencer posts that have the most likes and comments.
And then…
- Check their engagement rate. When this indicator is high, it means that their followers carefully follow what they are doing and react to their content, and like and comment on it. Over 10 % is a great engagement rate.
- Check how many people follow them and what their audiences are like.
- Check their posts and whether they regularly publish quality posts in your niche and whether and how the audience reacts to them.
- Take a good look at the comments. Do people get emotionally involved in their posts or just leave the generic “cool photo” or hit the ‘heart’.
This is perhaps the hardest and most arduous way to find influencers. It will take you a lot of time but believe us, in the end, this kind of analysis can pay off well. If you choose the wrong influencers, then influence marketing is a pure expense to you. When you find the right influencers, what kind of campaign to run?
Make a Long-Term Cooperation – Brand Ambassador
While you can hire several influencers to advertise the same thing, it is a good strategy to find someone with whom you will have a longer collaboration and who will be the ambassador of your brand. Why? If Instagram followers see that a certain person often recommends your product, it will seem more relevant to them and they will trust that product more.
Now, it would be good not to limit their creativity but to let them know what kind of image of your brand you want to send. Also, it would be good to immediately distinguish whether you can use images and posts for other purposes and in other places – on the website (if you wonder how to build a website – we recommend two most common methods: through WordPress or website builders), blog, or similar. Next is to create a successful campaign on Instagram. There are several types of campaigns you can work with influencers and micro-influencers:
- Sponsored post – you can arrange with the influencer to sponsor a post in which he/she mentions your product. This spreads the story of the brand.
- Competition – a type of promotion in which you send free products to influencers so that they can organize a competition. This is a great way to start rumors about your brand and find new audiences or potential end-users of your product.
- Branded content – which would briefly include a post posted by you (image or video) but includes an influencer. Let’s say he or she records a video of how they use your product and you post it on your page. This type of promotion is good for gathering new customers.
- Product review or analysis – a type of promotion in which the influencer informs the audience in detail about your product: what it is, what it is like, what the experiences are, where it can be obtained. This type of campaign is great for those who want to raise brand awareness, build trust, but also for conversions.
- You can ask micro-influencers to tag your product, so reward the most successful (make a prize game out of your own promotion).
How to Measure the Success of Advertising With the Help of Influencers?
It depends on what the marketing goal was, but here are the metrics:
- by number of comments, shares, likes
- by how people talk about your brand
- by the number of people who visited your site after the ad
- by conversions
It is a good tactic to use some URL shortener such as Bitly which the influencer will insert into his profile bio so that you can keep track of how many people came from it to your site, how many of them bought the product, and more. Influencer-assisted marketing is a great tactic for startup projects that initially have a limited marketing budget.
As you can see – there are plenty of reasons to try it. There are a lot of influencers – you just need to find the right one. Micro-influencers are very profitable and with them, you can get good advertising at a good price. And if you hire a few of them that the audience overlaps with – you get the effect that your product is talked about by everyone. A word-of-mouth advertisement is the best advertisement.
