February 22, 2023
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Using Instagram as a marketing tool is a surefire way to reach and understand your customers. Instagram has more than 400 million monthly active users, with 80 million photographs uploaded each day. How do you make yourself stand out?
Instagram has a huge community and it’s easy to get lost in the millions of daily posts. There are a number of ways you can organically grow your Instagram followers, such as; Using the right hashtags, high-quality relevant imagery and showing your Instagram feed live on your website. Check our 9 Tips on how to get more Instagram followers first to make sure you are maximising your channel.
Firstly, do you understand what an influencer is? Imagine, you are stood at the bar with your best friend and they recommend the guest beer, or you are on the phone to a relative and they advise you to try a new TV show. In a smaller world, these are influencers, they will encourage you to try brands or product you may not have known about and break your regular habits.
Influential Instagrammers work in a similar way. They have similar interests to their followers and have gained respect and trust from their fans. They become a powerful voice when persuading followers to purchase products as their recommendations are credible. Instagram influencer marketing is when a brand or service collude with a well known and followed Instagrammer to create duel content to promote the brand. The desired outcomes to this can vary from product launches, general awareness or growing the brand's own social following.
So how do you engage influencers in your target market?
Firstly you have to understand your target market. Who are they? What do they like? Where do they shop? Do they follow any of your competitors? Discover who impacts your followers and how they already engage with their favourite brands. Is a customer holding/eating/wearing your product? Share, like, even follow them. Build relationships and engage with your target market as they are influencers themselves to their friends, family and social network connections.
Narrow down who you are targeting, decide on a few niche hashtags that really define the cornerstones of your brand promise. #fashion is saturated, so look for other hashtags that delve deeper into your brand's core values, there are a lot of paid tools that can help you do this research such as Iconosquare.
By investigating and researching you should be able to identify who are the top influencers that engage with your perfect target market. Influencers do not need to be celebrities, pro-athletes or models. They can be stay at home mothers who have great tips for entertaining bored children or home bakers who know how to dial down the calories. Select whose lifestyle and values best represent your brand and customers.
If you think you have found the perfect influencer, monitor their Instagram activity. How often do they post? What style is their content? Do they work with any other brands? Start to engage them, favourite a few posts and follow their future adventures. If you are looking for wider exposure, try to focus on 10 accounts, preferably with 100,000 followers or more to maximise your efforts. Influencers who are open to working with brands will have obvious contact details or instruction of how to contact them in their bio. Some Instagrammers will also have agents who negotiate any terms of a collaboration, so be prepared to deal with a third party.
Different influencers will have different pricing structures, there is no one size fits all. There is a great, if scathing, article here, Confessions of a Social Media Exec, it gives an idea of how much to pay influencers and the different types of negotiations and collaborations. Smaller accounts may just be happy with a free version of the product, others will charge a fee per post. Make sure you negotiate all rights to the images post promotion, these can be a great addition to your website as the content is usually exceptional quality.
If you have a number of influencer campaigns live, consider setting up a specialised landing page or using a discount code so you can how much impact hiring an influencer has on your revenue. Measuring your data is essential and having something tangible and trackable will help guide your future influencer campaigns.
There are several ways of co-creating content for an Instagram marketing campaign. One way is to supply the creative yourself. This can look slightly out of place if your message is very sales based, it needs to look natural and in line with the influencers lifestyle. Another way is to supply the influencer with your product and have them use it/eat it/wear it for one of their posts. Yet another way is for you to appear in the influencers post with them, either via shout out or physically in the picture (location and product dependent). Figure out what sends the best message for your product and brand.
Instagram's audience is known for being young, internet aware and eager to express their public passion for brands and products they like. However this level of engagement demands authenticity. Here below are a few great examples of Instagram influencer marketing campaigns.
Old Spice has become renowned for its humour and off-the-wall messaging. This campaign saw them connecting with health and exercise conscious consumers by offering prizes for submitting pictures of their exercise route (aerial view in the shape of the prize). This included user generated content and engaging Logan Paul (his Instagram is here) and several other prevalent Instagrammers. Logan Paul is known for his funny and health conscious content that fit directly with the brand's campaign
Chanel engaged influencers to promote the launch of the new Chanel No. 5 L’Eau. Their target was the top fashion Instagrammers and their campaign centred around inviting them to the Chanel flower fields in Grasse, France. The result was 1600 pieces of content, both influencer and user generated and estimated exposure totalled to 9 million people.
This is a great example of using an influencer simply by they using or wearing your product. Jennifer Lawrence appeared at the Mockingjay Part II premiere wearing a Dior dress. In a few days, Dior’s Instagram post had received 131,000 likes and over 1,100 comments.
Hopefully, these examples show you the importance of engagement and the value of user generated content paired with the reach of Instagram influencers. You can engage with us on Instagram by following @wemakewebsites_
