Instagram influencer marketing is a concept where a brand leverages an Instagram influencer’s reach and authority to increase its visibility, share its messaging, and build brand awareness.
Instagram is among the best platforms for influencer marketing. As per a survey by Statista in 2018, 78% of social influencers use Instagram for brand collaboration worldwide.
Here are the six best Instagram influencer marketing strategies to grow your business:
Strategy #1- Identify Your Audience
Before you start looking for influencers who will help you connect with your target audience, you need to be clear who your target audience is.
Create buyer personas. First, define your product and its features. Also, define your audience’s needs.
Second, look into your competitor’s Instagram audience. Check the type of followers they have and the type of posts they are publishing.
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You can use Phlanx Influencer Auditor too to analyze your competitors. Enter your competitor’s Instagram handle in the tool, and it will generate a comprehensive audit report. Include demographic and psychographic segmentation.
Use Instagram Stories polls to ask relevant questions that can help you understand your audience better and will improve your Instagram targeting.
For example, the audience of National Geographic is travel-focused. It uses Instagram stories polls to find attractive destinations as per its followers. This helps the National Geographic team to have a better idea of the kind of content that is more engaging.
The buyer persona should outline specific details about who you want to connect with through your Instagram influencer marketing campaign. It will be easier to identify the influencers that you should reach out to, once you have clarity about your target audience.
Strategy #2- Search the Right Influencer
When looking for influencers, focus on their resonance, their reach, and their relevance.
Focus on the type of influencers you want to reach.
Influencers can be categorized into four types: Nano-influencers, Micro-influencers, Macro-influencers, or Mega-influencers.
Nano-influencers have around 1,000 to 5,000 followers on Instagram, and micro-influencers have between 5,000 to 50,000 followers.
Macro-influencers have over 1,00,000 followers, and mega-influencers are generally media stars who have more than 1 million followers.
Reaching out to Nano-influencers is best when you are just starting your business, as it would be difficult to catch the attention of big influencers in the initial phase.
If you are already successful in building a decent following, then you should reach out to micro as well as macro-influencers. If you are a big name, a brand well known in the public eye such as Nike or Puma, then your main focus should be on Mega influencers.
For example, if you are someone who manufactures and sells running shoes, then you can reach to marathon runners or even to various sportspersons such as Usain Bolt as he is a mega-influencer.
Look at their stats to understand their impact on the platform, and their audience engagement level. Look through their comments to check the quality of the engagement. If these influencers can generate real conversations through their posts, they are probably worth partnering with.
Strategy #3- Set Your Budget
Before designing your campaign, plan your budget to avoid unnecessary costs.
Nowadays, influencers range from well-known celebrities to everyday users on Instagram. Thus, the cost of working with influencers will vary as per their followers’ size and the sector in which the influencer specializes.
When considering Instagram for influence marketing, it is a very cost-effective platform. Influencers on Instagram charge an average of $10 a post, per 1000 followers.
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As per a report by Influence.co, Influencers with less than 2,000 followers can charge around $124 per Instagram post. It may increase to $258 per Instagram post for Influencers with around 75,000 to 100,000 followers. If the number of followers of an influencer is over a million, then the influencer might charge more than $1,400 per sponsored Instagram post.
For example, Virat Kohli earns an eye-watering Rs 3.2 crore (500,000 Pounds) per post.
Strategy #4- Design Your Campaign
Broadly, there are four types of campaigns. These are product placement, brand ambassador, hashtag campaign, and affiliate marketing campaign. Choose the type of campaign you want to provide to your selected influencers.
In product placement campaigns, brands seed their products within influencer’s content. For example, influencers styling a t-shirt that the brand has sent and posting it on their Instagram.
Brand ambassadors are usually those influencers who regularly post content for a brand. For example, Priyanka Chopra is the goodwill brand ambassador of UNICEF who usually posts about her work for UNICEF.
In the hashtag influencer campaign, brands look for influencers who have an engaged audience and get them to share about the specific topic using the hashtags they have predefined.
For example, McDonald’s defined a hashtag #EggMcMuffinDay for one of its new meal and reached influencers to promote it on their Instagram accounts.
In an affiliate compensation campaign, an influencer makes a commission by using affiliate links for a particular brand.
Choose any of the above types of Instagram influencer marketing campaigns and set guidelines for influencers around the type of content that you expect to be created and promoted.
Strategy #5- Connect with Selected Influencers
Once you are clear who you want to reach, then determine how you will reach out to them.
Related: Learn The Top Instagram Marketing Skills
Generally, micro-influencers are likely to manage themselves, so you can engage with their content on Instagram by following them, reposting their posts, or commenting on their posts.
You can also reach out directly in a private message on Instagram.
If you’re looking at a big influencer, you can click around their profile, and they may list contact information for business inquiries in their bio. They will probably have an agency that manages their campaign requests.
When reaching out to these agencies, ask for the influencer’s rate card. Brief them about your brand and the campaign. Try to have a detailed discussion about budget, the type of content, number of posts, etc. to fulfill expectations on both sides of the collaboration.
Strategy #6- Track and Optimize Your Campaign and Result
Examine your campaign by analyzing the numbers, like engagement and click-throughs. Try to measure the key performance indicators such as the number of comments that were generated due to an influencer posting on their social account, the total number of followers that commented on the influencers promoted post and traffic flow to your account from an influencer posting.
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To track the performance, you can ask influencers to share Bitly links. Bitly helps to shorten the URLs and track traffic from Instagram. You can put the link in the caption or bio of your Instagram. You can compare the channel success, paid, and organic content for any influencer campaign.
You can track your follower growth with Instagram Insights, which is a free analytical tool of Instagram. This will show how your Instagram account performs. You can see the total impressions and the change from the previous week. You can use Pixlee, which provides a weekly report showing last week’s Instagram usage. It also offers hashtag statistics and tracking.
Final Thoughts
Instagram is one of the best engaging social media platforms that provide a way for your business to expand its reach. And, to reach your audience, you can use the tips and tools mentioned above to create an influencer marketing strategy for Instagram.
