Looking for some actionable way for increasing your brand awareness? You might be familiar with the term digital marketing before, but here comes a more realistic and less effort-requiring approach towards how one can market their brand easily and effectively.
This approach is known as Instagram Influencer Marketing. If you’re a complete beginner to this term, this article can help you have a clear idea of it plus how you can get started with this type of marketing campaign on Instagram through a complete step-by-step guide.
What is Instagram Influencer Marketing?
Instagram is a social media platform that can help brands in finding out and reaching their target audience. They can easily target the audience they’re looking for by marketing their content using Influencers on Instagram.
If you’ve spent even a few minutes on Instagram, you might’ve come across such Influencers who are promoting a product on their channel. It can be either through Instagram posts or the stories shared on their profiles.
Instagram Influencers are a great source for promoting a brand as they’ve got an audience of almost every taste.
Types of marketing campaigns
There are a few popular campaigns that you can ask your influencer to run on his blog. The rates may also vary for each campaign depending upon many factors, mainly the type of campaign. Other factors include which strategy is being used by the influencer and your demand such as;
- Instagram story
- Instagram post
- Instagram video post
- Instagram Profile Image
- Instagram post description or bio
However, here are the types of marketing campaigns you can choose from;
Ø Product Review:
This campaign is run by providing a product of our brand to the ideal influencer and asking them to review it. This can either be done through an Instagram story or a post/video based on what you’d desire.
The influencer reviews your product and gives his opinion and a CTA (Call-to-action) at the end. You can also set a specific discount on the product getting reviewed by your ideal influencer by providing him a PROMO CODE or some other CTA.
Ø Sponsored Post:
This type of campaign is run by paying the influencer to market your product through sponsored or on-demand content. The influencer showcases your product in his posts or stories or directly markets it based on your desire.
Ø Branded Content:
This is the type of campaign that is run by you but supported by an influencer. You create and publish the content about your brand or product featuring your ideal influencer in it. The influencer may also share this on his Instagram channel to make them watch the branded content. This type of campaign is used for brand awareness or attracting a new audience to the existing brand.
Ø Ambassadorship or Brand Representative Campaign:
This campaign is used for acquiring a large audience for our brand or product. An Influencer plays the role of a brand ambassador or brand representative. His audience automatically gravitates towards the brand he is representing which helps in driving more traffic and engagement. You can also set up a discount link or PROMO CODE that will serve as a Call To Action for the audience.
Ø Contests and Challenges:
Nothing is more engagement driving than the contest campaigns. This is for the fact that the audience easily gets driven by any challenge or a contest announced by an influencer on his channel. Create a contest and ask the influencer to share it with his audience. Set some lucrative rewards in it. The rest will be done by the audience itself.
This type of campaign is also used for driving the audience to a new brand and boosting the retention rate and engagement as well.
Why you should go for it
Marketing done by the influencers on this platform is different from other traditional advertisement campaigns. This is for the fact that an influencer has developed a bond with their audience on Instagram. They trust what the influencer shares or gives an opinion about.
That is the reason why the engagement of the target audience is greater than the traditional advertising campaigns on other social media platforms. The target is the same either way and that’s to find a real audience what our brand is looking for, but the result varies.
Marketing our brand’s product by an Instagram Influencer increases the engagement rate because the audience has built trust in the influencer so they’re eager to follow what the influencer shares or suggests.
So the three major benefits of using influencers for promoting our brand are;
- Higher audience engagement rate
- Massive reach
- Maximum leads and clickthroughs
Now that you’re well aware of the term, let’s dive into the ultimate 6 step guide to the process.
1. Setting up your Budget
The first and foremost thing to do before going for any campaign is to recognize our marketing cost. Just like other advertising campaigns, the costs also vary here depending upon the followership, engagement, and size of a particular influencer’s channel or blog.
Some influencers may also charge more or less based on the type of content they produce and their audience’s engagement rate. As per influence.co, influencer’s rates increase as their size (and audience) increases.
Though Instagram marketing isn’t costly as you’re able to negotiate and fix a good rate with an influencer unlike traditional advertising, you must set your marketing budget and make plans accordingly.
2. Finding the Right Influencers
Now that you’re well aware of the rates and stuff and have set up your marketing budget, the primary step is to find the right influencers for our brand. This is one of the crucial and challenging steps though.
This thing can however be accomplished by hiring a Freelancer as well. Going to some freelance marketplace like Fiverr or Upwork and searching for someone who does this for your brand eases the job.
Most freelancers also provide much additional information about the influencer which helps us proceed more effectively.
However, if you want to do it yourself, you need to overcome this challenge by being clear about what you’re searching for. Think of your brand and the marketing campaign you want to achieve and figure out what you’d like to see in your ideal influencer. This will significantly ease the job by lessening the amount of effort you had to put in if you were unclear about your target.
Here are some helpful tips regarding your search for the right Instagram influencer:
- your budget
- engagement rate of target audience you want on your brand
- relevant influencer as per your brand
- good reach of the influencer
- creativity and engagement on the influencer’s blog
3. Searching for the Right Hashtags
This step can however be also a part of the influencer search discussed above. Searching for the right and relevant hashtags eases the job significantly by narrowing down the search.
Think of your brand and the type of product you want to use in the marketing campaign, and figure out the keywords that you’d like to search on Instagram.
On getting the hashtags that are relevant to your marketing campaign the type of product you want to be promoted, you will easily find out your ideal influencer as well. This is how this step can be merged in the one discussed above.
Here are a few tips that can help in finding the right and relevant hashtags;
- conduct research about your product to find relevant products and results
- search for relevant influencers by mentioning your product, for example, if you have a beauty product, search for a beauty blogger or a fashion blogger, or a makeup artist.
- research on google to find relevant results and hashtags, some hashtag generators can minimize this effort of researching
4. Using the Right Tools
By using the right tools for finding out influencers, you can minimize a lot of effort getting wasted in searching. There are a bunch of tools that you can make use of to find the ideal influencers for your marketing campaign.
All you need to do is to search for your keyword to get a list of relevant influencers out there on Instagram. Some of the very useful tools that do this job effectively include;
These tools play a brilliant role in not only finding the right influencer but also in finding the relevant content for our product or brand, thus the whole process of research becomes a piece of cake.
Influence.co is a free tool that can also help you filter the results based on the location and the followership of the influencer. This will do magic when you can set your desired follower count and location to find a perfect influencer for promoting your brand or product. This will ultimately decrease the overall cost and will enhance the campaign success rate as well.
BuzzWeb also does a great job in finding out your ideal influencer from the vast sea of over 100,000 influencers. You can then analyze their follower count and engagement for grabbing the perfect fit for your marketing campaign.
5. Approaching the Influencer
Now that you got sufficient knowledge about how you can easily and effectively find out an ideal influencer for promoting your brand or product, the final step that comes is approaching and communicating with the influencer.
At this moment, you might have found out the influencer’s contact info like an email address or any other one-to-one contact source. Approach the influencer with a greeting and by letting him know how and where did you find him, followed by your brand/product’s basic info.
Keep the details of the influencer’s blog alongside and try to be negotiating in your approach if the deal seems to be progressing.
6. Tracking your Success Rate
The biggest challenge after getting done with marketing and running campaigns is how a brand can track its success rate in this type of marketing. However, it is equally important to measure our ROI (Return Of Investment) to analyze whether the campaign went successful or not.
As per later.com, almost 79% of the businesses measure the success rate of their marketing campaigns by tracking the number of conversions they get. But, that is indeed unrealistic and hectic at the same time to track every single conversion we receive.
Campaign URL Builder Tools
Although the businesses track it through other factors like traffic, conversions, and sales, you can also set up a conversion tracking system. This is achieved by designing an affiliate link for your campaign and marketing the whole thing through that link to easily track conversions.
You can find many affiliate link-building tools on the web which do the job. Search for the term “Campaign URL Builder tool” and you will find a bunch of them. Use the one which suits your campaign the best.
However, here is a list of some of the Campaign URL Builder tools;
- Campaign URL Builder by Google Analytics Dev-Tools
- Campaign URL Builder by Tilda
- URL Builder by Facebook
- Online UTM Tracking Code Builder
- Campaign URL Builder by GoSquared
- Utmbuilder.net
- URL Builder by matomo
The process of building a campaign tracking URL is pretty simple. Most of the campaign URL builders ask for the following information about the campaign to generate a tracking link;
- Campaign (like, Sales, promotion, etc.)
- Website URL
- Campaign Source (like Facebook, Instagram, etc.)
- Campaign Medium (like email, social media, etc.)
- Campaign Headline (or Call To Action)
- UTM Term (or keywords for your paid campaign)
Conclusion
Promoting something through an Instagram Influencer is probably the most realistic approach towards a marketing campaign as compared to the traditional advertising campaigns which the users usually dislike (when they see ads on any platform).
An influencer is a perfect source for marketing your product or brand, for either getting more conversions and sales or brand awareness.
CTA is a big game-changer. You must have some Call To Action for the audience that can urge them to buy your product.
A successful marketing campaign is the one that drives higher engagement, audience retention, sales, and conversions to a product.
- References:
- Beginner’ Guide to Influencer Marketing on Instagram:
https://influencermarketinghub.com/influencer-marketing-instagram/#:~:text=How%20many%20followers%20do%20you,300%20sponsored%20posts%20or%20more. - A Simple Guide to Instagram Influencer Marketing in 2021:
https://www.hopperhq.com/blog/instagram-influencer-marketing/ - A Comprehensive Guide to Instagram Influencer Marketing:
https://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-strategy/guide-to-instagram-influencer-marketing-2/ - The Ultimate Guide to Instagram Influencer Marketing:
https://later.com/blog/instagram-influencer-marketing#track
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