Instagram influencer marketing succeeds primarily because influencers personally connect with their target audiences.
On Instagram, brand ambassadors help you to create a trustworthy and successful brand image. Honestly, brands have no idea how much their influencers and followers communicate.
Influencers may be assigned to work on a specific post, but they are also required to answer follower questions and encourage them to shop your brand.
Before jumping into Instagram marketing campaigns, its critical to identify your right social media platform for your brand promotion. To find out which platform best suits for your brand promotions, read the below article;
Ways to Identify right social media platform for your brand promotions
“Influencer marketing is most effective when it is backed by a real, authentic, and engaged relationship.”
Your brand campaign needs a strategic approach to find the right Instagram influencer.
5 Steps to a Successful Instagram Marketing Campaign
1. Identify Instagram marketing objectives for each influencer campaign
Your goals may include:
- Building brand awareness
- Growing brand followers
- Generating leads
- To increase CTR
- In order to drive more traffic
- To generate more revenue
2. Instagram Marketing: Steps in finding relevant influencers
Following factors and metrics play a significant role in identifying the ideal Instagram influencer for your brand.
- Brand Fit
The following pointers will help you determine whether an influencer fits your brand or not:
- Check influencers’ posts and stories to determine their niche.
- Find out what they often discuss on Instagram.
- By looking at the comments section of the influencer’s content, you can learn what topics spark conversation.
Engagement rate
Number of followers is no longer the most relevant metric when it comes to choosing influencers. Recently, brands have become more interested in measuring engagement rates.
Example: Assume that your brand sells vegan food. A vegan influencer or someone who speaks about the benefits of a vegan diet or how to use vegan products is the ideal partner.
An influencer’s engagement rate is calculated as the total of their likes, comments, and shares for a post divided by the number of followers they have.
Past sponsorships
Have they partnered with anyone before? Would you consider them to be competitors? Any alternate brands?
Analyzing past sponsors will give you an idea of how your partnership could fare and give you an idea of how similar campaigns performed.
Clear Communication
Consider how an influencer communicates before pitching an influencer marketing campaign. What is their response time? Is it quick or do you have to wait days to get a response?
Love for your brand
It is important to partner with an influencer who is creative, authentic, and passionate about your brand.
3. Pitch Your Idea with Instagram Influencers
The collaboration pitch must be sent to influencers once you’ve shortlisted your influencers. It is not wise to pitch your idea right away.
Three ways brands can reward influencers are as follows:
- By offering free products
- In an affordable fixed price range, or
- Using affiliates (each conversion-based commission).
4. Plan & Craft Your Campaign Strategy
After the decision has been made to utilize Instagram influencer marketing, you will have to design your campaign.
Be sure to involve your influencers in the planning process, so they can contribute their ideas as well. Influencers know their followings best, so they should be included in the planning phase.
5. Analyze campaign performance and optimize it
To optimize your Instagram influencer marketing campaign, you must track and evaluate your results. You will gain a better understanding of your situation and how to achieve your Instagram marketing goals.
This will allow you to learn what needs to be changed for your Instagram influencer marketing campaign to make it more effective. Also, you might consider doing some A/B testing to see which parameters are most effective for your brands’ influencer marketing campaigns on Instagram.
Negotiating with Instagram influencers: A real-life example
We have an upcoming campaign for our coffee category that we wish to outsource to relevant influencers. Relevant meaning influencers that have the followership of our target segment. Therefore, the first question after introducing our idea would be to ask,
Please tell us about your Instagram followers
We would be looking at answers that provide us insight into demographics such as age, location, device, and gender. Along with earlier defined, we will ask for psychographic details such as preferences, choices, brands they follow, interests.
A good influencer will provide these details as they understand their followership. However, there can be those that are just lucky.
Taking a closer look at their previous paid partnerships and the industry to see if the partnership is relevant
Another hack would be to see which products they are talking about and which industry they operate in. For instance, if they are talking about high end products for skincare, they are probably relevant to our brand.
Marketing/campaign objectives must be aligned
We will also be required to define our goals for the campaign, i.e., Awareness, Sales, Signups, or Engagement. Most ideal would-be sales in our case for which we will be required to set a benchmark, but the blogger can only guarantee reach and will talk accordingly.
We can also ask them if they have run any similar campaigns before for other brands and how was the response to it. Our target would be to establish Key Performance Indicators against which we will measure their performance.
After establishing the kind of followership an influencer has and its relevancy to the campaign we want to launch, we will need to ask the following questions!
Do you have any suggestions for marketing XYZ brand on Instagram?
They may choose not to share their side of expertise, but if they do then we can learn of prevailing practices.
Comparing the effectiveness of a marketing campaign executed by different Instagram Influencers
We can outsource a campaign to different bloggers at the same time and evaluate which performs better and then align them for further campaigns, but it will require further in-depth analysis as few might sell more of a certain product and others with remainder.
Tracking each Instagram Influencers campaign to analyze its performance
Furthermore, we will be sharing our tracking generated links which they will use in their swipe-up or bio link so that we can track performance.
To study Facebook Marketing Strategy, read this short articles;
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We would like to hear about your Instagram influencer selection strategy and marketing approach.
Feel free to share your thoughts in comment section