Today, if you have a business and want to promote something, I don’t think I have to explain how powerful Instagram is as a medium to reach your audience. However, besides having your own business Instagram profile, how can you reach your audience faster and increase your sales? Scoop of the day: Influencer Marketing on Instagram.
What is Influencer Marketing on Instagram?
Briefly, Influencer Marketing is a marketing strategy that consists in partnering with an influencer or a group of influencers, in order to promote your brand. It can include an ad read in a story, a full post dedicated to the product, a mention with the hashtag #ad, a testimonial, a « shoutout », etc.
Therefore, the possibilities to deliver the actual content are limitless. As a result, it’s a popular and powerful marketing strategy that allows for faster brand awareness.
How to Use Influencer Marketing on Instagram
Step 1: What is the goal of your campaign?
Firstly, in terms of the marketing funnel, which one of the followings do you want to address: awareness, interest, or conversion. Moreover, depending of your answer, the budget, the frequency of posts and the type of influencer will vary.
So, say you want the audience to know about your newly produced beautiful bamboo cups; then you are in the awareness section of the funnel. In fact, you can ask the influencer to post a simple picture with the #ad mention. The goal is to get it out there. Instagram is all about beautiful pictures. Above all, try to convey an action. What can they do with the bamboo cups? For example, the influencer could show how amazing they are as substitutes for teacups.
On the other hand, if you believe the audience might have heard of you, then you are in the interest section of the funnel. You have to pique their interest. The best way to do so is with a story. Hence, the influencer could explain how practical these new lovely bamboo cups are. To do so, stories are a good way to quickly and uniquely convey information. Consequently, your audience will be able to see the emotion of the influencer as he’s using the product.
Nevertheless, you want to be in the last step of the funnel: the conversion. Here, the best way to convey information is with a video or a reel in the form of a testimonial. Remember, people don’t want to be guinea pigs. In fact, when see that their favourite influencer posted a video about these awesome bamboo cups, they are more likely to engage and buy your product. That’s how you use Influencer Marketing effectively.
Step 2: Find the right influencer.
Secondly, now that you have a purpose for your campaign, you have to find an influencer that targets the same audience as yours. This is primordial. If you want to reach your audience more effectively, the audience of your influencer has to be segmented in the same demographics or psychographics.
As an illustration, you can’t promote hair products on the page of an influencer whose content is about animals around the world. Pay attention at the content the influencer uploads, his personality, the way he engages with his community. In other words, you want to find matching values between the influencer and your company.
In essence, all you need to know is that for awareness or interest purposes, an influencer with a large following is the way to go. These are influencers with usually more than 1 million followers. You’re looking for volume of clicks, comments and like. The good stuff.
Furthermore, for conversion, you want micro-influencers. These are influencers with usually less than 1 million followers. The logic behind that is you want as much interaction in the community as possible. An influencer with a smaller follower base is more likely to engage and answer the question of his audiences.
Step 3: Content is King
Finally, Influencer Marketing is all about engaging content. You have to work with your partner (the influencer) on some ideas and forms of content. However, always remember the goals of your campaign. A good way to increase interest with the audience and achieve your campaign goals is through contests.
In short, contests provide satisfaction and promote trust and implication throughout the whole process. For instance, the influencer could talk about how he partnered with your company to provide ten amazing bamboo cups and a set of bamboo toothbrushes.
In addition, you could also create a media calendar with the influencer and discuss the frequency of posting, the type of answers he can provide for potential questions, etc.
Hopefully, this guide on How to Use Influencer Marketing on Instagram helped you navigate in this jungle that is web marketing!
* The masculine form is used for readability purposes.
