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Instagram influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing in which brands collaborate with prominent Instagram creators in their niche industry, known as influencers. Brands collaborate with these influencers to promote products, services, or campaigns because they have a vast and engaged audience base. Influencers create brand-related content, exposing their followers to these endorsements, thereby increasing brand recognition, engagement, and, ultimately, sales.
Instagram is the most popular social media platform for implementing influencer marketing initiatives. Two factors contribute to Instagram's effectiveness as the leading influencer marketing platform—first, its huge user base (over 2 million monthly active users), and second, the power of the visual medium of communication and information distribution. Influencers may get people talking about a company or their product by publishing sponsored content such as photos, videos, stories and reels.
Popular Instagram influencer marketing niches include lifestyle, beauty, fashion, music, cinema, travel, sports and outdoor activities, and more.
Growth and Impact of Instagram as a Social Media Platform
Instagram's enormous user base has solidified its position as the top influencer marketing campaign platform for businesses, regardless of their size or niche. Finding the relevant influencers allows your product to reach a targeted and engaged audience, fostering trust with potential customers.
Research shows that 72% of Instagram users are influenced to make purchases based on promotions from their favourite creators, highlighting the solid influencer-community bond.
Additionally, Instagram is especially popular among the tech-savvy Gen Z, making it a prime platform for businesses targeting this demographic. Due to its success, 72% of marketers reported successful Instagram influencer marketing campaigns, leading to increased investment in the platform for 2023.
Why Choose Instagram for Influencer Marketing?
Here are some compelling reasons for brands to start Instagram influencer marketing as their preferred marketing strategy:
Enhanced Brand Awareness and Engagement:
With 69.7% of users actively posting and sharing on Instagram, it has become the most engaging platform. Collaborating with potential influencers allows brands to tap into this engagement and increase brand visibility and awareness. Influencers expose brands to their engaged followers, leading to a favourable view of the brand for future purchases.
Sales and Revenue Boost:
A staggering 62.3% of global Instagram users use the platform for brand research before purchasing, making it an ideal platform for product promotion. Working with established influencers to create content can significantly enhance sales and revenue, leading to measurable positive ROI in a short period.
Cost-Effective Solution for Startups:
For cash-strapped startups without established brand trust, organic reach is essential. Instagram influencer marketing offers an affordable solution. Partnering with micro and macro influencers whose values align with the brand resonates with their audience, gaining organic reach, especially in niche markets, making it a budget-friendly marketing solution for startups.
Types of Influencer Campaigns on Instagram
Instagram offers various types of influencer marketing campaigns, and three popular ones are highlighted here:
Giveaways and Contests
Giveaways involve influencers offering products or services to their followers, generating assured growth in terms of follows, shares, and comments. This approach can lead to higher ROI, and brands can benefit from increased sales and engagement, even from non-winning followers.
An excellent opportunity to announce a brand giveaway is a milestone follower count, like how Hydro Flask uses reaching 200,000 followers on Instagram as a giveaway opportunity to reward their existing audience and add a few more followers in the process.
In this post, fans of Hydro Flask were encouraged to follow the @hydroflask account and tag two friends in the post comments for a chance to win a 32-oz. Hydro Flask. The post has over 12,500 likes. What's more, announcing two winners equals higher odds; thus, it ensures greater engagement!
Social Media Takeover
In a social media takeover, an influencer assumes control of a brand's social media channels for a specific period. This campaign requires trust as the influencer gains access to the brand's account. Instagram Stories have made takeovers more convenient, allowing creators to showcase their skills and provide value to the brand's audience.
For this, we have taken the example of celebrity makeup artist, Nina Ubhi, taking over Fenty Beauty's Instagram account Stories for a day in 2020.
During the takeover, Ubhi showcased her skills as a makeup artist by creating new looks with Fenty Beauty products, thereby providing value to both new and existing followers of the beauty brand.
Affiliate Marketing
This cost-effective campaign involves collaborating with multiple influencers simultaneously at a nominal cost. Influencers promote the brand using unique discount codes, and they receive commissions for every sale made through their codes.
For this, we will draw on the example of fitness influencer Jesse James West, who typically shares his unique experience with fitness-focused businesses and recommends them to his followers, along with an affiliate code, using which the latter may get a discount on the brand's products.
Now, let's dive into some Instagram influencer marketing strategies you can use to maximise your campaigns and efforts.
Instagram Influencer Marketing Strategy
While influencer marketing on Instagram can benefit your brand, you need an effective influencer marketing strategy to target your prospective buyers. Let's understand how these Instagram influencer marketing tips can help you.
Set Clear Goals and Objectives for Your Campaigns
Having goals allows you to chart your course and determine the best way to reach them, so you must establish benchmarks for your Instagram influencer marketing strategy.
If you want to enhance your sales or engagement, clearly stating your goals can be really beneficial. Or perhaps your goal is to broaden your reach and attract more individuals to your brand. Or simply to direct more people to the new product introduction.
So, always be explicit and simple while defining reasonable and quantifiable goals because clarity leads to something. Your goal assists you in determining the budget and structure of the content and its contents.
Focus on a Brand Fit While Choosing Your Influencer
Finding the ideal fit for your Instagram influencer campaign necessitates finding someone with genuine and similar values to your business messaging.
In order to execute your influencer marketing strategy correctly, you must thoroughly evaluate the following aspects:
- Demographics of the influencer's audience;
- Sponsored brand content they have previously created;
- Whether their reputation, opinions, and values will hurt your brand; and,
- Whether their audience's engagement rates are at par with industry standards
While researching content creators, you must narrow your selection and decide which type of creator you require for your campaign, as there are several varieties ranging from their community reach to their campaign charges.
Create a Branding SOP
Once you find your ideal influencer partner, you need to share a clear vision of what you would want your collaborative campaign to look like. For this purpose, make a brief SOP document describing your brand's appearance and feel. You may use your brand's top-performing Instagram posts and conceptual graphics to help them better understand your brand personality and motivate them to create similar content.
You should include a brand explainer as well as a full description of the product they will be marketing. Influencers want the product to reflect their image as well, so a media kit can keep everyone on the same page.
Structure Content into Different Formats
The next stage is to get everyone on the same page and create your campaign. Keep your influencer in the loop and plan together for this, as this helps take into account their creative ideas and expertise.
A great idea here is to create content in different formats. Instagram offers various ways to share photos and videos, including feeds, Stories, Reels, and IGTV. You can also share Carousel posts, which are many photos or videos combined into a single post or Story.
Here are a few actionable tips on content creation for your successful influencer marketing campaigns:
- Share your stories on a daily basis. They are valid for 24 hours and can be highlighted and categorised on your profile.
- Create Reels with trending audio, filters, and effects.
- Use IGTV. It is a new Instagram content-sharing format that allows you to publish films ranging from 15 seconds to 10 minutes. It is ideal for marketing because it allows you to generate engaging content, describe your items, and engage your audience.
- Going live is another method of sharing content to introduce new products, communicate with your fans, and respond to their questions.
Produce up-to-date content, leverage the trends and maintain authenticity while creating content, which helps improve communication.
Start conversations and engage with your audience.
To gain the rewards of an influential influencer marketing strategy on Instagram, remain active and interact with your community on Instagram.
Remember these things to connect with your followers better:
- Respond to their questions and concerns;
- Respond to comments to increase your engagement; and
- Respond to their brand mentions and campaign hashtag content.
This can help you in various ways, including developing a strong relationship with your target audience and broadening your reach and visibility through your marketing strategy.
Monitor Your KPIs to Measure Progress
As a brand, you should prioritise analysing your progress as the final step in your Instagram influencer marketing strategy.
The growth of social media platforms, such as Instagram, has changed the way brands interact and host marketing efforts, but remember to:
- Create key performance indicators (KPIs) such as likes, comments, and shares;
- Take into account your audience's valuable insights; and,
- Examine your influencer-specific analytics and request a recurring report from them.
This is one method for learning and achieving your objectives. Not only that, but you may also improve the steps of your campaign to ensure that you reach your goal on time. Influencer content might take time to produce results, so bear to write and share only authentic content while leveraging your values.
Following this, let's learn about some ways you can find the right Instagram influencers for your brand and partner with them to maximise benefits for your brand.
How to Find the Right Instagram Influencers for Your Brand?
Here are four tips for finding the right Instagram influencer for your business:
Monitor Instagram to find which creators are talking about your brand.
Finding the appropriate people to collaborate with might be as simple as looking in your backyard.
Set up time to regularly check your tagged posts, comments, direct messages, and branded hashtags to identify influencers and creators already engaged with your brand.
Find out who your target audience follows and interacts with
Finding social media influencers relevant to your target audience is a critical stage in the search process.
Examine your current community for inspiration. Choose 10 to 15 followers representing your target audience and look at their following lists.
What kinds of creators do they already follow? What is their area of expertise? Do you notice any recurring themes in their content? How well do they match your brand?
Make a list, and plan to engage them for your brand.
Assess the influencer's KPIs to gauge their potential.
Evaluating an influencer's metrics is critical in determining whether they will assist you in reaching your objectives.
Research them thoroughly before approaching a collaboration. Look through their followers and comments on their posts. No matter how extensive their follower base is, if their comment section looks infested with bots or spam accounts, it is best to steer clear of them.
Assessing these KPIs will assist you in determining the sincerity of their community and engagement. As a best practice, It is recommended that you delve deep into an influencer's previous posts, conduct a thorough Google search, and question any influencer marketing industry contacts you have.
Use an influencer creator and database tool.
Finding the ideal collaboration can feel daunting without the correct tools, but who says you cannot take help?
There are multiple influencer marketing databases and creator tools in the market right now that can help you evaluate the potential suitability of an influencer for brand marketing success and even facilitate transparent communication and payment arrangements for a successful partnership.
Using a third-party service, such as the influencer marketing platform from Phyllo, will assist you in quickly discovering and connecting with creators and influencers for your next campaign.
Instagram Influencer Marketing Case Study
Since the advent of influencer marketing, brands have tried many crazy campaigns for success. For our influencer marketing case study, we have chosen a great example of how businesses can achieve influencer marketing success by doing something a little different.
Introducing Dyson's #dysonDogs influencer marketing campaign… featuring pets!
Yes, that's right! Instead of human influencers, Dyson used five of Instagram's well-liked pet influencers, with follower counts ranging from just 2500 to more than a million. While everyone knew Dyson's brilliance as a household Hoover cleaner and hair straightener company, pet owners were oblivious that Dyson could also give them a realistic solution.
Dyson gave pet owners complete creative freedom to produce content as per their social media brand personality and reputation. The only requirements of the brief were to create something funny and show how the five pet parents cleaned up after their furry children. It was a bold move, allowing creators so much room to create content in their own way, but it paid off excellently.
Dyson saw more than 1 million views, 115,000 likes, and a 10% engagement rate across their influencer marketing efforts.
Dyson did two things right to make this campaign a success here.
Dyson engaged with well-known pet influencers, some charging thousands of dollars for this collaboration. But this worked for them since the campaign's objective was to build brand awareness for their pet cleanup product line instead of increasing sales.
Dyson also gave the creators a lot of creative freedom to conceptualise amusing ideas that they felt would resonate with their followers the most. It is generally recommended that brands guide influencers on the type of content they want the former to create. But Dyson kept the creative brief relatively loose, resulting in magic!
Brands may rarely know as much about the community as the influencer who has built it. Having partnered with well-established and well-experienced influencers, Dyson played its cards right by allowing the creators to decide what kind of content would work best!
How Phyllo Helps in Instagram Influencer Marketing Success
Phyllo is an influencer marketing analytics platform with a universal API for multiple social media platforms, including Instagram. Its Identity API verifies creator data, while the Engagement API provides essential engagement metrics like likes, comments, and shares.
Key features of Phyllo for Instagram influencer marketing campaign success include:
- Streamlined KPI Tracking: Phyllo's intelligent technology ensures you never miss a story and have access to real-time stats, especially for Instagram Stories.
- SDK for Phyllo Connect: The SDK guides creators through complex account connections, providing interactive tutorials and help options in various languages.
- Webhooks Notifications: The Webhooks from Phyllo send regular notifications when story metrics change, keeping you updated on influencer performance.
Phyllo aims to be your influencer marketing partner, empowering your brand's growth. Schedule a call or sign up for a free account to access creator data with Phyllo APIs today!
FAQs:
How much does influencer marketing cost on Instagram?
The influencer marketing cost on Instagram differs based on the influencer's follower count, content type, engagement rate, and industry. In 2021, nano-influencers charged $25-$200 per post, while micro-influencers asked for $200-$1000. The influencer marketing budget varies for Instagram features like stories, reels, and feed posts.
How to find influencers on Instagram?
Research keywords and hashtags related to your niche to find influencers on Instagram. Use Instagram's search feature to explore posts, Stories, and the "For You" page. Influencer marketing platforms can also help identify influencers based on audience size, engagement rate, and market relevancy.
Is Instagram influencer marketing effective?
Yes, influencer marketing on Instagram can be one of the most effective ways to promote your brand and its products and services. Once you develop a data-driven content strategy, you can engage Instagram influencers to create sponsored content for your business to increase brand visibility and marketing ROI.
Download our detailed guide on how to leverage Instagram Stories for influencer marketing
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