After becoming a $2.5 billion industry, influencer marketing on this popular social media platform has redefined everything. Brands around the globe are now earning from collaborations, paid posts, and joint marketing campaigns.
Instagram offers the ideal setting for brand endorsement and ambassadorship. Premier users promote products and serviced to their followers in an authentic manner. With the influencer marketing realm all set to touch $10 billion by 2021, brands to leverage it as much as possible. So, what’s IG influencer marketing?
You see people with a massive following and good engagement on the platform are called influencers. Many people revere and love them, and hold their opinions in high esteem. You’ve a vast and dynamic pool of IG influencers, which means virtually every brand has the bandwidth to utilize this facility to target a demographic and market their business.
It’s a mutually-inclusive domain with niche marketing. The surge of Instagram influencers has created new opportunities for brands to authentically promote their products and services to their specific/target audience. This is how they spawned the paid post marvel.
The system works because it allows business to tap their target customers in a way that is far more realistic, genuine and impressionable than traditional, make-believe advertising. Instead of selling directly to customers, brands are now building accords with influencers, who can take care of selling part.
The organic powerhouse
There’s a reason why market pundits consider Instagram Influencer Marketing as the natural and holistic superfood to grow your ecommerce operations. Historically, companies have directly messaged their target customers, without elicit a response or even waiting for it.
But with the advent of Instagram and other prominent social media messaging resources, customers have changed the operations and conversation. The brand-to-consumer dynamics and conversation have become flexible and fluid, propelling products to adorn a human-like vibe or persona for showcasing their value/importance proposition.
- Sensory marketing is a good example of this phenomenon. The latest Harvard Business Review shows how brands implement sensory marketing campaigns with three core objectives. They want to identity and fathom customers’ emotions.
- They want to explore new markets and capitalize on them, and they want to enhance brand loyalty.
- As a brand, you need to know that influencers come from different niches and market segments.
- They have different and diverse ways to create content. You need to know what type of influencer can sync with your brand, and most importantly your budget and business operations.
- There are nano-influencers, micro-influencers, macro-influencers, and mega-influencers.
Reasons to use
Putting first things first, brands need to ensure that influencer marketing yields positive results for them. There’s no cookie-cutter approach here.
- A fitness brand from New Jersey may not imbibe the same approach as that of a LA Although they both are from the same niche industry, the modalities may differ.
- Instagram marketing is viable choice for marketers due to its high engagement rate. On an average, the platform sees 1,000 followers per post. It’s important to note that influencers also prefer Instagram. Surveys show that over 3,000 micro-influencers regarded IG as the best platform for their business.
- More than 64% say that Instagram is the most effective and realistic platform for engaging with their target audience. Many brands also use sites like blastup for gaining new followers.
- Before you can initiate or even plan your campaign, it’s pivotal to understand the money factor. Brands must consider their budget and tailor their campaigns to it. While influencer marketing isn’t perpetually a costly affair, proper budgeting and planning can help in avoiding unnecessary, unforeseen costs.
Brands need to keep in mind that the cost of collaborating with influencers is bound to vary in accordance with the follower size of the influencer and his/her industry. Experts say that influencers charge on the basis of their audience size. So, the more their followers, the more will be their rate.
Use the best tools
Aside from influencer marketing, there are great tools to build your Instagram audience. The best part is, you can grow them organically.
- Tools like IconoSquare and Webstagram help in unveiling the top hashtags for your niche industry. Brands can then selectively use those hashtags in their posts to reachout to the right segment.
- Many Instagrammers run a Webstagram search for finding viable relevant hashtags for their business. You don’t need to search them manually on the platform. You can customize your options by typing relevant keywords for your brand.
- Webstagram is easy to use and completely free. For brands that don’t know much about influencer marketing, this tool is a good choice for identifying key details about your marketing strategy.
Brands also siphon followers from competitors to market their product. Do know that the followers in your competitor’s profile have expressed their desire to buy a product or service that you’re also trying to promote and sell. Hence, you need to divert the audience to your account and build a dedicated following.
- Leveraging IG influencers is also a fundamental step. For young entrepreneurs, this can be an intimidating and daunting task.
- When using influencer marketing on IG, your first need to find the right influencers for your brand.
- A quick and trusted way to find them is by using popular influencer platforms like Snapfluence and Ninja Outreach.
- Apart from using the right analytics to tap your influencers, you can also use relevant keywords in the app as an integral aspect of your IG marketing strategy.
Brands need to form a partnership and then measure the results before making more campaigns.
Working on subtleties
Brands that understand the ballgame of Instagram marketing will focus on subtle aspects like checking the length of the captions. Try to collaborate with influencers who share their content with captions.
Captions are compelling and engaging in the social media realm. It’s also crucial to showcase your sponsored posts. As brands, it’s your sole responsibility to make sure that your influencers comply with FTC.
If you share a sponsored content on the feed, your disclosure should be conspicuous enough in the opening lines of your caption. On Stories, you need to superimpose the same disclosure on your video or picture.
