How Businesses Can Start Instagram Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing enables brands to connect with their target audience in a much more authentic way than with traditional advertising. Instead of selling directly to consumers, brands build relationships with influencers who can sell for them.

Influencers on Instagram have a very close relationship with their followers, as they share many aspects of their lives with them. We get the impression that we know them in person, so when they recommend something, we listen to them as if they were our friends. Or at least that’s the theory.

Currently, Instagram has 1 billion active users per month and has become the favorite social network for influencers. That’s the reason many people prefer to buy Instagram likes. 72% of users say they have bought fashion, beauty, or style-related products after viewing them online, so there are plenty of exciting opportunities for brands.

Influence marketing may have grown in popularity thanks to Instagram, but you don’t need thousands of dollars to collect!

Generally speaking, a micro-influencer is someone who has a significant but not massive following on social media.

Instagram influencers with a huge number of devotees regularly lead experience that is not actually “typical”, and their feeds may look like an optimistic way of life indexes.

When a micro-influencer presents a product on their channels, it may appear as a trusted recommendation from a friend rather than a celebrity endorsement.

And this can make a difference for a small brand trying to establish itself in the market or reach new audiences.

There are no strict criteria to be considered as an influencer on Instagram. Any user who has a relatively high number of followers with a good level of engagement will influence their audience, and therefore will be interesting for brands.

When an influencer recommends a product or service on their channels, it may appear as a trusted recommendation from a friend. This is obviously very advantageous for brands: it gives them direct access to the target markets for only a fraction of what they would pay for a traditional ad.

Finding the Right Partners for Your Instagram Influence Marketing Campaigns

Finding the right influencers for your marketing campaign can be challenging, so it is important to research and set clear goals for your campaign.

For example, if your goal is to accumulate a lot of engagement, it might make sense to partner with micro-influencers with smaller audiences but higher engagement rates.

On the other hand, if you’re trying to increase brand awareness, metrics like influencer reach and traffic will be more helpful.

There are a few questions the business owner needs to answer before opening an Instagram account for their brand:

• What allows Instagram to do differently compared to other tools?
• Is my business suitable for Instagram? The creation of an account on this network is not always the most suitable for the brand since it is less visual than others. In this case, it would be more convenient to promote other networks such as Facebook or Twitter.
• What kind of strategy am I going to carry in this social network?

Instagram Is an Extremely Active Social Network

Instagram is by far the best social network to get users to share their experiences using a company’s products or services since they only have to post a video or photo with the brand’s hashtag.

It Does Not Have As Much Competition As Other Networks

Having an audience on Facebook or Twitter is the first step of any company or brand to enter the online world. It is true that they are the two most important networks in this world, but they are also the ones with the most competition.

Location Function

Another of Instagram’s strengths for companies is the location function. Both synchronization with Foursquare and the photo map can be very useful in promoting your business and it is a very efficient way of attracting customers to your physical location.

It Can Be Accessed From Any Browser

Despite the fact that Instagram is a mobile social network, that does not mean that it is necessary to have the application installed on your mobile to view the profile of anyone. Each profile of this social network has a web version that anyone, having or not having an Instagram account, can access from any browser.

How to Track the Success of Your Instagram Influence Marketing Strategy

Not surprisingly, one of the most important questions for companies just getting started with Instagram influencer marketing is how to track and measure their return on investment (ROI).

The truth of the matter is, to build up a successful influencer promoting technique for your business, you have to see how your influencer battles work, and that implies defining clear objectives and measurements.

According to the research, 79% of companies measure the success of their sponsored posts by the amount of engagement they receive. But that will probably change!

As more companies realize Instagram’s ability as a customer discovery and sales channel, we hope that the focus of influencer marketing campaigns will also change.

And this will likely be reflected in how companies track the success of their Instagram influencer marketing. In fact, although engagement (likes, comments, and shared actions) took precedence in the past, in 2019, more companies will focus on lower-funnel goals like sales, traffic, and conversions. Read this article from stormlikes and learn how to increase likes on your Instagram post.

As such, it’s a good idea to implement conversion tracking systems, like affiliate links, to reliably track your campaign conversions.

This will not only track the ROI of your campaign, but you can also use the performance data from this campaign to see which influencers performed the best (and why), and then use this data to inform how you build future campaigns.