How To Work With Instagram Influencers

Following on from my previous article, Influencer Marketing is here to stay.

The majority of successful influencer marketing campaigns happen on Instagram. – The platform that has over 700 million monthly active people worldwide.

In this article, I’ll be covering what you need to know and the steps for working with Instagram influencers. By following the points below, you should see a success in your Instagram influencer marketing campaign.

Determining The Objectives

To make sure your influencer marketing campaign is a success, you need to identify your key objectives.

• Are you looking for your influencer to create authentic content about the brand?
• Are you wanting them to generate awareness of your brand?
• Do you want them to drive traffic to a specific landing page?
• Are you wanting them to drive online and in-store product sales?
• Do you want the influencer to generate engagement around the product/brand?

You need to identify what you want to achieve from running an influencer marketing campaign on Instagram.

According to a survey by Linqia, 89% of marketers used influencer marketing to create authentic content about their brand.

Why You Should Use Instagram

Instagram is one of the world’s most used social networking apps. With over 400 million people worldwide using Instagram every day, this is the perfect platform for your influencer marketing campaign.

According to research from SheSpeaks, Instagram was the second best platform for influencer marketing. Facebook being the first.

Since Instagram is purely image and video based, running your influencer marketing campaign can be very successful providing you brief your influencer thoroughly with a detailed plan.

Finding A Suitable Influencer

Before you begin your search for an influencer, you need to first define a suitable profile of the influencer. Failing to do this, may result in an unsuccessful program.

There are a few rules you should follow for when identifying the most suitable influencer for your campaign. These are:

• -> An influencer that shares high-quality content on a regular basis
• -> Authentic and interacts with their audience
• -> Sticks to a specific theme and style that relates to your brand
• -> Has a large following that is both active and engaged. A good like and comment ratio is ideal.

Now you are aware of the recommended rules to follow, finding an influencer on Instagram can be a tough task.

Some tools I mentioned in previous articles don’t support Instagram yet, so other methods for discovering influencers are by directly searching for influencers who have established credibility on the platform and have a large following.

This can be done via searching through a variety of hashtags and looking at the top content. You’ll then need to analyze their profile, run a few checks to see if they have a legit engaged audience and gather information on how regularly they share content.

Keep in mind, getting in touch with them to propose your campaign can be quite a hard task too – especially if they have a large fan base. You’ll need to dig up their contact information and find out where the best place is to contact them – email? Twitter handle? Website? Or Instagram’s DM.

A real-time social analytics platform like HYPR is ideal for when running influencer marketing campaigns on Instagram. The online application allows you to search and discover over 10 million influencers.

These type of platforms collect all the necessary information you’ll need to know about influencers before you reach out to them (engagement percent, the location of followers, most engaging content, demographics, other social profiles etc) – cutting the time it takes to do the manual research.

Rewarding The Influencer

Once you’ve successfully identified your ideal influencers, you’ll need to come up with a plan of how you will approach them. Believe it or not, this can be quite difficult for brands.

Not all influencers are motivated by financial rewards. Influencers’ motivations for when working with brands are to increase their own reach and grow their audience. Other motivations include creating quality content for their audience, receiving perks such as discounts and free samples and lastly live new experiences.

If you are able to offer additional rewards to those influencers you work with, they’re more likely to help and continue to work with your brand to help you achieve more success.

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