Harnessing the reach of social media influencers is the latest marketing approach for many companies and brands today. With over 300 million users, Instagram can be one of the most valuable social media marketing assets for your company. Whether you want to boost sales, grow your consumer base or increase brand awareness and user engagement, influencer marketing with Instagram is the key to fulfilling your goals.

Influencer Marketing with Instagram | Overview

An influencer is an individual who has a large following on social media and has the ability to sway the opinions of their audience.  They are trusted for their opinions and can add credibility to any brand or product that they promote. An influencer is a great resource for engaging your target audience by integrating your brand’s message through organic content. They will help to build brand awareness by leveraging their own social following and trusted voice.

In a recent study, 59 percent of marketers will be increasing their ad budgets for influencer marketing over the next year, since it provides great returns to the majority of businesses that use it. This study also found that marketers consider influencer marketing to be the fastest-growing online customer-acquisition channel.

Finding the Right Influencer

Establish Your Audience

The first thing that you need to do is figure out exactly who you are trying to reach so that you can find an influencer who speaks to that audience. This will give your brand the opportunity to better target the audience you are trying to reach.

Content is Key

An influencer is a great resource to share quality visual content. When searching for the right influencer for your brand, you want to make sure they post content that regularly engages their audience: the individuals that you are trying to reach. After doing in-depth research, you should feel confident that this influencer will be able to communicate your brand correctly. Allow them to be creative and give them control over how they will share your brand or product, as this will be the only way it will come across as authentic and effective to their followers.

High User-Engagement

Influencer marketing with Instagram is one of the most effective forms of promotion on the internet. According to Forrester Research, Instagram’s engagement ratio is 60 times greater than Facebook’s and 140 times greater than Twitter’s. The most valuable influencers will be those who consistently drive user-engagement, which will help your brand to reach a new, larger audience. Your main priority is to get the influencer to encourage their followers to join them in your brand’s content sharing.

Alignment and Authenticity

An influencer should already have established followers that look up to them as a tastemaker, someone who is credible and trustworthy. It is more important that an influencer aligns with your brand’s voice, so that if they were to post something about your brand or product, it would be viewed as authentic, rather than sponsored.

Successful Strategies

Event Promotion

An influencer will have the ability to use their Instagram account as a platform to spread awareness and build excitement about your brand’s upcoming event. By providing the influencer with a scheduled promotion calendar, they will be sure to distribute quality content over the duration of your event campaign.

Hashtags

This is one of the most popular search methods on Instagram, so it’s necessary to have clearly defined and unique hashtags. This will increase the discoverability and engagement of content and will drive traffic and followers to your brand’s Instagram account.

Contests and Giveaways

This strategy will help to build an Instagram audience and increase engagement on posts. The influencer can add a call-to-action (CTA) to the post such as like to win, tag a friend, comment to win or photo challenge. This will not only help to drive user-engagement, but it will also generate brand awareness and be an effective way to measure the results.

Analyze Effectiveness: What to Measure

It’s vital to track the effectiveness of the influencer to make sure that you are gaining value from this marketing strategy. It’s best to have a good analytics system, like Iconosquare, that will measure all of the key performance indicators (KPI), such as engagement, followers and reach.

Key performance indicators (KPI)

• Likes and Comments: the two engagement measures within Instagram
• Shared Posts: how often a post was shared by users and the overall reach
• Hashtags: track posts and shares via search engines or hashtag-tracking apps
• Unique URLs: custom landing page URLS in images or post text ; track CTA conversion rates
• Follower Growth: the amount of followers that your brand gained over a specific period of time