Instagram

Instagram holds tremendous potential for brands to expand their reach and achieve their marketing goals. To create an influencer marketing strategy for Instagram, you must decide on your goals first and then find the right influencers for your campaign.

You also need to establish your KPIs so that you can track the progress of your campaigns at a later stage. And put effort into building a rapport with your influencers and giving them creative control over the content they create for your campaign. Lastly, track everything so that you can optimize your campaign performance. However, to get influencer marketing on Instagram right, you need to have an influencer marketing strategy. Here’s how you can create one.

1. Define what success is for you

Just like every other marketing strategy, your Instagram influencer marketing strategy also must start with a goal in mind.

You must have some sort of expectations and key performance indicators (KPIs) in mind before you set up your first influencer marketing campaign on Instagram. This is a crucial step as it helps you figure out how well your campaign performs.

The goals that you define should also be SMART goals. Some of the goals that you may have are:

• Increasing your brand awareness
• Improving your engagement rates and getting more followers
• Expanding your reach
• Getting a higher click-through rate
• Generating more sales for your product and increasing your revenue

Your goals should be as precise as possible to ensure that you can track your progress. Based on your goals, you can also define your KPIs so that you can check where you stand.

2. Find relevant influencers

Once you’ve set your goals for your Instagram influencer marketing campaign, you can move to the next step of finding Instagram influencers. This is an important step as well because your brand will be judged by who you partner with. That’s why it’s of the utmost importance to find genuine influencers who share similar values as your brand.

3. Send your pitch

Once you’ve shortlisted your potential influencers, you need to send them your pitch for the collaboration. Ideally, you shouldn’t pitch your idea right in the first message.

Influencers are real people who are passionate about what they do. They are not just marketing tools for your brand. You need to build solid relationships with them before you can start creating content with them.

Some tips for sending your pitch include:

• Be clear about what they should expect in exchange for working with your brand.
• Never offer exposure as payment. Many influencers will find it offensive.
• Keep your message short and to the point.
• Try email first, then follow up through Instagram DM if they don’t respond
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4. Design your campaign

The next step is to design your Instagram influencer marketing campaign. For this, ensure that you keep your influencers in the loop. By involving them in the planning phase, you’ll be able to get their perspective as well. This is important because nobody knows their followers as well as they do. In addition, you shouldn’t design the entire campaign yourself and then just instruct the influencers to create posts accordingly. Give them enough creative freedom to produce content in their voice and style. You can, of course, give them a few guidelines about what you expect from them.

5. Decide on a budget

Set a budget for your campaign. This may be easy to skip over as a small business owner, but you want to keep track of expenses so you know if your campaign left you in the black or the red. If you are paying influencers for a product, figure out your cost per influencer. For example, say your shipping costs are $7, and the cost to make a product is $13. Your total cost per influencer is $20. Divide that by the amount of money you want to spend on the campaign and that gives you a rough idea of how many influencers you can afford to work with.

6. Track and optimize

The final step in creating your Instagram influencer marketing strategy is tracking and optimizing your campaign. This step helps you understand where you stand and what you need to do to reach your goals.

You must track the KPIs that you defined in the very beginning to check your progress. For this, you can use influencer marketing tools which can also help you track the results of your influencer marketing campaign.

By doing so, you’ll be able to find what you need to change to optimize your Instagram influencer marketing campaign. You could also do some A/B testing to understand what parameters work best for your campaigns.

Benefits of using Instagram as your Influencer Marketing platform

1. It’s more organic

While Instagram ads are still relevant across influencer marketing strategies today, influencer content on Instagram is a strong driver for organic traffic. 

Real-time content (like Instagram Stories or Live) and high-quality posts (featuring images or videos) give consumers multiple ways to engage with an influencer.

Rather than engaging with one advertisement, consumers can engage with content they resonate with. This means influencers, your brand ambassadors, can use their creative freedom to integrate your product into their daily lives, showcasing it in a medium they deem the best fit.

With the use of influencer marketing on Instagram, referral traffic to e-commerce websites has skyrocketed. It’s become such a dominant source of traffic that even tweets are no longer convincing consumers to convert as they did before. 

2. It’s a niche

Instagram provides various ways for consumers to find and engage with niches that interest them.

All in all, it’s a great way to find a niche that you want to tap into. Since a certain influencer might be targeting a niche already, they’ve done all the hard work of gathering followers together.

3. It’s personal

One of the biggest reasons why influencer marketing thrives on Instagram is because the connection between influencers and their target audience is personal. 

The key to success with influencer marketing is leveraging a genuine, authentic, and engaged relationship. By having brand ambassadors on Instagram, their followers see your brand as a trusted and successful one. 

Truth be told, brands don’t realize how many conversations occur between influencers and their followers. You may be working with them on a specific post, but the influencer is then answering questions and encouraging their followers to shop for your brand. 

Instagram influencer marketing FAQ

What’s the difference between influencer marketing and advertising?

Advertising makes a product or service known to a large but often broad audience. Influencer marketing uses research and data to align a product with a specific demographic and encourage them to buy. Instagram users trust influencers more than traditional ads, which makes this strategy more effective.

How impactful is Instagram influencer marketing?

Instagram influencer marketing is a multibillion-dollar industry. Ecommerce brands can use this digital marketing strategy to reach target markets, build trust with the right audiences, and make direct sales faster. The rise of micro-influencers accounts with small but engaged followings has made it affordable for small businesses to use Instagram influencers to grow their brand.

How much do Instagram influencers charge?

• Nano (1-10K followers): $10-$100 per post
• Micro (10-100K followers): $100-$500 per post
• Mid (100-500K followers): $500-$5K per post
• Macro (500K-1M followers): $5K-10K per post
• Mega (1M+ followers): $10K+ per post

What is the best way to reach Instagram influencers?

Reach out to Instagram influencers by email for the first official ask. Most influencers have their email address on their Instagram account, or you can go to their website contact page to find it. If they don’t respond to your email, send an Instagram DM to follow up.

What are the best sites and tools for influencer marketing campaigns

How to find influencers suitable for your brand

There are various tools to help you to find influencers online, basing themselves on factors such as the number of followers, posts, SEO and the topics which the influencer focuses on. You can try Buzzsumo .

If you want to get a better idea of the platforms before throwing yourself in with the professionals, these are some of the characteristics which you should consider when seeking influencers for your brand:

How to find influencers whose content image is in line with your brand

Let’s not get sidetracked with how many followers or how many deals with well-known brands an influencer has: if they don’t share values with your brand, the collaboration will come across as a fake and consumers will notice. You need to look at an influencer’s career, how they’ve developed over time, the causes which they support and their outlook on life. When an influencer doesn’t share the vision of a brand which they associate themselves with, the outcome often involves a loss of credibility for both parties. By contrast, when there is a sharing of principles and values, the relationship is natural – people can see that. The promoted product should seem like something that the influencer would actually use or recommend.

How to find influencers with quality content

More than the number and the frequency of updates (which in themselves are important), what matters more is that the influencer creates quality content and is recognized for this. They need to be relevant, know how to express themselves, take quality photos, research their topics, and have recognised contacts. An influencer with these traits is someone who concerns themselves with the content they publish and not just with getting likes. This type of influencer is an online professional who will work with the same dedication and attention as you invest in your campaign.

How to find influencers with a quality audience

When we plan a campaign, we analyze the variables which will determine its success. We need to do the same when choosing the most suitable influencer and one of the most important factors to analyze is their audience. And even when you find influencers with a quality audience, it’s important to be sure that they also have a genuine audience. Influencers who buy their followers or collect them in a “follow-back” fashion may not make much of an impact to their audience.

10 ways to find Influencers as a New Brand

1. Start with hashtags

Before you can have influencers posting about your brand on Instagram, you’ll want to be aware of the trends, content, and posts already available on Instagram. Use your brand’s Instagram page to follow relevant hashtags that can help you discover new influencers and content. 

You can also search for hashtags that influencers are posting to, then click through the posts to the influencer’s profile so that you can send them a message within Instagram. Hashtags are the broadest and most expensive way to find influencers, so be sure to vet each influencer before agreeing to partner with them. 

2. Use Google… the smart way

Google and other search engines can help you find influencers, but you have to search specifically, or else you’ll be battling through all the search results on the internet to find your influencers. Build a list of keywords that capture your brand’s overall mission for use in these search queries. 

When searching, add “site: Instagram.com” before your keywords so that you are only searching Instagram for the keywords within your niche.

You can also add “blogger” or a location to narrow your keywords even further. If you search by location and keywords, you’ll be able to find local influencers within your niche. This is especially helpful when you are looking to work in-person with an influencer for photo shoots, events, and other promotions.

You may also want to use Google and search engines to find blogs and personal websites. Most of these will have social links in the header or footer, so you can click through to their profiles once you’ve seen if they share about the same industry and topics as your brand.

3. Scan competitors’ mentions & tags

Your competitor’s may already be using influencer marketing to grow their brand. Keeping a list of competitors can help you find influencers who are already posting about the same topics that you want.

On a competitor’s Instagram profile, check the photos that people have tagged them in. Influencers may be listed among these posts. Click through to their profile to take a look at their follower count, and what their feed looks like.

If an influencer is already posting about a competitor, they may be more willing to share your brand as well because it fits into the topics that they are posting about. On the flip side, you may want to skip any influencer that only posts exclusively about a certain brand, as they may not want to work with other partners or may have a deal with that brand. 

4. Search by keywords on YouTube

If you’re working in certain niche industries, YouTube may be a lucrative place to start your influencer marketing. YouTube is especially helpful for finding influencers who do longer reviews of products. YouTube is also a great place to start if your brand focuses on a particular hobby, as influencers share this type of content here.

Using keywords in YouTube can help you search for the top videos and channels posting about that topic. Dig a little deeper into long tail keywords to narrow your search even further and find influencers who have a good amount of views, but won’t break the bank to work with. 

Another perk of finding influencers on YouTube is that they rarely exist on YouTube only. If you find a good influencer on YouTube, they may have a blog or Instagram where they can also help you promote your brand. 

5. Start following blogs and bloggers

Blogs and bloggers are a great way to build back-links to your brand, as well as partners for social media promotions. Blogs and bloggers promote their content through social media, so they typically have strong followings through their blog readership and their social media following. 

Search for your keywords and add “blog” to see what the top blogs are for this topic. Most blogs will have the social links either in the header or footer, so you’ll be able to see what kind of audience they have by clicking through. 

Tip: Sign up for their newsletters so that you can stay on top of the latest trends and see what they are posting about on their blogs. Who knows, they may share something that can help your brand! 

In addition to reaching out to these bloggers to see if they would be interested in partnering with your brand, you’ll also want to search their content for lists of popular influencers, or sources that they link to often. These can be valuable contacts as well, so the deeper you dive into their content, the more influencers you may find! 

6. Use influencer tools or databases

Influencer tools and databases may have search features that will reveal the top influencers within certain niches. These databases can provide you with their social profiles, their email address, and their website, so that you can connect with them right away for partnerships. 

Although a simple and effective way to find influencers, this method should be used with caution. There are many companies over-promising and delivering out-of-date influencer information. If possible, ask the company for a free trial or a demo so that you can see what kind of influencers you would find there. 

With a reputable company, finding influencers is as simple as inputting your criteria and pressing enter. 

7. Recruit through your brand’s website to find influencers as a new brand

Your website should have resources available to influencers in case they stumble upon your website through any of your other marketing methods. If they wanted to reach out, is there a way for them to easily do this?

Pura Vida has a good example of this type of landing page.

Adding a link in the footer to an influencer landing page will allow you to share how you’d like to collaborate with influencers and leave some contact information so that potential partners can reach out. That way, influencers who already love your brand can propose collaborations easily and save you the hassle of searching for them! 

8. LinkedIn… no really!

LinkedIn may seem like an unusual place to find influencers, but its ability to refine searches by industry and title can help you find the right people fast. Rather than searching influencer, the best searches seem to be for “blogger” and “content creator.” Refining by industry as a filter can help you find people who create content within that industry.

Reaching out to them via a LinkedIn message versus an Instagram message can also help instantly present you with an air of professionalism. Remember to add information about your brand to your personal LinkedIn page so that influencers can easily see who they are talking to within the company!

9. Comb through followers on personal and competitor accounts

Influencers are everywhere and they follow a lot of the same accounts that you do. Find a few accounts on Instagram that are within your niche, then look through the followers. While a bit time consuming, there may be an influencer within these follower groups that would be perfect for your brand.

If you have a handful of influencers that you are already working with or have reached out to, taking a glance at their followers can help you find additional related influencers as well.

10. Set a large net of alerts

Once you’ve tried a few of the easier strategies, it’s time to automate the process a bit. You can set an alert about certain topics so that you always know when fresh content is being posted. Follow a handful of hashtags to see if any new influencers emerge. Set a Google alert for your brand to see who is posting about you on their blog or social media. All these little steps can help you sort through all the noise online and focus on the influencers who can help your brand. 

If you haven’t already, installing Carro is the best way to make sure that you never miss an influencer again. Carro syncs to your Shopify store, email list, and social media, then alerts you whenever an influencer is found. It’s the best way to grow your influencer list without any effort at all!