Beginner's Guide to Instagram Influencer Marketing

If you’re thinking of trying Instagram to gain brand awareness, grow your follower base, and drive major sales, then this is the perfect time to start.

In this guide, we will be discussing how to find the right Influencer for your brand, the right way to disclose sponsored posts, and much more. Let’s go.

Why choose an Instagram influencer to promote your brand?

There are many social media platforms that offer advertising with the help of the so-called Influencers, but Instagram is by far the top choice due to its avg. 3.21% engagement rate compared to other platforms which only have ~1.5%. This means Instagram users have a higher chance to comment, like, and share what they get across.

What makes Instagram marketing so effective? This can be due to admiration, trust, and the fact that a lot of users want to follow trends.

So when an influencer shows or recommends a product, it’s likely there will be followers willing to try it out. It gives the follower a sense of “living the lifestyle” or acquiring the same thing that their idol uses/owns.

This makes Instagram one of the highest value means for business owners to promote their brands. As a result, partnering with influencers can be an incredible channel for promoting your products and brand on Instagram!

How do I find the right Influencer?

There are a lot of influencers out there from Nano (Over 5 million followers) to Micro (Less than 5 million Followers), now the question is which one will help your brand? That is by far the hardest part of doing Instagram influencer marketing.

Your ideal choice should be relevant to your brand and campaign. They should be creative and engaging. And depending on your campaign goals, they should also have significant reach. There are a few means to know how to look for them.

Try to search using Hashtags

If your brand or product is well known, then it’s easier for you to get potential results since there are most likely Influencers already using your brand. Once you find results, check their bio to see if their niche if it fits your brand and then compare their reach or total followers.

They should have real followers that show engagement, right now there are a lot of applications and software that some Influencers use to buy Instagram followers. To know if they have authentic reach, check their comments to see if the comments make sense based on the post. If it’s just a random or unrelated comment, then it may not be legitimate.

How much does it cost?

I know everyone is excited to jump in, start contacting Influencers, and start advertising, but there are things you need to consider before you do it. The first is the cost. The price depends on their avg. Engagement, Reach, Niche, and Total Followers.

There are Influencers that charge under $150 per Instagram post; these usually have less than 100k Followers. Going upwards, there are those that charge $280 per Instagram (~1M followers) and $1400 (above 1M followers).

Per studies, those with fewer followers tend to have more engagement (going upwards of 7%) compared to multimillion followers which normally have 1% engagement. Make sure to do your due diligence on the Influencer’s typical engagement before locking in a deal.

Creating Campaigns based on your objective.

Now we’re on the last step, and finally, we can start choosing and creating a campaign based on your objective you want to achieve. Here are some trending campaigns business owners chose.

Contests & Giveaways

You can send sample products to your Influencer, and let them create a contest for his/her followers. This is a good strategy for gaining publicity by giving away something for free. You can lay rules like having the contestant follow both the Influencer and your business account, posting comments on the post, or creating their own posts using a designated giveaway hashtag.

Reviews

This strategy is by far the most common. Typically the Influencer showcases a product and tells you its use, how great the brand is, and that it’s a must-have. This is perfect if you want to increase brand awareness and nudging the undecided customer to go and buy your product.

Discount Links or codes

One of the best means to market on Instagram is to incentivize your Influencer to promote your brand. What do I mean by this? Easy. Give him/her an Affiliate link or Discount code to share with their followers. If it is used in a purchase, they can get a small percentage of the revenue. This type of campaign can help raise brand awareness and drive conversions effectively.

After choosing and trying a campaign, evaluate if it’s working for you. Are you seeing conversions tied to the influencer, or overall growth? If not, you may want to try working with the influencer to change the strategy/angle, or use a different person altogether.

Conclusion

There are a lot of strategies out there, and you should not be limited to the tips we walked through in this guide. We encourage you to also explore new ways and methods that you think may work. Best of luck!