Instagram influencers get paid to promote products and brands through Instagram pictures, videos, and stories. These popular profiles can make 5-7 figures just to influence the shopping preferences of their loyal followers. They range from microinfluencers with 10,000 - 20,000+ followers to full fledged celebrities with millions or tens of millions of followers. Instagram influencers usually make more money than any other online influencers, except maybe YouTube where top Creators can make a whopping 7-8 figures each year. If you can be an Instagram influencer then you should ride that wave for as long as you can.
But most of us aren't true Instagram influencers and never will be, so we need to consider hiring them instead as part of our social media marketing strategy to promote our businesses.
Why Hire Instagram Influencers?
Why should your company seriously think about hiring Instagram influencers? Marketing can be challenging in our digital world, and nowadays businesses need new ways to reach customers and clients. One way to do this is to use top social media sites such as Instagram. After all, Instagram (owned by juggernaut Facebook) just surpassed the 1 billion user mark. That's great market potential, because you'll need to reach plenty of users.
Here’s how you can effectively use the trend of influencer marketing on this rapidly-growing photo-sharing platform.
Influencer marketing is a novel approach to advertising. It’s where you use people who are already well-known Instagram to help promote and showcase your brand. These individuals already have a native following that you need to reach new customers. In turn, these new customers will be likely to visit your site if it’s recommended by someone they know and trust, especially when it appears genuine. Instagram also dominates the Millennial market along with YouTube and Snapchat so if your target market involves these demographics you'll definitely need your advertising game to be on point.
Influencer marketing is also popular because it’s a way to reach new customers without a traditional hard sales pitch. Essentially, you’re hiring people to spread the message about your brand in an organic, lifestyle-driven way. For example, if your product is cat-themed sweatshirts, teaming up with an influencer who is known for their quirky fashion sense would be a natural fit.
It’s also an excellent method for reaching followers who might normally be outside of your core audience or demographic. Aligning your product or brand with an influencer who attracts followers because of multiple interests or endeavors extends your reach.
Therein lies the biggest challenge and greatest opportunity of influencer marketing. You want to find a partner that you can easily work with. The influencer should be excited about your brand and have the right audience for your needs. You don’t want to align with someone who has no passion for your brand or isn’t cultivating the best-suited reach on Instagram. Once you find the right individual, contact them and ask if they want to work with you.
It’s recommended that you perform a short, no-strings trial upfront with the influencer to ensure that their working style complements yours and that they can attract the intended audience to your product.
You can measure the success of campaigns using Owlmetrics, an Instagram analytics tracking platform. It pays to keep on top of a few key insights affecting your business. Engagement, followers, and click-through rates are a few figures to consider, and seeing these numbers rise over the course of your campaign is a sign that your strategy is working.
It’s your responsibility as the brand or business to work collaboratively and provide your influencer with the right tools to get the job done. Be completely clear from the onset about your expectations for the campaign and share your performance metrics with the influencer on an ongoing basis. Seek the influencer’s input for your campaign, especially during the design phase. Trust that they know their Instagram followers’ demographics, tastes, and behaviors more than you do.
Influencer marketing is a creative and highly-effective way to market your business on Instagram. It’s cost-effective and allows you the ability to really drill down and reach niche audiences. If you take your time to find a good influencer on the site and curate the working relationship, you should see some great business growth as a result.
Getting Started Finding Instagram Influencers
1) Identify Your Influencers
This requires some work. You will need to trawl the Internet. Social media accounts, blogs, websites - find who are the people that keep popping up again and again in your niche. Find the influencers on "Insta" that have the most followers and tweet about your market and then follow them. Learn what they tweet about, what interests them, and think about how you can contribute.
2) Engage Engage Engage
You don’t get something for nothing so, in order to connect with your influencer and convince them that your product or service is worthy of mention, you need to provide some value to them first. This can be taken care of by simple engagement. Productive conversation and interaction - these are the most important parts of influencer marketing outreach strategy at this present time.
3) Provide Value
If you are on Instagram every day you will notice there is a lot of pointless and annoying spam from other users. Your prospective influencers and businesses feel the same way and don't want more of that from you. To stand out from these messages, you will need to provide some usefulness to your influencer. Ways to do this include:
- Like, comment, and share their Instagram posts and videos
- Be interested and interesting on their blog
- Thank them for any interaction that they have with you
- Be professional and courteous
What Not To Do When Seeking Instagram Influencers
- Don’t ask them right off the bat to start liking your social media posts or promoting your blog, good or service. It takes time to build a relationship online, just like in real life.
- Don’t get upset if you do not hear back from your influencer immediately. These men and women have hundreds of messages a day and often don’t have the time to read through each one.
- Don’t forget to just be a valuable member of their online society. If you create value and interesting content and are likable, you should be able to develop a relationship with an influencer. It won’t happen overnight but it can happen from polite persistence.
Hiring Instagram Influencers: Pros & Cons
When it comes to promoting your business online, there are so many different forms of advertising that it can be impossible to know where to begin. From banner adverts to pay-per-click, you’re faced with a thousand and one different options -- and no idea which is going to bring forth the best results for you.
One of the most common, though still relatively new, methods of promotion is to pair with a social media influencer. These high-profile users have a dedicated fanbase ready to lap up information on your company, which sounds pretty ideal, but is that always the case?
If you have wondered about partnering with a social media influencer, then it’s time to drill right down into it: is working with an influencer a good idea or a bad one?
Pro #1: Influencers More Relatable Than Standard Ads
Influencers have a better connection with their audience than almost any other form of advertising. They know their audience, how to market to them, and what will work. This can give you an “in” to a community or demographic that might otherwise be difficult for you to appeal to. For example millennials can be notoriously difficult to market to -- unless you use an influencer.
Con #1: Influencers Can Be Unreliable
While some influencers are as professional and courteous as you might have hoped, the truth is that some just aren’t. For some, their work isn’t a full-time profession, it’s more of a side gig to supplement their main income. As a result, their attitude to the work is not necessarily as good as you might hope. There are ways and means of ensuring you weed out the good influencers from the bad, of course. You need to make sure that you find the right social media influencers for your brand can make a big difference. All the research is done by them, so you can just focus on looking forward to the returns that you are able to generate.
Pro #2: Influencers Are More Trusted By User Base
The reason that influencers know their audience so well is because they reach so many people online, but more importantly they engage with them. This engagement goes both ways; the audience tend to be better connected to the influencer, so they have an emotional attachment which makes the audience trust the influencer more. If you want your brand to be authentic and endorsed by those “in the know”, then partnering with an influencer is the most direct route to achieving this.
Con #2: When Relationships With Influencers Go Wrong
If you do enter into business relationships with influencers, then you have to behave impeccably. If you don’t, such as forgetting to pay an invoice, then they could turn and “out” you on social media. No business wants or needs this kind of negative promotion.
Instagram Influencer Fails
There are many challenges when it comes to Influencer marketing. When it comes to Influencer marketing, I view the process as 4 parts: Selection, Proof Of Influence, Execution, & Return On Investment. It's relatively easy to locate potential Influencers and to measure their actual influence (cutting through the vanity numbers on social media), but you don't know for sure how they will execute their campaigns. I hate to use pathetic pop culture social media references, but I will because they stand out in my mind as horrible examples of Influencer marketing.
1) Scott Disick
Last year socialite Scott Disick posted a sponsored Instagram post (which also auto-posted to his Twitter account) about skinny tea including the copied and pasted text of the actual online campaign instructions. Lord Disick re-posted it later and presumably still got paid over $10,000 for his staged post about the tea that he loves before his pretend trip to the gym.
2) Naomi Campbell
Model and actress Naomi Campbell also made a similar copy-and-paste mistake with Adidas shoes. How embarrassing! And that's with an industry leading global company that works tirelessly to protect their brand equity! Their blogger outreach manager must have had a heart attack when they saw this one.
3) Ramona Singer
Another copy and paste massacre from Ramona Singer of "The Real Housewives of NYC" is when she blew it this past year promoting a Rodan & Fields healthy supplements company update. Aside from the obvious copy and paste disaster on Instagram and Twitter, the post was also completely counter to her own brand's voice. Maybe she could use some extra Ginko Biloba to help boost her brain's performance.
4) Tia Mowry
Very recently actress Tia Mowry was promoting DQ (Dairy Queen), and in the same promotional interview she talked about staying in shape by avoiding dairy! Any fitness blogger worth their weight in whey protein could avoid making this mistake. We get it Tia, you don't actually eat anything from Dairy Queen ever, but at least don't sabotage the company that's helping you get back in the public eye. At least Chrissy Teigen does a good job advertising McDonald's when in reality she's probably never had a bite of Micky D's in her life.
5) Rob Kardashian
Black sheep of the family Rob Kardashian was being paid well to promote sock and clothing brands before going off on an explicit and borderline illegal tirade about Blac Chyna. The financial fallout and brand damage is still unknown but I think it's pretty obvious that neither of these two will be commanding such high prices for their Instagram and Twitter posts. Rob Kardashian continues to display incompetence in the business arena, much to the disappointment of his entrepreneurial sisters and mother.
These are all marketing epic fails that failed in the execution phase and you can't be sure a similar result won't happen with your paid Influencer(s). And that can make all the difference for your campaign ROI.
This inherent risk can make Influencer marketing somewhat of a gamble depending on your company and budget. Tread carefully and don't put all of your eggs in one basket! Diversify your marketing strategy to include paid blogger outreach, SEO, PPC, Email Marketing, and any other strategy that can get you results.
I hope you enjoyed this article about whether you should look into hiring Instagram influencers as part of your social media marketing strategy.
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