Another year, and Instagram remains the top social media platform for influencer marketing.
recently The State of Influencer Marketing Lyncha, 93% of marketers agree that Instagram is the best social channel for influencer marketing.
In addition to using the main Instagram news feed to reach their target audience through influencers, 73% use Instagram Stories and 37% use Instagram Reels.
Choosing between Instagram and other social networks is just one step in the process. You won’t get the results you want on any platform or social network without the right influencers.
In this article, you’ll find four essential tips to follow when choosing the right influencer for you Influencer Marketing Campaign.
1. Keep your business goals in mind
Before you start looking for important metrics for influencers, such as engagement rate and number of followers, consider your business goals.
Take a step back and determine why and how you intend to use your Instagram influencer marketing campaign.
Why do you need an influencer?
What are your specific goals for influencer marketing?
The three main goals should be:
- Increase brand awareness.
- generate leads or Sales volume.
- increase your Instagram followers.
Your choice of influencer will depend on these goals.
For example, increasing your Instagram followers will require you to create contests or quizzes with specific hashtags.
Attracting influencers who can enter the contest and encourage his/her followers to join as well would be the right approach.
On the other hand, sales and lead generation will require you to use affiliate marketing and discount codes.
So, you need Work with Influencers Its audience is likely to buy your product.
Do they match your brand’s personality?
Influencers need to align with your brand identity or at least the product you want to sell.
Without brand consistency, your campaigns will generate lower ROI.
It is necessary to have a clear understanding of your influencer campaign goals in order to find influencers who are closely related to your brand.
For example, an influencer known for budget travel would be the right choice to promote low-cost travel gear.
Hiring a model with beauty tips would be a waste of time.
Boat shoe brand Sperry works with over 100 micro-influencers who have posted high-quality images of Sperry products on social media.
Most photos include micro-influencers in high-altitude scenic spots.
Until recently, Canon has focused on using professional photographers to drive their latest innovations on Instagram.
Thinking outside the box, however, the brand has started to embrace a new generation of Instagrammers like filmmaker Elise Bauman to promote their products on Instagram.
Although these influencers have a smaller following, they offer better engagement due to their industry expertise.
American Express, on the other hand, uses super-celebrities and micro-influencers to promote their brands on Instagram.
Award-winning bartender Jim Meehan (@mixography) is one such niche influencer active in the #AmexAmbassador campaign. He promotes the brand on Instagram, alongside celebrities like Los Angeles Clippers basketball professional Paul George (@ygtrece) and fashion and travel influencer Leo Chan (@levitatestyle).
All of these influencers utilize American Express for their frequent travels.
2. Find genuine engagement
got engaged is one of the key metrics for Instagram influencer marketing.
The average engagement rate of an Instagram influencer is about 3% Influencers with less than 1,000 followers will have the highest engagement rate at 8% by 2021.
As the number of followers increases, the engagement rate decreases. However, sometimes this metric can be misleading because popularity doesn’t always lead to conversions.
You must first determine the veracity of the engagement.
Analytical Comments
2021 HBO Documentary Fake Celebrities Turned three non-celebrities with no more than 2,500 followers into tens of thousands, namely Dominique Druckman (@dominiquedruckman), Chris Bailey (@chrisvsmyself) and Wylie Heiner (@wylezzz), brought awareness to the fake engagement problem.
They use tactics such as buying bots and paying to set up fake “pay it all” photos in order to earn extra rewards from brands later on. You may also encounter fake influencers.
One of the easiest ways to determine if an influencer is fake or real is to analyze the comments on their posts.
Often, vague comments like “nice photo” or “cool clothes” or “looks good,” along with comments with emojis usually mean a fake engagement.
On the other hand, relevant conversational comments are a sign of genuine engagement, which brings us to the next point.
Search word of mouth response
Real followers ask questions, make personal statements, and tag their friends in the comments. These are the word of mouth responses from true followers.
Check out Instagram influencer Lisa Linh (@bylisalinh). All of her posts get real replies, like this one, from her real followers, not bots.
Only this type of engagement can lead to new leads and sales.
3. Explore hashtags relevant to your brand
It’s best to reach Instagram users who are already talking about your brand or product. They could be the next influencer to promote your brand.
In this regard, some labelling research can prove helpful.
Avoid high-density labels
tags are like Keywords for SEO. You’ll come across several high-density keywords. These are the most used hashtags on Instagram.
While relevant, finding influencers using these keywords would be a waste of time.
For example, if you started your search with #organic, you would have to browse over 54 million posts.
However, as you dig deeper into long-tail (or low-density) hashtags, the number of posts also drops.
In this case, #organicfoods has 338,491 posts, #organicfoodstore has 14,054 posts, and #organicfoodchicago has only 66 posts.
Both #organicfoods and #organicfoodstore will give you more accurate search results. There are too few posts for #organicfoodchicago to be considered for influencer search.
Use keywords that describe your brand or target audience
You can also start your search with keywords that describe your brand or target audience. Follow hashtags with lots of posts to find influencers.
If you sell running or jogging accessories, start your search with something like #running and Instagram will suggest the most popular and relevant hashtags.
Here, you can use hashtags like #runningmama, #runninggirl, and #runningcoach to find influencers who cater to specific niches.
Use the hashtags #sponsored or #ad
Instagram also requires influencers to use the #sponsored or #ad hashtag to differentiate promotional content.You can follow these tags Find out potential influencers in your field.
You can mine your followers or those of your competitors to see who is using the #sponsored or #ad hashtags.
If they’re using it, they already know what influencer marketing is. You can ask them to advertise your product.
4. Use an influencer platform
All of these methods, while useful, are manual and time-consuming.
Fortunately, you can use influencer marketing platforms to find the right influencer in just a few clicks.
Some popular ones include HYPR, Tap Influence, Upfluence, Famebit, NeoReach, Revfluence, and Influencer.
Find the right influencer
You can use different sets of parameters such as number of followers, type of followers (demographics) and work experience to search for the most suitable influencers in your niche.
Complete event management
You can also use these platforms to manage one or more influencer marketing campaigns.
You can control campaign features like ad text, graphics, hashtags, social media mentions, giveaway details, influencer payments and a full campaign schedule all from one platform.
real-time analysis
You can calculate a variety of campaign metrics, including pageviews, reach, engagement, ROI calculations, and URL tracking. Multiple platforms allow you to generate daily, weekly and monthly reports that can be shared with your marketing team.
Perhaps, the only downside is that all these platforms usually charge you a recurring monthly or annual fee. If you can set aside a budget for this, you will save a lot of time and resources.
Keep the following in mind when choosing a platform:
- Choose from a huge number of platforms Influencers from your niche. However, make sure the quality of the influencer is also good.
- Find out what content creation, distribution and tracking tools are available on one platform. You should be able to control every aspect of your campaigns through the platform.
- The platform should also offer good options Real-time analysis and reporting tools.
- You should also get built-in payment and transaction facilities to pay your influencers.
- Don’t forget to check what other people are saying About the platform. Check user reviews and how long the platform exists before signing up.
Here are some examples of influencer marketing platforms to get you started:
- Click to affect: It is a cloud-based influencer marketing platform. According to TapInfluence, their platform can increase the ROI of your influencer marketing campaigns by 11x. It also comes with an ROI calculator to let you know if your sales goals are worth investing in a marketing campaign.
- hunger: It initially focused on YouTube users, but now Famebit supports almost all social networking sites. You can start finding social media influencers from 5000 followers belonging to different fields.
- high pressure: HYPR claims that over 30% of the world’s largest brands, agencies and influencer marketing platforms trust their data. This feature-rich platform is equipped with several tools based on complex algorithms that help analyze registered influencers.
parting word
Influencer marketing is catching up, especially on Instagram.
However, only the right influencers can help you succeed. Therefore, you need to focus on finding the best product for your business.
Hopefully these four tips will help you find the best product for your brand.
Have you used Instagram influencer marketing before? Tell us more in the comment box below.
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Featured Image: Kick Studio/Shutterstock
