In recent years, businesses have adopted new ways of attracting customers to their businesses. The competitiveness of the online market has seen a significant shift from traditional advertising products to customers to the new form of marketing known as influencer marketing. With the growing number of influencers who keep joining the market daily, businesses are faced with tough choices when they want to adopt this new form of marketing to reach their target audience. The many social media marketing platforms also make it hard for businesses to pick the right platform to get a large following and generate leads that convert to sales. This article shares tips that a company can implement to increase their success chances when using Instagram for marketing.
What is Influencer Marketing
This marketing approach where a person with a significant audience and some command on popular social media accounts endorses products or services to their audience. Influencers who get the job done to focus on particular topics and are considered experts by their audience. When the influencer recommends a specific product or service, his audience trusts in the recommendation. Statistics show that customers are more likely to buy a product recommended by an influencer than one that the producers of the product directly advertise.
Why Use Instagram for Marketing
Among the popular social media platforms, Instagram has been on the rise in growth and popularity in recent years. Older platforms like Facebook have a broad user base, but the people on Facebook are considered outdated and old. The majority of consumers who are young and urban folk prefer using Instagram to other social media sites.
Influencer marketing through Instagram is considered more effective since posts on Instagram have proven to get more comments, shares, and engagements than posts on other platforms.
What Are The Best Practices To Use On Social Media Marketing
When using Instagram for marketing, getting the right influencer for your brand is vital in achieving results. But that is just the beginning. The company needs to set out proper guidelines to follow and measure whether the money they spend on marketing gets them more business and customers. We have outlined some of the practices that, if implemented, your company can get positive results from Instagram marketing using influencers.
Work with multiple Influencers.
Brands should consider working with multiple influencers who have established some authority in the market. Having more than one influencer gives the marketing campaign a wider reach and diverse marketing approach. Each influencer uses a different perspective when marketing the product or service to their audience.
The high charges by influencers who have large followings may limit the number of influencers you can hire, but smaller influencers who do not have large following have lower rates. Marketing with smaller influencers also gives your product better reception as most of the audience can relate better to smaller influencers than large influencers who are considered celebrities.
Communicate goals to the influencers
Let the influencers you hire know what your brand aims to achieve by engaging them and why their services are needed in your brand’s campaign. Discuss timelines within which the results can be achieved and what strategies the influencers will use to achieve the results within the agreed-upon deadlines.
Let the influencers have the freedom to be creative.
Since the influencers know how they engage their following and keep them entertained, let them have the freedom to be creative when marketing your product or service. Allowing the influences creative freedom allows their posts to have some authenticity when marketing for your brand.
Ensure that your brand is visible
Since the influencers charge you for marketing your products or services to their audience, your brand’s name can be treated as secondary by some influencers. Ensure that the influencers’ posts when marketing for your brand has your brand’s name conspicuously displayed throughout the marketing campaign.
Measure the effectiveness of the marketing campaign
You should always have a way of measuring if the goals you set out to achieve have been met. There are software tools such as Sprout Social and Keyhole that allow you to measure the influencer’s posts and captions during the campaign. The metrics for measuring the effectiveness of a marketing campaign include:
- Views – the number of people who saw the posts
- Engagement – the number of shares, likes, and comments that the posts received
- Conversions – Number of people who made purchases after seeing the posts and clicking on purchase links
- Sales generated during the campaign period
- Traffic that the influencer’s posts generated for your company’s website and social media pages through links.
Author’s Bio:
Sean Begg Flint is the founder of Position Digital, a digital marketing agency for ambitious startups and growing brands. He is passionate about purpose-driven content marketing and using outreach for good.
