What is influencer marketing: How to develop your Influencer Marketing Strategy
What are Influencers?
Influencers are people who have a large following in a particular niche and are usually able to affect the purchasing decisions of their followers due to their own topic of authority.
On social media, influencers usually have built a reputation for their expertise on a specific topic and niche as they make regular posts about their topic.
As a result their followers are usually highly engaged with their content and may rely on the influencer to make certain decisions and choices.
Why Influencer Marketing on Instagram?
There are many ways to grow your business online nowadays, online ads among the most used. The problem is that most people distrust ads they see and so many successful businesses are turning into Instagram influencer marketing instead because it helps create stronger trust with their audiences.
To put in perspective, over 92% of people trust recommendations from individuals over brands - and as a result brands on average make $6.50 return on investment for every $1 they invest in influencer marketing.
In 2020 and beyond, Instagram continues to be the most popular platform to collaborate with influencers because:
1. It has over 1 billion active monthly users on the platform with tens of thousands of different niche that you can target
2. Over 65% of top-performing Instagram posts feature products meaning that users are constantly exposed and discover new products that they can purchase
3. Instagram has higher user engagement rate and interaction rate compared to other social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat
4. Instagram is continuously pushing new features to support ecommerce and small businesses from introducing new business accounts, enabling shopping feature in majority of countries and giving businesses more exposure through new IG stickers
And in this guide, we will explore how you can take advantage of the influencer marketing to 3X your growth.
Set your objectives
Before you start reaching out to influencers and collaborate with them, it is very important to set your objectives as this will be key to executing a successful influencer marketing strategy.
Here are main objectives and metrics you should consider related to influencer marketing:
1.Increase Brand Exposure
If your objective is to increase your brand exposure, you need to utilise the impressions and reach metric. Impression is the total number of views that your posts have generated. On the other hand, reach entails the total number of people who have seen your posts.
This objective is usually more appropriate for brands with a larger budget as it is difficult to directly measure the impact in return on investment.
The advantage of this objective is that it helps make your brand more socially credible among your target audiences as your brand is trusted by the influencers and thus your prospective customers.
2.Increase Sales
Perhaps one of the most popular influencer marketing strategies is to increase sales as you get to see and measure your results quicker.
The metrics used to measure the success of the influencer campaign is the amount of sales (or total revenue) attributed to the influencer that you have worked with.
3.Increase Leads
Depending on your industry, you can also utilize influencer marketing to generate leads. Leads refers to the data that identifies a person as a potential buyer of a product or service.
Usually this applies to service-based businesses who have lower volume of customers (compared to consumer goods) but higher valued items such as real estate, landscaping, online coaching.
The metric used to measure typically consist of contact information received such as email addresses, phone numbers, or even visits to an offline store.
4.Increase Instagram followers
Increasing instagram followers helps make your account look more established in your niche and credible among your target audience. Believe it or not, you can build your following to become an influencer by using influencer marketing strategies as well!
When you have a large following, it helps you to venture out to other objectives in the long term such as selling products to your loyal followers or even working with brands to promote their goods or services.
Finding your influencers
Now that you have set your objectives, it is time to find your own influencers. Here I am going to show you the most authentic way of finding followers directly on Instagram.
Of course, there are also other Instagram influencer tools that you can use - but usually they are overpriced and most influencers on the platform are already working with big brands, and so they will be much harder and more expensive to collaborate with!
1.Finding through Hashtags
Before you start looking for your influencers, you need to know your specific niche - for example, if you are selling resistance bands, you want to look for fitness influencers. Knowing your specific niche will also allow you to know keywords that relate to your niche. Keywords are important because they allow you to search for influencers via hashtags.
One highly effective way is to find influencers through niche hashtags. What you want to do is type in the keyword “#resistancebands” into Instagram’s search bar, and first go through the top posts within the results section.
The Top Posts section will display Instagram content that has a large amount of engagement that has used your hashtag. Simply click on each of the content and visit the profile of the content creator to assess whether he/she qualifies as your influencer (detail more below)
Advanced Trick - when you search for your hashtags, most of the time, Instagram will show you ‘related hashtags’ that you can explore as well. Click on the related hashtags and repeat the process which will allow you to find even more influencers
2.Finding via suggestions
Another trick that I like to find popular influencers is via suggestions. Let's say that you have found your first influencer that works for your niche, what you want to do is click on the ‘arrow pointing down’ below the bio description. Instagram will show you other similar influencer accounts to follow
Assessing and Analyzing Influencer Accounts
If influencer marketing is that easy, everyone will be successful. Unfortunately, due to the popularity and money-making opportunity in this industry - it is not uncommon that you find influencers that are not genuine and have many fake followers and vanity metrics (i.e. fake likes, comments).
Luckily, I’ve had my share of failures and learnings so that you don’t repeat the same mistakes that I have made.
To avoid it, here are some steps you should follow:
1.Analyze Influencer Profiles
Go check out their profile and analyze their profile description to make sure they are within the same niche as you and would be highly likely to work as an influencer for you.
Usually, a good indicator would be when 1) they include their email contact information on their bio description, and 2) they have worked with previous brands before - which you can find by exploring their feed.
It is completely okay as well, if you see an influencer that don’t have these information (1 & 2) , especially accounts between 8-20k followings - this just means that you are probably the first to reach out to them which means you can negotiate a better offer (more on this later)
2.Engagement Rate
Once you are confident that they are within your niche with followers that make up your target audience, you want to start looking into the numbers to make sure that they have a good engagement rate.
Why? Engagement rate is a metric that measures the level of engagement that a piece of created content is receiving from an audience.
To calculate average engagement rate, you can use this formula for a post:
Average engagement rate = [ ( Likes + Comments) / Total followers ] x100
Note, that this is an average calculation, to make your findings more confident, you can apply this formula to 5 to 10 of their most recent posts to get a more accurate average engagement rate of their account.
If you don’t have time, you can always google influencer engagement tools that will give you an average - for instance you can try:
https://phlanx.com/engagement-calculator
https://www.tanke.fr/en/instagram-engagement-rate-calculator-2/
https://triberr.com/instagram-engagement-calculator
The engagement rate will give you a better understanding of how much engagement your piece of promotion will receive per post.
For example, let's say you work with an influencer with 100,000 followers with a 5% engagement rate, each post that you collaborate with an influencer will have around 5000 engagement.
If the account has a large following and a really low engagement, there is a huge chance that the influencer account is fake.
3. Check for Real Engagement
While engagement rate is a good way to assess the potential impact of a collaboration with an influencer, it does not guarantee that the influencer has real engagement
In fact, many people are utilizing engagement pods on Instagram where even the likes and comments on a particular post is un-genuine - for example “comment for a comment” “like for like”.
Therefore, in order to avoid these accounts, one simple but effective way is to simply look at the comments of their posts.
When you see the majority of comments such as “Nice post”, “great post”, “keep it up”, “thank you for sharing” - it may mean that this account is using an engagement pod to grow their engagement rate. However, do note that sometimes there will be bots who will leave these comments as well.
Advanced Tip: Before you decided to pay the influencer, you can request the influencer to send over their Instagram insights as well to show where most of their demographics are from.
Reaching Out To Influencers
Finding the influencers is probably the most tedious role, but once you have that sorted, then what comes after is more exciting.
There are 3 ways that you can contact influencers on Instagram, via 1) Email, 2) Direct Message or 3) Call/text them
Based on my experience, email is perhaps the best way to reach out to influencers as it seems more formalized. Not all influencers provide their email and so usually you can simply direct message them on Instagram itself.
When approaching influencers, try not to be too 'salesy' or pushy. Since influencers are constantly contacted by many other brands, try
and craft a compelling message that will grab their attention and convince them to work with you.
When sending your email, make it personalized by mentioning their name i.e. Dear Tommy.
Secondly, show that you appreciate and understand their account/niche, and explain to them why your product/service/brand would benefit them and their followers. This will not only make them more inclined to work with you, but it would also allow you to better negotiate your proposal with them.
Working with Influencers
On Instagram, there are actually several ways to collaborate with your influencers, and ultimately this depends on your objective and budget.
I will introduce you 3 main ways to collaborate with influencers
1.Product Shoutouts
Product shoutouts entail giving away your product for free to an influencer and in return, they will post on their feed about it.
This strategy works best if your objective is to increase sales of your product. What you are paying the influencer in this case, is your product. This works really well when your product is something that the influencers themselves find useful too (which is why the niche is so important).
Another advantage of this approach is that you can even reshare the influencer’s photo of your products on your own feed or marketing channels to help increase the social recognition of your brand.
Advanced Tip: Make sure the influencer doesn’t advertise too much on his/her account - otherwise your promotion will go unnoticed
2. Shoutout for Shoutouts
Sharing content of another account in exchange for them to share your content. This is a great tactic to leverage if you have a huge following as this does not entail any cost besides cross-promoting the influencer’s content.
Let's say you want to collaborate with an influencer who has 100k followers, and you have 50k followers, what you can negotiate with them is that you promote their content twice for one content of yours that they promote.
3. Paid Shoutout
Paid shoutout entails paying influencers to post about your products on their feed. This way of collaboration works for all 4 objectives - increase 1) brand awareness, 2) sales, 3) leads and 4) followers.
Payments
As the influencer market is so varied with a diversity of mix niche, there are not any set rates that dictate how much a brand should pay an Instagram influencer with X number of followers. Therefore, rates can vary depending on a number of factors:
1) Type of posts
When working with the influencer, you want to consider what type of post you want the influencer to promote.
Image post is the most common for brands with products as this entails the influencer posting a photo of themselves with your product.
Instagram Stories posts are usually cheaper compared to image posts, however, they only last 24 hours and so it is better if you invest in multiple Instagram stories to create a lasting impression to your target audience.
The advantage of stories post is that the influencer can also add a direct link in their stories so that their followers can simply swipe up to visit your website.
Video posts are still in its infant stage but this will be more expensive compared to the other two types of posts as this requires more shooting time and creative direction from the influencer to execute.
2) Industry Competitiveness
The deeper the niche that you are able to drill down your influencers, the cheaper it will be. If you target an influencer with a general fitness niche, chances are there are going to be many fitness brands who will contact him/her and thus driving the prices up.
On the other hand, if you found an influencer who specialized in resistance band workouts and your company is offering a resistance band, the price of the negotiation will be cheaper since the influencer will value your products more.
3) Number of followers and engagement rate
The higher the number of followers and higher the engagement rate, the more expensive the influencer may charge you. Therefore, your budget will give you an indication of how big you want your influencers to be to target.
4) Type of account
There are 2 types of influencers, pages and personal. A general rule of thumb is that pages should usually be less expensive than a personal branded account, because page accounts usually don’t have as strong of a trusting impact as personal accounts, and that they are as easily duplicated by competitors.
Again, how much you are willing to pay comes down to your overall objectives.
With shoutout for shoutout, you are not paying any monetary money.
For product shoutout, make sure you take into account the value of your products to negotiate with influencers. In this case, always pitch your product first.
Finally, for paid shoutouts, you can use the table below as a reference only - but do use the factors as mentioned above to assess the final price you negotiate with the influencer
In addition, for paid shoutouts, once you have contacted 1 or 2 influencers within your niche, you can get an idea of the average price they offer, you can use that as a basis to dictate the industry benchmark price for your niche.
When you do know the average pricing to collaborate with an influencer in your industry, always try to go for your offer first - and use that as a basis to negotiate your pricing. You can refer to the strategic templates provided to learn more.
Advanced Tip: Always ask influencers to add a call to action in their posts and have them tag and @mention your product and Instagram account. Doing this will help drive more of their followers to visit your account or website.
Terms
The last thing you want is for your influencers to run away with your money without promoting your content. There are a number of ways you can minimize this:
1) Ask the influencer to showcase some of the projects that he/she has worked for -with more experience working with other brands will mean she will be less likely to be a scam
2) If large amount of cash is involved - try paying in batches such as offer 50% upfront and 50% once influencer completes the requested task or meets an objective
3) Create a contract and have influencers sign it - the agreement sets out in writing what both the influencer and your brand are expected to do, and what they should receive; and reduces the risk of any miscommunication. This will guarantee that the influencer will live up to their agreement. This is included as part of the template that you can find in the other document. 4)
Measure impact of your influencer marketing strategy
Know what to measure as a result of your influencer marketing strategy is essential as it allows you to:
1. Re-assess your marketing strategy
2. Determine whether you should continue collaborating with the influencer
3. Help you decide which method helps you achieve the best return on investment
Once your influencer has completed the shoutout - you want to start measuring the results and compare it against the cost invested (usually within a time frame of 48 hours).
You also want to add UTM parameters to the links that you share with your influencers. UTM parameters are simply tags you add to a website URL — when your link is clicked, the tags are sent back to Google Analytics and you can track the number of clicks of the url.
At times, you may find yourself getting a below-average result from working with an influencer, but the important thing is to not give up and keep trying until you get the result you wanted - everyone in this industry will face this problem and its those who re-assess their strategies and spend more time on evaluating their influencers and strategies are ones who will thrive.
Advanced Tip - if you have a slightly bigger budget, i would try and collaborate with as many influencers at the lowest budget possible at the beginning. After re-assessing the results after the first collaboration, continue and scale the budget with influencers that got the higher results and drop the influencers which gave you below-average results.
If you are looking for Advanced Influencer Marketing guide, get Instagram Executive Master Course https://naivedigital.teachable.com/p/advanced-influencer-guide/
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