A Comprehensive Guide to Instagram Influencer Marketing

Before you dive into finding and executing influencer campaigns, you will need to clearly define what you want to achieve. Consider factors such as how much brand exposure you’re looking for, which of your products you want to promote, and what metrics will measure success. Answering these questions will help you develop a plan of action that can be used throughout the campaign. When it comes to Instagram influencer marketing, most brands focus on sales, awareness, and content when planning their campaign goals. Instagram influencers are typically the most established and programmatic when it comes to social media, which is why their content lends itself to scale on brand websites, ads, and pages. Instagram’s shoppable posts have also made their influencers significantly more valuable in recent times, since users can simply make a few clicks in order to go from a picture to a purchase. The goals that you choose will ultimately dictate which type of influencers you use – nano, micro, macro, mega, or even celebrity, since they each shine in a particular area – remember, there is no one size fits all solution here, a blend is probably your best bet.

It’s essential to identify the target audience you are looking to engage when selecting an Instagram influencer. Do they have a large following within your industry or target demographic? Does their content align with your brand values? Make sure that the audience overlap between the influencer and your brand is high enough to generate meaningful results. Beyond filtering for variables such as age, gender, location, and interest, see if you can build a customer persona. Typically, brands have customers that exhibit certain traits and patterns. Identifying brand affinities, key followers, and lookalikes, will allow you not only to narrow down your potential customers, but also allow you to scale across multiple influencers using a platform like Smartfluence, that allows you to act on these specific filters.

Once you’ve identified influencers who have the same target audience as your brand, you can start narrowing them down based on their stats and engagement rate. The higher their stats, the more expensive they will be. A good starting point for Instagram influencers is a 10-20k range in terms of followers, although larger accounts with verified badges are becoming increasingly popular. Look at their average number of likes and comments too, as this shows active engagement levels. While this is a general starting point, as mentioned before, your goals will likely dictate what size of influencer you use. Larger influencers are great for growing brand awareness, driving traffic to websites, effectively building your top of funnel. Smaller influencers below 10K typically tend to be excellent for sales since they have a very trusting audience that follows them typically for just one reason. The middle range is where Instagram influencers can be a bit more versatile and used for multiple purposes.

After you’ve identified a list of potential influencers, spend time exploring their content and engagement level. Consider the quality of their content - does it reflect your brand values? Does it look professional or low-quality in comparison? It’s also important to determine whether their audience engages with them regularly by looking at likes, comments, and shares desired actions. Good influencer relationships are built on mutual respect and trust - so make sure to assess their attitude, professionalism and approachability too. A platform like Smartfluence shows you the best performing posts across every Instagram influencer’s feed, allowing you to get a glimpse not only into their overall style, but also a peek into how viral the influencer’s content can potentially become.

When working with Instagram influencers, it’s essential to develop a comprehensive campaign that adds value to your brand story. To start, create a brief that outlines clear objectives and expectations around the goals you want to achieve. This should include messages you hope to communicate, content formats, and deadlines. Additionally, encouraging influencers to share personal stories about how your product or service has impacted them is an effective way of incorporating user-generated content into your marketing strategy. This allows brands to better connect with their audience in a more intimate and meaningful way, and it’s precisely this type of content that you can scale through paid ads across Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and beyond.

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If you’re interested in learning more about influencer marketing and how Smartfluence can help you establish and scale your influencer marketing campaigns, feel free to book a demo here.