Without a doubt, influencer marketing has become an essential part of digital marketing. In the last few years, it has grown significantly, and it’s not surprising that there is a sharp increase in the number of Instagram influencers available. If you have an e-commerce site, you can take advantage of Instagram influencer marketing to take your business to the next level.
What really is Instagram influencer marketing? How can it fuel the growth of your business?
What is an influencer?
To understand Instagram influencer marketing, we need to first explain what an influencer is. Simply put, an influencer is a person with a wider audience on social media channels and capable of influencing their thoughts and views about a product, service, or issue. Influencers can be athletes, actors, thought leaders, and other individuals with lots of followers. Therefore, an Instagram influencer is an individual with tons of followers on Instagram.
You can also become one by choosing to buy Instagram likes and followers.
What is Instagram influencer marketing?
Instagram influencer marketing, on the other hand, refers to a form of marketing that requires an influencer to promote a particular service or product on Instagram. This marketing strategy offers the following benefits:
- It helps businesses to reach more prospective clients faster.
- It builds the credibility of a business.
- It humanizes a virtual brand.
When all these happen, businesses are bound to see a notable increase in their return on investment (ROI).
According to Statista.com, influencer marketing is worth around $16.4 billion in 2022. This establishes the fact that it’s a booming niche for influencers as well as businesses using their services.
On Instagram, influencer marketing promotes a business by:
- Creating sponsored Instagram Live, stories, or posts.
- Making an appearance in offline events.
As influencer marketing uses the methods above, more individuals will be able to learn about the marketed products and services. It’s a digital word-of-mouth advertising where people’s buying habits, interests in products, etc. are influenced by people they listen to on Instagram. It’s noteworthy that there are influencers on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and other social media channels.
Considering the numerous benefits of Instagram influencer marketing, you’d agree that it acts as the organic superfood you need to fuel your e-commerce.
How to fuel your e-commerce store with Instagram influencer marketing.
Now that you’ve known what Instagram influencer marketing is, you might be thinking about how you can use it. This marketing technique can be implemented in the following ways:
Know your audience and competitors
The first step to fuelling your e-commerce store with Instagram influencer marketing is to define your audience. Here, it is vital to outline your brand identity and values as these will make it easy for you to find people who are likely going to use your product or service.
You want to know the kind of people you’re providing your services to so that you can craft your unique offers to suit their tastes. The following questions can help you define your target audience:
- Who’s like going to need my product or service?
- What’s their average age?
- Where do most of them live?
- What’s their average monthly income?
- What’re their interests or hobbies?
You may also want to consider your major competitions. Think about their propositions to the target audience and look for a way to offer improved services or products.
Look for suitable influencers
The truth is that you can rely on every Instagram influencer to assist you to promote your e-commerce store. This is because some influencers’ audiences may not be your target audience. Hence, using their services won’t help you to reach more people. For instance, if your products are for people in their 50s, it could be counterproductive to use an influencer whose audiences are teenagers. Therefore, you should look for suitable influencers.
Remember that influencers come in different sizes such as:
- Mega-influencers
These are Instagram influencers with over 1 million followers. They are usually popular athletes, musicians, actors, celebrities, social media content creators, and other public figures.
- Macro-influencers
Macro-influencers are social media personalities with over 100,000 to 1 million followers.
- Micro-influencers
These influencers are usually individuals with excellent knowledge of a particular industry or topic. They have over 10,000 to 100,000 followers.
- Nano-influencers
They have the least number of followers, usually less than 10,000 accounts. Although they don’t have lots of followers, they tend to engage their followers more than others.
Get in touch with your preferred influencer
Once you’ve chosen the influencer you want to work with, it is time you approached the person. This can be done in different ways such as:
- Direct message (DM) on Instagram
- Email, if you have the person’s email address
- Phone call (some influencers add their phone numbers to their profiles
Note that most influencers are busy people and receive lots of messages on their social media pages. So, go straight to the point and showcase the value you’re offering to the influencer.
Of course, the influencers will not offer their services for free. Therefore, you should be ready to invest some money in influencer marketing.
Communicate your Instagram campaign ideas
To get the best results from your Instagram influencing marketing, you should clearly communicate your campaign ideas with the chosen influencers. What do you intend to gain from the Instagram marketing campaign? What do you want influencers to do for your brand? What are the parameters for measuring the success of your campaign? Your communication with the influencers should provide answers to these questions.
Keep track of your campaign
Although Instagram influencer marketing is reliable, you may encounter a few challenges with it. As a result of this, you may not get the desired results from your campaign. Given this, it’s essential to keep track of your campaign. You want to ascertain whether it’s working or not.
In a nutshell, Instagram influencer marketing can provide great value to your business as it exposes it to more potential customers. However, it may not produce the desired results if you don’t follow the steps explained above.
This article was written in cooperation with Tedfuel