The era of influencer marketing is changing and it’s changing fast.
It’s the beginning of a new era where brands and marketers start to question what are the right metrics to measure a successful influencer activation? What do “likes” or “reach” really mean?
With the reveal of the upcoming Instagram features around the corner, here are the 5 ways you can apply these to your brand.
1. Relevance is Superior to Reach.
The short, simple explanation is that you really need both. But to really make a long lasting footprint in a world of distracted users, relevance has grown to be more critical than just getting eyeballs. It’s moving into getting the right eyeballs.
An influencer being measured by the number of followers is becoming less important than the quality of their followers. Things to consider, are their followers also loyal to their multi-platforms? Are they a reflection of who the influencer is or are they a reflection of who the audiences aspire to be? Does the audience react positively, negatively or are they neutral to when an influencer collaborates with a brand?
Start by looking deeper into the influencers’ you want to work with measuring success with relevance over reach.
2. Your Brand = Legacy
The cry for genuine, long lasting content created between influencers is more in demand than ever before. It’s time to make content that lasts beyond just a ‘shout-out’ on YouTube or Instagram. It’s time to create real stories.
Influencers are pushing the envelope and becoming the drivers of brand identity, equity and ambassadors. They are their own brands and are powerful partners to creating a long lasting legacy. Think of your next influencer campaign one as a two sided story, leveraging the influencer’s existing brand to build a legacy for your own.
The ability to see these insights with Instagram’s new insights terms is easy, slick and clean.
3. Think About Your Instagram Feed as a Formation
There’s no Beyonce joke in this one. We’ve been preaching to look at your whole Instagram feed as an entire grid, not just singular posts. With the ability to convert your brand page into a business page as one of the reveals, standing out as a united voice is a huge advantage in the busy mind of a consumer. Who do we praise for doing this really well? Look at examples like Michelle Phan, who uses color a unifying voice, Herschel Supply Co, who uses a muted color palette coupled with framing each image and composition to complement their full grid are great examples we ❤.
4. Predictions
Welcome to the era of the groundswell. It’s the going to be a push towards accessing influencers with tighter audiences, it will be less about the allure of having a ‘large following’ and more attention will shift towards influencers with a focussed, even at times, smaller following. The balance will be that they will still be creating beautiful content despite their size.
The challenge will be how to work with multiple smaller influencers to achieve that scale, how to make influencer marketing as accessible as DoubleClick did for ad-words.
5. Upcoming Potential Instagram Features
We’ve listed a couple throughout this post but here’s the full reveal:
• Boosting Posts: Pretty self explanatory, similar to Facebook, boosting popular posts on Instagram. Some marketers question if we’ll end up in a similar situation with Facebook where this becomes the only efficient way to reach your followers.
• Organic Insights: The upcoming analytics interface from Instagram look pretty sweet. It looks like a regular or paying user will have access to their posts’ data.
• Convert to Business: Like Facebook, Instagram will be pushing users to distinguish their profiles from personal and business. It may give business owners the ability to view insights and engage in paid ads that wouldn’t be available to a regular personal user.
We have our fingers on the pulse of the influencer economy and it’s a thrilling ride. We’re a fast-growing team at a venture-backed SaaS startup that has worked with thousands of influencers, hundreds of brands, in multiple countries in all under 12 months, we’re excited to see what the next wave of change takes us.
