Ingredients of an Instagram Influencer Marketing Campaign

Instagram is now the real winner of the global network. Being started as a photo sharing platform now this social media is a powerful tool for earning money and getting worldwide fame. And the best way to get the most out of it is to be a famous blogger with a million-strong audience. But what if you have no time to win tons of loyal subscribers thousand by thousand? What if you promotions via Instagram Ads don’t take the expected effect? There is a workable solution: try influencer marketing.

It takes more efforts than creating ads in Ads Manager. But if you are ready to research the market (can take really a lot of your time), negotiate with influencers (some reliable, some not) and pay for the result (often uncertain) — you’re welcome to join and try this strategy.

So, how to organize a perfect ad campaign with Instagram influencers without getting mad?

First of all, determine the goals of your campaign. Every promotion needs to have an objective and your Instagram influencer marketing is not an exception. Are you looking to increase your brand awareness, extend your reach, generate high-quality leads or create buzz about new products, offerings, and services? Keep in mind that you not only have to define your purposes, but also should make them measurable (for example, you wish to have 150 extra leads per week). And, of course, approve your budget. After that it will be much easier to understand which blogger could be the most appropriate candidate for your promotion and what kind of content exactly they have to create for you.

The next step is the audience. Clarify who is your target audience in general and for your campaign objective in particular. Keep that in mind while searching for a right influencer and note for the next time the influencers who are not suitable for the actual campaign but are fit for your wide target audience. Learn more about how to determine your target audience in our article: “Target Audiences and Where to Find Them?”

The next step is to find the influencers whose followers are your target audience. Sounds simple, isn’t it? In fact, it will take some time. And we warn you at once: don’t select influencers only because of their popularity. 1000 loyal fans are better than 500 000 “ghosts”, so don’t forget to evaluate their level of influence over their followers. Check out the ratio of total amount of subscribers to the average number of likes in the post, compare results obtained from different Instagrammers and choose the best candidates.

Other important parameters which are worth to be examined for every potential influencer: engagement rates, post aesthetics, history of working with brands, expertise, interests or specializations. If it’s important for your brand to be promoted in a certain region pay attention to the geo of a blogger. We recommend to use discount codes for promotion via influencers. It can be an effective strategy especially if boosting sales is one of your main goals.

So you’ve chosen a blogger, discussed the cooperation and approved the content. You campaign is live and running. To see what’s going on with your campaign you don’t need to wait for it to end. Use several metrics to measure potential success of your campaigns. This can be:

• Influencer-specific discount codes. Count the number of times each code is used.
• Referral links. Measure all the clicks and successful conversions for your links.
• Engagement. Request the data from the blogger if it’s an Instagram Story post or check the number of engagements for yourself if it’s a public post.
• New followers. Check the number of new followers of your channel.
• New customers or purchases. You can track conversions to sales when you have an appropriate ad campaign objective.

Monitor these parameters during and after promotion and correct all you need in time. Be ready for possible problems with bloggers because influencer marketing is the new sphere where you can encounter fraud, uncertain pricing, complicated transactions, etc. Influencer marketing is extremely powerful strategy, but it takes too many resources to gather all the information, to analyze the efficiency and to negotiate the adequate price with some social media “stars”.

All these problems could be solved by SocialMedia.Market. Beta-version of our platform will be launched this February. It is a unique decentralized solution that will simplify the maintenance of influencer advertising campaigns and provide a complex set of tools to resolve the current issues of influencer marketing. Read more about SocialMedia.Market here: https://goo.gl/FMJjVU