How To Use Influencer Marketing For Your Business On Instagram
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What is influencer marketing? To better understand it, you need to understand one thing. Traditional media through TV, radio or online banners on websites are on the decline. The reason being that 1, it costs a LOT of money and 2 the user’s behaviour have changed. People can notice an ad from far and will either click to exit, watch on demand TV programs or skip your ad in milliseconds.
Therefore, it is important to understand users behaviour online to better promote your product or service as a brand and save your precious marketing budget as a business.
Users learn about new products or services from other people through online research.
Look at the way you look for information before buying a product. I bet that your best friend is Google and then either you end up watching a Youtube video or reading a blog from an influencer.
Influencer marketing is booming. “In fact, influencer marketing is on pace to become an $8 billion dollar industry by 2020! So if you haven’t started collaborating with influencers to market your business on Instagram, now is the time.”
Lately I have been busy helping a few clients better understand how to leverage Instagram to monetise their accounts. This is part of the services I offer via my Instagram Online Training How To Become An Instapreneur And Turn Your Followers Into Paying Clients.
So if you are just getting started online, do not have a huge following on your account and not thousands of likes for each of your posts, fear not! I will share with you a few ways for you to promote your product or service.
#1 Have a strong product to promote
What matters in business is your product. Nothing less, nothing more. If you have a good product that answers to the need of a large audience, 98% of the job is done! Most entrepreneurs will focus too much time on the marketing aspect. But if your product is not great and your customer on-boarding process is not optimised, do not be surprised for not getting any results.
Focus first on your product making sure that it answers to the needs of a wide audience and put upfront your benefits compared to the competition. Then make the customer on-boarding process as smooth and user friendly as possible. Once it is done, you can start with step 2.
#2 Find the right influencers
Finding the right influencers online to promote your product or service has become way easier than it used to be. Agencies have noticed a huge opportunity to help influencers and most of them would focus solely on finding brand deals for them. So you have several routes to find the right influencers for your business.
Use freelancers to do the job for you. Websites like upwork or Fiverr are great resources to find the right people to do the work for you. For roughly 5 dollars and more depending on the request, someone will take care of doing the job for you.
Leverage Influencers platforms managed by agencies. Most agencies would manage influencers deals. They’d ask the influencers to create their profiles on their platforms and when an offer would come up, they would get in touch with the right influencers. Same principle applies to Businesses. You can create an ad to find the right influencer for your campaign and submit it on their platforms. The agencies will take care of finding the right people for you.
You can do it yourself. I actually wrote a blog post describing the process right here. Make sure to check it out.
#3 Set clear goals
When working with influencers, it is important for you to set clear goals. What is your campaign objective? What are your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)? What do you want the influencer to do exactly? I.e. Create one Instagram post and one Instagram story promoting your product and bring traffic to your online store.
KPI: Number of people clicking on the link that redirect users to your store. Revenue generated. People who downloaded your app. etc...
It should align with your business needs. If you fail to define clear goals, everything that will follow will fall apart, from campaign execution to reporting won’t have real impact and won’t be data you will be able to leverage for the next campaign you will run.
#4 Define the right budget
The main benefit of using Influencer marketing is that it does not require a lot of investment to get a good ROI (Return On Investment) as long as you find the right influencer to promote your product or service.
The campaign budget will mostly depends on the following
Influencer number of followers
Influencer engagement rate per post
Influencer instagram stories number of views
While there is no one-size-fits-all pricing, many digital marketers adhere to the one cent per follower (or $100 per 10K followers) rule, but only as a starting point for their calculation.
You can have a look at this article from Later.com for more information regarding the pricing of influencers.
You might be thinking that you may need hundred thousand of followers to make a living and as a micro-influencer with 10K followers or less you won’t be able to earn enough from your brand deals.
Again it is a matter of perspective and business needs. Brands have noticed that micro-influencers have more engagement from their posts than huge accounts with more than 100K followers. Therefore they would rather work with 10 micro-influencers with 10K followers than 1 influencer with 100K followers because they will be able to reach a wider audience. But once more, it depends on the brand campaign objective.
#5 Track your results post campaign
As mentioned previously, it is important to set clear goals with the influencer you will be working with according to your business needs. If your goal is to generate traffic, make sure to track the number of clicks or visitors to your website. If your goal is to build an email list, make sure to track the number of subscribers. If your goal is to increase your online sales, make sure to track your product revenue generated from your influencer campaign (easy way to do so is to assign a coupon code under the name of the influencer and track sales that used the promo code).
This data you will collect will allow you to not only better understand your customer behaviour, but also the impact of one influencer versus another and help you decide with who you will continue to work with in the future.
There are many benefits to use influencer marketing as a small business
Promote your product to relevant audience
Increase brand awareness
Helps you promote your product on a budget
Helps to build trust and brand recognition
Nowadays, advertising is accessible to anyone, as long as you have a social media account. Then it is just a matter of leveraging it the smart way to benefit from it. Long are the days where you’d need to invest thousands or hundred of thousands of dollars in marketing. Now you can start with a lower budget and scale up your budget according to the results you will get.
I hope that you found this article helpful and that you better understand the opportunity to leverage Instagram influencers for your small business. If you enjoyed this article, make sure to like it, it actually makes a difference.
If you would like to learn all the techniques I have used on Instagram to not only grow my following but also managed to transform my followers into paying clients and monetize my Instagram account, you can join my FREE online training where I break down this exact process.
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