Influencer Marketing With Instagram

  on Jun 6th 2018  

In this article, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about using Instagram for influencer marketing campaigns. We will take a closer look at all the features this social media platform offers and provide insight into how you can best use it for your next campaign.

An Introduction to Instagram

The likelihood that you haven’t heard about Instagram is small, but we still thought it would be good to go over the basics.

Instagram is an image-based social media platform that’s owned by Facebook and has been rapidly growing for the past few years. Every user has their own profile where they can write a short description about themselves and link to one website. Other than that, this social media is only images accompanied by text.

Generally speaking, Instagram attracts a younger crowd in their early twenties to mid-thirties and compared to most other social media the level of engagement is huge.

All of these factors play an important part in why Instagram is so good for influencer marketing. Firstly, the image based format is perfect to sell products and lifestyles, and it provides opportunities to be creative. Secondly, the younger user base is good to market online products and e-commerce stores to since they often feel comfortable with this media. Lastly, the high engagement means big reach which in most cases means you can sell a lot of products.

In other words, Instagram is a win-win-win situation for influencer marketing strategies.

Running Ads on Instagram

The focus of a social media influencer campaign on Instagram is images which in most cases requires you to have a product that can be sold via pictures. However, the beauty of influencer marketing is that you don’t have to produce the content. Instead, your job is to find good influencers that can reach your target group, which we can help you with - see more here. Then you provide them with your product and let them do the creative work.

You see, these influencers have gotten to where they are because they are good at what they do. They also know exactly what their followers want. So instead of you having to pay to create good content, you should let the influencer take care of it.

Image to Text Ratio

One important thing to remember with Instagram is that you should try to keep text limited. People use Instagram to share pictures, and many times long sections of text can come off as spammy or be distracting. Because of this, we suggest you keep the text to a bare minimum and let the image sell your product.

That being said, you need to tell your potential clients something about the product, and you want the influencer to share their thoughts on it. You also have to make sure that the influencer links to your product the right way, which brings us to our next point.

Using Links on Instagram

Instagram is different from other social media platforms in the sense that every account is only allowed to share one clickable link. This link can be put in the profile section of every account, but there is no way for you to link directly from a post.

Sometimes this creates a problem with influencers since they tend to link to their own blogs and e-commerce stores from their profile, but in most cases, they are okay with adding your specific link on their profile while you’re running the campaign. Just don’t expect them to leave it there for forever.

We always advise our clients to use unique links for each influencer during campaigns since it makes it easier to track how everyone is performing. Using unique and traceable links is a part of all our strategies since data-driven influencer marketing is what we do best.

Instagram Videos

You can choose to upload videos on Instagram instead of images, but it is not as common, especially not for influencer marketing. If you’re into video content, there are other social media platforms that are much better suited for that. However, it’s good to know about it in case you need to use it at some point.

Influencer Marketing with Instagram Stories

Aside from regular image posts, Instagram provides another content format. This is called Instagram Stories, and it’s based on videos instead of an image. The idea is that users can upload short videos to their “story” and 24 hours later the video is automatically removed.

It’s a very popular format that originates from Snapchat and can be found on Facebook as well. Although, nowhere is it quite as popular as it is on Instagram.

In our opinion, there are two ways one can use Instagram Stories for influencer marketing.

  1. Influencers use their stories to tell their followers that they have uploaded a new post that they should check out.
  2. Influencers can also use the story format to actually sell and promote your products as a part of the campaign.

For obvious reasons, the second method is the most effective in a campaign, but this is something you’ll have to work out for each campaign and influencer.

Swipe up

Remember how we said that you can only use one clickable link per account on Instagram? Well, that’s not entirely true. In 2017 a new feature was added to Instagram Stories and most people refer to it as the “Swipe Up” function.

The feature lets influencers link to a URL in the story and users can go directly to the link by swiping up on their screen. This has resulted in many brands using Instagram stories to promote products with a text on the screen saying “Swipe up to learn more,” “Swipe up to purchase,” or something similar.

As you might imagine, the Swipe up feature is very resourceful and it can create a lot of engagement when used correctly.

Instagram Stories: Formats and Filters

Instagram Stories also come with a large selection of video formats and filters that can be used to engage your potential customers further. Most influencers are experts at using these in the best way possible, and we recommend that you leave the filter part to them.

Recap of Influencer Marketing on Instagram

Instagram is the most popular and effective social media platform for influencer marketing for several reasons. Since the platform is completely based on images and videos, it is easy to sell products. It also happens to attract a user group that is used to interacting and shopping online, but more importantly is that Instagram has the highest engagement of all social media.

Instagram also has an innovative video format called Stories which can help take your campaigns to the next level while boosting engagement

This collection of features creates the perfect conditions for social media influencing and that is why we at Beatly almost only work on this platform. In fact, we say you have to use Instagram if you want to reach good results with your marketing strategy. And if you want your results to be amazing you should consider letting us help you with your Instagram influencer marketing.

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