What Is Instagram Influencer Marketing?

Instagram influencer marketing is a valuable promotional option. Let’s explore what it is and how it works.

What Is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing involves companies partnering with social media influencers, bloggers, podcasters, and other people who have a significant online presence and follower base. Influencer marketing is valuable to companies because it helps them promote their products or services in a unique way that is more relatable to consumers.  

What Is An Instagram Influencer?

An Instagram influencer is someone who has a substantial and engaged following on Instagram. They are able to influence the opinions, behaviors, and purchasing decisions of their followers due to their perceived expertise, authenticity, or aesthetic appeal within a specific niche. Through creating engaging content and participating in strategic collaborations, Instagram influencers promote brands, products, or causes to a diverse audience.

What Is Instagram Influencer Marketing?

Instagram influencer marketing campaigns involve companies collaborating specifically with Instagram influencers to promote products and services to Instagram users in exchange for compensation and sometimes free products. Instagram provides an excellent opportunity for influencer marketing, since influencer promotional posts on Instagram are affordable while still providing a lot of reach and engagement.  

What Is An Instagram Influencer Campaign?

An Instagram influencer campaign is a popular marketing strategy in which brands collaborate with creators on Instagram to promote their products or services. These campaigns involve influencers creating and sharing content that showcases the brand’s offerings in an authentic and engaging manner. The goal of these campaigns is to influence the creator’s dedicated follower base to try the brand’s offering. These campaigns often utilize a series of stories, posts, reels, and interactions to maximize the campaign’s impact and engagement.

What Are The Benefits of Instagram Influencer Marketing?

Instagram influencer marketing stands out as a highly effective promotional tool for brands looking to enhance their visibility and connect authentically with their audience. Here are several key benefits:

• Enhanced Brand Awareness: Collaborating with Instagram influencers can significantly boost your brand’s visibility. Influencers’ endorsements help introduce your products or services to a broader, yet targeted, audience.
• Increased Trust and Credibility: Since influencers are often viewed as trusted sources of recommendations, their endorsement lends credibility to your brand. This trust can translate into a higher propensity for their followers to try out your offerings.
• Targeted Reach: Influencers cater to specific niches, making it easier for you to reach your ideal audience without the scattergun approach of traditional advertising. This specificity increases the likelihood of reaching potential customers genuinely interested in your products or services.
• Cost-Effectiveness: Compared to traditional advertising channels, influencer marketing can be more affordable and offer a better ROI, especially when partnering with micro or nano influencers who have highly engaged audiences.
• Diverse Content Formats: Instagram offers a wide range of content formats, including posts, Stories, IGTV, and Reels, allowing influencers to creatively showcase products in various contexts. This diversity can cater to different audience preferences and attention spans, making it easier to convey your brand’s message effectively.
• Established eCommerce Features: Instagram has integrated eCommerce features like shoppable posts, product tags, and a dedicated shopping tab, making it easier for users to discover and purchase products directly within the app. This seamless integration can enhance the shopping experience and potentially increase conversion rates for brands.

What Are the Top 5 Tips for Implementing Influencer Marketing?

There are tips you can follow to implement an Instagram influencer campaign successfully. The top 5 tips for implementing influencer marketing on Instagram are:

1. Be genuine: Successful influencer marketing campaigns are genuine. Working with content creators who genuinely love your products or services is a great way to make influencer promotions feel more trustworthy and natural. 
2. Research your audience: Before starting an influencer campaign, you should research your audience. Knowing your target audience will help pinpoint their specific pain points, wants, needs, and values. This will help you design promotional strategies that speak toward the things your target audience cares about the most. 
3. Allow creativity: Allowing influencers some creativity in marketing campaigns will go a long way toward making advertisements more successful. Influencers typically know their audience better than you do, so allowing creativity will help influencers create promotions that effectively speak to the needs of their audience. 
4. Know your goals: Before you start your marketing campaign, you should know what goals you want to achieve. This will help you create a better marketing strategy so you can determine what posts, influencers, and types of influencer content will be the right fit to get the results you want. 
5. Build relationships with influencers: When you decide to work with an influencer, you should build a relationship with them. A good relationship with an influencer will help them get to know your brand better, leading to better promotions.

Implementing these tips will lead to more effective influencer campaigns that speak to your target audience. 

How to Improve Influencer Marketing?

There are many ways you can improve your Instagram influencer marketing strategy for increased success. The top ways to improve influencer marketing are:

1. Value engagement over volume: When choosing which influencers you would like to work with, looking at engagement over reach can be helpful. Engaged audiences tend to be more loyal and see influencer recommendations as more trustworthy. 
2. Long-term commitments: Long-term commitments in influencer marketing can be beneficial. Audience members don’t always convert the first time an influencer promotes a product. Working with influencers for an extended time can lead to sustained brand awareness that keeps the brand name at the top of consumers’ minds. 
3. Collaborate with influencers: It’s essential to emphasize collaboration with influencers and listen to their feedback to create effective brand promotions. Influencers have built the following they have for a reason, and they will often have great ideas that you should consider. 
4. Innovate: If a certain post or promotional style isn’t working, don’t be afraid to innovate or change things up. One of the benefits of Instagram marketing is there are several types of content you can post. This gives you many options to see what works best for your brand. 

There is always room for improvement in marketing campaigns. These tips will help get your brand on the right track toward successful promotions on Instagram.  

How Do Businesses Work With Instagram Influencers?

Working with Instagram influencers is a valuable way to promote products and services. Businesses and influencers typically work together to find creative ways to promote the brand that will have an impact on the influencer’s audience. When done right, this collaborative effort can make marketing promotions more effective and benefit everyone involved. 

What Are Influencer Strategies?

Influencer strategies involve businesses creating a plan for how they will use influencer promotions to achieve their goals and get a high return on investment. The typical steps to take to create an effective Instagram influencer strategy are: 

• Define the goals you want to achieve.
• Define your target audience.
• Define the characteristics of the right influencers for your brand.
• Reach out to influencers.
• Plan, create, and optimize content.
• Analyze results from influencer promotions, such as Instagram ads, and optimize as you go.

If you want additional help creating an Instagram influencer strategy, Lionize’s influencer marketing software can help with each of these steps. Our artificial intelligence software helps you find the right influencers, manage influencer campaigns, analyze data, and optimize promotions to get the results you want to achieve.

How Do Instagram Influencers Use Marketing?

Typically, Instagram influencers will try to integrate marketing promotions into their normal content, which makes it feel more natural to consumers. Instagram influencers can promote products by:

• Displaying brand logos prominently in their content.
• Creating tutorials for how to use products.
• Giving product reviews.
• Showing how products can be used in daily life.
• Sponsored posts detailing the benefits of the product.
• Providing discount codes or other special offers to their audience.

Different marketing strategies and posts will create different levels of audience engagement. This means that influencer marketing should be tailored toward the results the company wants to achieve from promotions on Instagram. 

How Much Do Instagram Influencers Get Paid?

Instagram influencer pricing is usually $10 per 1,000 followers for a promotional post. That means if a creator has an Instagram account with 10,000 followers, they would make $100 promoting a brand’s content in one of their posts. However, certain influencers can negotiate higher amounts if they have a highly engaged audience or other special characteristics. Micro-influencers tend to be more cost-effective with a narrower niche, while macro-influencers tend to be more expensive and have a wider but more general reach.

Instagram Influencer Marketing Examples

Many companies have seen great results from using Instagram influencer marketing. The following Instagram marketing case studies will outline examples of two popular companies that used this type of marketing and how they were successful. 

Instagram Influencer Marketing Case Study #1 – Warby Parker

Warby Parker is one of the most popular companies in the eyewear industry today. They sell direct-to-consumer glasses that are fashionable and affordable. One of the ways Warby Parker generated brand name recognition and sales is through an Instagram influencer campaign.

Warby Parker’s “Wearing Warby” campaign involved the company partnering with seven micro influencers who had already posted on Instagram about Warby Parker glasses organically. The company targeted influencers who already loved their products because they wanted their influencer advertisements to feel genuine. 

The campaign involved influencers creating posts where they were wearing Warby Parker glasses while doing everyday activities. Whether it was cooking, painting, or going for a hike, the campaign showcased how the brand’s glasses could fit into all aspects of daily life. 

The best part is that this campaign had great results. The results of the campaign were: 

• 800,000 people reached
• 55,000 likes
• 640 comments
• 3.4% engagement rate

This campaign was successful because it felt genuine coming from influencers who had already used the brand and loved it before ever working with Warby Parker. The promotional style also felt more natural than a traditional advertisement, since it involved influencers doing everyday activities that showed how the product could easily fit into someone’s life.  

Instagram Influencer Marketing Case Study #2 – Dyson

Dyson has become one of the most popular vacuum cleaner companies. One of the ways Dyson wanted to improve their marketing strategy was by showing how Dyson vacuums could help pet owners, specifically how they could clean up pet hair and messes created by pets. 

Dyson partnered with five pet influencers on Instagram to generate brand awareness for pet owners. They gave influencers a lot of creative freedom in this campaign, with the one requirement being that posts should be funny while showing how the product could benefit pet owners. 

The campaign did end up being a success in generating brand awareness. The results were:

• Over 1 million views
• 115,000 likes
• 10% engagement rate

What made this influencer campaign successful was giving influencers creative freedom. The creativity led to posts feeling more natural and innovative than traditional advertisements. In addition, the creative and humorous nature of the posts made them more shareable. People sharing posts with friends created more reach and a higher engagement rate. 

Get Started With Instagram Influencer Marketing With Lionize

Lionize can help you get started with Instagram influencer marketing. As one of the most streamlined influencer marketing tools available to brands, Lionize will connect you with the relevant influencers for your needs, provide automation to manage influencer campaigns, and track data, so you can optimize as you go.

You will have everything you need to manage influencer marketing all on one platform. Book a free Discovery Call today to learn more about how Lionize can help you.