How Your Instagram Skills Can Help You Win At Influencer Marketing

5 min readDec 18, 2020

We trust people more and businesses less, isn’t it?

Now think of the time you bought something on the recommendation of your friend or colleague. Or the time when you ordered takeout from a restaurant a trusted friend recommended. Needless to say, it is quite natural for people to get convinced and influenced by people they believe in.

This era belongs to social media; from advertisements, product launches to doing business — brands are increasingly switching to social media channels for their marketing.

Instagram has made the conversation between the brands and the consumers even more fluid.

It is, after all, one of the most popular social media platforms and has over 800 million monthly active users,

Spend even a few minutes on Instagram and you will come across an influencer post, video or image that promotes a brand or business. According to research, Instagram sees the most average interactions per post per 1,000 followers. Moreover, 63% of customers trust what people say about brands compared to what brands say about themselves.

These dynamic statistics are one of the driving forces behind the rise of influencer marketing, and it looks like the genie is not going back in the bottle anytime soon.

Here, we are going to discuss how you can get your influencer marketing strategy right on Instagram.

But first up,

What exactly is ‘Instagram influencer marketing’?

According to BigCommerce, influencers are “individuals, bloggers, content creators who are significantly engaged on social media and share their genuine opinion, information on varied topics, products and services.”

Businesses and brands are collaborating with them to tap into their huge followers base. You can also channel your content marketing strategies through their popularity and reach out to a wide category of audience at once.

Imagine if the top Instagrammer/content creator in your field endorses your product or service in front of their massive followers.

Sounds powerful, right?

Time to dissect those Instagram skills and learn the art of influencer marketing.

Getting started with Instagram influencer marketing

1. Set your goals

Know exactly what you want to achieve through the campaign. This will form the base of your marketing strategy.

Identify your marketing goals, whether it is to promote a product, highlight a new launch, raise campaign awareness, increase sales, drive more traffic or talk about product upgrades. Your plan can vary depending upon the requirements of your marketing campaign.

This is essential because identifying your clear goals will help you define the performance metrics that will be used in your campaigns — shares, engagement, posts saved, reach, and impression.

Image Courtesy: linqia.com

Pro tip: ‘engagement’ is the most important factor to measure the effectiveness of influencer marketing strategy on Instagram.

2. Be Picky with the Influencers

Okay, so once you have determined what your goals are, suss out the influencers that you want to collaborate with. The idea is to choose ‘brand-relevant’ influencers whose work aligns and blends well with your products.

Consider the niche or area of speciality. What topics do they cover? Would that go well with your product? Also, take into account the reach of your ideal influencer. Is their content hitting the right target? Are they able to target the right customers?

This will help you plan out your engagement parameters and see if it is worth choosing that particular influencer for your marketing campaign.

You can consider several other factors to decide who will endorse your brand, like:

Go through their comments section to see the quality of engagement.
Check if they are able to generate real conversions.
Use tools like iFluenz and BuzzStream to automate the process of influencer research.

Pro tip: Don’t follow a scattergun approach and choose every influencer you stumble across.

Image Courtesy: Instagram

Adidas collaborating with Selena Gomez for their ‘youth-based’ influencer-driven social media marketing campaign.

3. Send a good pitch

Marketing is no longer about the stuff you make, but about the stories you tell. ~ Seth Godin

Instagram influencers are passionate about what they do, so before starting with the marketing campaign, aim to create a connection with them. Show interest in the content they produce and engage with it. And tell an inspiring story about why they should endorse your product.

A yawn-inducing pitch and weak proposal will take you nowhere. So, ‘influence the influencers’ with a kind and clear pitch, a real good product story and make strong connections with them. Moreover, no one wants to go down a one-way street so show them how is it that they stand to benefit from your campaign.

4. Design your campaign

After deciding which influencer you want to work with, it’s time to determine how is it that you will work with them. Clearly communicate the deadlines and all requirements that need to be met.

Also, clearly define your content expectations.

Do you want photos featuring your brand and mentions or do you expect them to create how-to videos, additional promo ‘15-seconds reel’ and so on?

Pro tip: Don’t design the entire promotional campaign by yourself. Give the influencers enough creative freedom to experiment with the content.

Case study: Influencer marketing on Instagram

Alpro x Kate Spiers

Model Kate Spiers creates regular content that is related to food, fashion and lifestyle. Alpro collaborated with Kate to promote their alternative yoghurt products.

Kate made a beautiful promotional aesthetic for Alpro, where she positioned the product in the midst of her breakfast spread. She even posted a quick recipe of her breakfast which included the ‘Alpro’ product, thereby subtly promoting it.

Image Courtesy: Instagram

Wrapping up

Instagram is a strong marketing tool that can boost your brand reach and sales exponentially, if used properly. To conduct a successful influencer marketing campaign, determine your goals at the very beginning and choose the influencer that aligns with your product well.

No campaign is complete without progress tracking. Thus, make sure to set KPIs and follow all results from the campaign. Also, put in efforts to communicate your vision to the influencers effectively. And lastly, maintain a creative balance and let the influencers come up with their ideas and experiments.