As reported on Medium:
“There is no denying that Instagram has become a powerful marketing tool for organizations of all sizes to obtain new business. Whether it’s a small boutique or a Fortune 500 enterprise, the platform puts everyone on an even playing field to promote their services, products, and events.
Instagram is synonymous with influencer marketing; the platform would be nothing without its tastemakers in different niches bringing their personality and exuberance to the visual medium. It’s these creative, efficient influencers that find unique ways to vouch for products that they believe in.
Whether you are already working with influencers or are just building your Instagram influencer network, it’s important to ask yourself if you’re being strategic with the way that you’re building out your brand’s influencer program.
Here are some tips, tactics, and strategies to get a 10x return on your Instagram Influencer Marketing Program:
What is an Instagram Influencer Program?An Instagram Influencer Program is a system for brands to organize all of their influencer outreach, paid partnerships, distribution of products, payments, and work on campaigns that will enable businesses to have a scalable influencer strategy.
An Example of an Instagram Influencer Software by KishoreHaving a successful IG Influencer Program comes down to selecting influencers that will engage your target audience. This can get tricky, especially if you work in a niche area. You will have to source influencers that have a decent reach, an engaged audience, and are experts or thought leaders in your space.
Once you’ve selected influencers, create strong relationships with them. Establishing rapport and keeping the lines of communication open will help them understand that they are working with a brand that genuinely wants them to be an ambassador.
It is important to know that most influencers have friends promoting products too, so asking them to recruit other influencers is a more organic way of growing your influencer network.
Important Instagram Influencer Program KPIsOnce you have picked your influencers out, it’s a matter of creating and managing the campaigns that you’d like to run. Before getting started with campaigns, lay out your marketing strategy goals based on KPIs:
Total Revenue — Total revenue brought in from an Instagram influencer campaign.Revenue Per Unique Influencer — Amount of revenue from specific influencers.Unique Hashtag Impressions — use a hashtag that’s unique to the company and brand to measure the overall growth of a tag.Audience Growth — though some may see followers as a vanity metric, it’s still a good way to measure your account’s popularity on the web.Cost Per Click — if you are using a UTM link, you’ll be able to see how many clicks are brought in from influencers to your page.Conversion — Signing up for a newsletter, or completing the goal of your influencer campaign.Cost Per Acquisition — Total cost per acquisition.Customer Lifetime Value — the potential value of a customer the total amount of revenue brought in during the period that they’re your customer.How to Increase Your Brand’s Instagram Engagement RateIf you’re looking for an organic way of boosting engagement, keep your posts looking clean, unique, and post consistently. Your social media guidelines should be a part of your brand identity, have your guidelines on-hand that you can provide for your team, and if needed, your influencers.
These Instagram Engagement Benchmarks are Provided by IconosquareA couple of quick ways to improve engagement and get you more likes and follows:
Engage with similar accounts and influencers in their posts.Always reply to comments as soon as possible.Track the best time to post for your account — scheduling tools have this optionCreate more stories and use hashtagsPost photos of people — photos with faces get 38% more likesAsk the influencers in your IG influencer program to help improve engagement by pointing back to your site in stories and posts. Having an influencer reshare a post of yours on their story will improve the likeliness of getting a user to go back and like your posts and follow your account.
How to Use and Manage Affiliate Links and Promo CodesAffiliate marketing gives an influencer (and consumers) the ability to earn a commission by promoting a company’s products. Setting up an affiliate campaign is fairly simple, you can distribute a unique URL that influencers can promote throughout their posts.
Using affiliate links is a safer approach to influencer marketing, being that it’s easy to implement (with the right program), and affiliates are typically paid a percentage off the amount of purchases through their referral.
It’s best to use affiliate links in different influencer marketing campaigns — whether it’s a contest, giveaway, or a single post that mentions the brand and product; it’s an excellent way for your brand to gain exposure and have influencers start introducing their followers to your brand. If you’d really like to get the most out of having influencers use affiliate links, have them offer promo codes in their posts.
Promo codes are a great way to improve the number of purchases from an influencer post. If you’d like to use them make sure to keep them short, easy to remember and spell, relevant to the individual influencer, and you are able to track them properly.
If you’d like to easily manage affiliate links and promo codes, use an IG influencer software that allows you to track these initiatives. One of the benefits of using an influencer tool is that you’ll be able to set up, track, and influencer’s in one interface. Your brand will have the ability to reach out and communicate with a segment of influencers to push out promos.
Using an influencer tool for these types of campaigns is a surefire way to track the ROI of your influencer marketing campaigns, help influencers gain more trust from their followers, and increase brand awareness and conversions.
How to Increase eCommerce Sales with your Instagram Influencer CampaignsWith the right Instagram Influencer strategy, you’ll be able to generate buzz for your brand and obtain more impressions along with potential customers.
Instagram users now have the ability to shop straight from Instagram — thanks to the growing popularity of social commerce all of the features that are a part of the new and improved IG Shop.
So now, you can run campaigns with influencers to create posts that contain “product tags” — these tags allow customers to be redirected to your eCommerce store directly from the post.
If your audience doesn’t want to make the purchase the first time around, you can use pixels for retargeting ads to promote the product throughout the web and get a purchase down the road.
Another effective way to have influencers bump up eCommerce sales is by having them use promo codes. The use of promo codes can help with seeing which influencers drive the most sales, along with finding out which products work with their respective audience.
No matter what campaign you run, you should start seeing a bump in engagement with your brand’s account. Expect to see more followers and likes on your posts from running influencer campaigns.
What is Social Commerce and How to Use ItSocial Commerce is the ability to sell products through different social media networks.
An excellent example of using social commerce as a part of your influencer marketing program is using the features available via Instagram Shop. IG Shop makes it easy for brands, eCommerce stores, and direct-to-consumer brands to collaborate.
Social Commerce MockupSimply having influencers tag your products, brand, and pages will lead people back to your site to complete a purchase.
The fact that Instagram has enabled brands to partner with influencers within recent years has shown value that influencers have brought to the platform. Giving them the ability to list products from brands is helping brands drive people back to their website to view products.
Shopping directly on social media sites is easier than ever
So why is using social commerce valuable?Well, internet users spend an average of 142 minutes per day on social networks a day. It gives you 2 and a half-hour window to reach your customer via your brand’s account, IG ads, and through the influencers.
Now that people can shop on-the-go and around the clock, it’s vital that you do your best to repeatedly get in front of a consumer’s device by using individuals that they already trust.
It’s worth noting that this was done before the rise of the Corona Virus*In today’s marketing landscape companies and influencers don’t just sell products; they are in the business of gaining trust with a community. Having a tactical communication strategy will influence how your brand is perceived by consumers.
Increase Web Traffic and Drive More eCommerce SalesThis is pretty much a rule of thumb for all marketers: the more web traffic you can drive to your site, the more sales you are likely to have.
When you are using Instagram, or any marketing channel, the goal should be to create a wide funnel of people that might be interested in your products then drive them through a frictionless sales experience.
Once you perfect your Instagram strategy and improve your engagement numbers, you’ll start seeing more traffic driven to your site. Utilize services like Google Analytics or your store’s web analytics to see how the traffic navigates through your website and its offerings.
With that information, you should be working on improving your site’s experience, and finding a good process for individuals to easily make a transaction.
Website Analytics by Maria BorysovaHere are a couple of tips to start monetizing a site once influencers start brining you traffic!
As seen with many brands, you can easily create a strategy that is centered around driving traffic to your website. If you keep on improving the aforementioned KPIs and keep making improvements to your influencer strategy.
The more influencers promote your product and campaigns you run, the more traffic you’ll gain, and (if you’ve perfected your site’s UX), the more new and returning buyers you’ll obtain.
Have You Perfected Your Instagram Influencer Strategy?This post highlighted some of the ways that you can use Instagram influencers to improve sales, create a buzz, drive more traffic, and engagement to your site and social accounts. Have you started using an Instagram Influencer Program as a part of your marketing strategy?
With influencer marketing space about to reach $10Bil, it’s important to have an effective strategy that is both sustainable and scalable.
Let us know what you’re doing and how we can help improve the return on investment on your influencer budget.
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Source: Medium
Author: Jeffrey Fermin
Date: 2020 07 28
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