What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is the process of utilizing the power of influencers to promote your business. In traditional marketing, you advertise your business by yourself. You are in charge of submitting your website and making sure that your audience knows that you exist.
Why Instagram?
Instagram is the fastest-growing image-based social channel. It introduced a different way of online sharing focusing more on creative imagery. Due to this, the audience of this social channel is different from traditional social media. Instagram influencers are usually more creative and more visually oriented.
How to Grow Your Business with Instagram
Instagram is a great social channel to find influencers. Unlike influencers in other social channels like YouTube or blogs, the influencers on Instagram are less elusive and more open to promotions and offers.
Here are some ways on how you can grow your business using Instagram influencer marketing.
Follow and Engage
It all starts with reaching out to your target influencer. But before you can do that, you have to ensure that you’ll get noticed. The best way to do that is to follow and engage.
STEP 1: Research Your Target Influencers
But you cannot go and just follow anyone who is in your path. You need to ensure that these influencers are relevant to your niche. This is why you do your research. In this step, you look for influencers who will most likely use your products. Their followers should be relevant to your business so that they can bring in leads that are more likely to convert. To do this, you need to have a search system. This can be a simple Google search or following a social media tag or getting free social media analytics tool. This will help you uncover influencers that are relevant to your business.
STEP 2: Follow Them and Look at their Content
Once you have a list of influencers that you like to follow, you’ll want to support them and observe. In this step, you’ll learn as much as you can about your target influencer so that you can give them what they need. Instead of merely going ahead to contact influencers that you found on step one, you look at the content. This way, you can give them an offer that they will not be able to resist.
STEP 3: Engage
Once you have observed their website or social channel, and you now have a clear idea of their content, it is time to engage. In this step, you start to talk to your target influencer. You can do this by commenting on their blog posts or following their social channels. You can also like and share their posts. By doing this, you can let the influencer know that you exist in subtle ways. And if you have a product that interests them, they may just click on your link to visit your site.
Connect
Once you’ve managed to make the first contact, it is time to sustain it. Connecting with influencers is like meeting a new friend. You cannot stop on the first contact. You have to continue the interaction for it to thrive.
STEP 1: Start with a Simple Message
After you have consistently engaged with the influencer’s content, it is time to make a bolder move. This is where you start messaging them either through social messenger or email. You may want to try both for the influencer may prefer one over the other. But don’t message them to promote your products. Message them to connect.
STEP 2: Support Them
As you communicate with your target influencer, be sure that it is apparent that you are there to support them. Not only do you appreciate their posts. You are also there to help them with every piece of content that they put out. Compliment them.
STEP 3: If You Can, Meet Them
Once the friendship is established, you may want to strengthen connections by meeting them. You can offer to see them face-to-face just to exchange ideas. This is an excellent way for them to get to know you.
PRO TIP: Is meeting an influencer too awkward for you? No problem! You can always host meetups instead. In these meetups, you don’t only invite one influencer. You invite several. By doing this, the meetup becomes a way to connect with other influencers. And it becomes less of a meeting between an influencer and a brand.
Join Their Cause
Every influencer has a cause that they support. If you don’t know which one(s), then you haven’t researched them all that well.
STEP 1: Get to Know Them as a Person
It is essential to look beyond the titles and the number of followers and see influencers as people. They are a real person with opinions, likes, and dislikes. They’re in the content business because They have a cause that they support. You have to break the shell and get to know the person inside.
STEP 2: Look at What They Care About
You can get clues on what the influencer cares about by taking a careful look at their content. You can also look at recurring topics in their content. These can give you clues on the issues that they value. Usually, influencers are creating content to become an inspiration to other people. This will provide you with a hint on their cause.
STEP 3: Appeal to Their Cause
Once you find this, it is time to appeal to this cause. You can do this by creating a product or service that will support this cause. You can also think of creative ways to promote this cause while also doing the same to your product and service. Once you do this, the influencer will see you as someone who cares for more than just money. You also care about helping other people. This is often very important to influencers, and it is the reason why they attained their influencer status.
Make Your Offer Unique
You cannot get an influencer to promote you if you are saying the same thing as other businesses. If you do that, your offer will only get ignored. You don’t even need to have a unique product. You just need to make your proposal unique.
STEP 1: Take an Inventory of Your Products and Services
To create a unique offer, you need to know what you can offer. This is where you take inventory of your products and services. So, take a step back and take a look at your current products and services and think about what’s unique about them. Take note of all of these as you proceed to the next step.
STEP 2: Craft a Unique Offer
From your current products and services, you can then create a unique offer. It helps to list all the benefits of your product. Then think about how the influencer will be attracted to it. It also helps to create some events to make your product more appealing. You can start by finding a perfect event venue in Paris, London, Amsterdam, or any other popular hub today.
STEP 3: Communicate Your Offer
Having an offer is one thing, but promoting it is another. You need to know some sales copywriting to properly communicate your offer to influencers. One thing that makes an offer unique is exclusivity. If you make the offer unique to a particular influencer and his followers, the influencer will also be more likely to become interested in the offer.
Aim for Collaboration
The products that are sold online are usually born from collaborative efforts from different people. It is typically a combination of ideas that resulted in a minimum viable product. You can use this concept when working with influencers as well.
STEP 1: Think About How the Influencer Can Help You
It is essential to observe the influencer before you offer them anything. You need to take a step back and take a look at their content. This will help you get some ideas on the products that you can work together. It can give an overview of their skills before you make an offer.
STEP 2: Work Together
Once you get to know an influencer, you can now make your offer. You can ask them to work with you on a product that you are about to release. You can ask for their aesthetic inputs or ask them to design the entire product. This opportunity rarely comes to influencers, so they are far more likely to accept it when it happens.
STEP 3: Ask Them to Share Your Progress
Once you managed to convince an influencer to work with you on a product, you can give them a gentle nudge so that they can share their progress with their followers. Most influencers will do this automatically. You’ll find that they may even share teasers to their followers. This is an excellent way to get an influencer to promote your business. The best part is that they’ll be excited to share this with their followers.
Connect with Followers
It is crucial to not only connect with the influencers. You should also connect with followers. While you may want the influencer to promote your products and services, you need to ensure that your offer is relevant to the target audience.
STEP 1: Get to Know an Influencer’s Followers
If you are trying to get to know an influencer, you may want to know his target audience. The best way to do this is to get to know his followers. You can do this by clicking on his follower list to look at the shares and behavior. You can also look at the comments made on the influencer’s page. This will give you an idea of their interests.
STEP 2: Engage with Them
The best way to understand an influencer’s followers is to talk to them. You can do this by commenting on their social shares or blog posts. This will help you get to know the topics that matter to them and the topics that get the most responses.
STEP 3: Join the Community
You can create laser-targeted offers to an influencer’s target market when you join the community. This will also help you get to know the culture that surrounds the influencer’s brand. You can learn the language for offers that directly speaks to the follower’s needs and wants.
Focus on Your Offer’s Value
You cannot convince an influencer to promote your offer if you don’t know how valuable your offer is. No one will know your products and services as much as you do. If you want to invite an influencer to promote you, you need to know how to communicate your product’s value.
STEP 1: Note Your Products’ Benefits
One of the easiest ways to list your product’s value is to create a list of product benefits. This will help you see how your product plays a role in your customer’s lives. More than the facets or features of the products, think about results that it can achieve or problems that it solves. These are the benefits of your product, and this should be your focus.
STEP 2: Amplify Your Value
Once you have a clear view of your benefits, it is time to amplify your value so that your customers can see it. Your customers will not see your products in the same way you do. So it is crucial to focus on value.
STEP 3: Communicate This Creatively
Now that you know your values, it is time to communicate it. You can do this by not only listing your main benefits but also listing problems that customers can solve and avoid by using your product. It is essential to take a creative approach. You must advertise your brand with an understanding of the influencer and his followers.
PRO TIP: Want to create a rewards-based program for influencers? You can create a referral campaign. Just use referral software like a WooCommerce affiliate plugin to create this. The best part is that it helps to stop shopping cart abandonment as well. Websites like Best Drums Set Labs have done this successfully.
So that’s how you convince influencers to promote your business for you. It is comprised of a careful approach and connection. You have to see it as a way to build relationships and less about promoting for profit. .
Author bio: Arlen Robinson is the co-founder and VP of Business Development at OSI Affiliate Software.
He is also the host of The Ecommerce Marketing Podcast where he discusses marketing strategies with experts from all over the world.
