Influencer Marketing is rising in popularity as more and more businesses and individuals pair up to promote products and services.
It’s a marketing trend that has grown and evolved as brands have seen the benefits of having ambassadors and influences on their side. One of the largest platforms for influencers to exist on is Instagram because of the visual content that brands can share.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a new branch of digital marketing, that sits alongside social media, content and email marketing. It’s a relatively new method of advertising, depending on how you define the term. If anything, the new influencer marketing is simply an update of using cartoon characters on cereal boxes, Santa in the Coca Cola advertisements or getting celebrities to endorse a product. However, with digital marketing backing businesses and companies using influential people to make their audience aware of their brand, it puts a whole new spin on influencing.
Influencer Marketing takes aspects of both old and new ways to market a product or brand. It takes the traditional route of celebrity endorsement and updates it to the new modern era of content-driven marketing campaigns. However, these campaigns usually result in collaborations between brands and potential brand ambassadors. Therefore, social media strategies in Influencer Marketing are aimed at individuals who influence your own target audience.
What are the Benefits of Influencer Marketing?
It also tends to be a lot cheaper and efficient than the other ways of marketing, as marketers won’t have to put large sums of money behind advertisements to gain reach or engagement. Influencer Marketing now exists in a time when people are questioning the aspects of social media and advertising. People are more likely to buy a product or listen to an ad, if it’s been recommended by a trusted friend or relative.
Therefore, people are more likely to trust an influencer, who they see the daily life of on social media.
You can find out more about Influencer Marketing in our article here.
What is a Social Media Influencer?
According to Mediakix, an influencer must be ‘a content creator with a social media following’. They ‘develop a following by sharing high quality content that inspires, entertains, informs, and connects them with their followers’. Finally, influencers should ‘start social conversations, drive engagement, and set trends amongst a receptive audience, which positions them to work with brands on sponsored content.’
Influencers have built their own brand, worked hard to get where they are and are responsible for a lot of people’s trust and their own reputation. You have to make social media influencers believe in your brand, as you want their audience to trust you too. Their audience have to be a similar audience to the customers or clients you want to attract. The influencer will become a voice for your brand, and you have to trust them to get your message out into the world.
You can find out more information on social media influencers in our article on them here.
What’s an Instagram Influencer?
Instagram influencers are just social media influencers that do their marketing on Instagram.
Instagram is one of the best places to advertise because of the vibrant material that can be shared. An influencer can simply take a photo of themselves in your restaurant, upload it to Instagram, and woo-lah – an ad! However, with Instagram you can also use the nifty Stories feature to your advantage too. As the content stays at the top of users feeds for twenty-four-hours, you can encourage an influencer to share a Story as well as a post to get more attention from their audience.
The Story features allow users to swipe up to shop, has a cool hashtag tool and gives influencers the chance to tag a brand and location.
What are the Benefits of Instagram Influencing?
Advertising on Instagram already has lots of benefits in itself because of the high engagement rate the social media platform receives from users. You can also get user-generated content too, especially if you encourage your audience to share and tag you in posts with them using your product or service.
The objectives of Instagram influencers are the same as social media influencers – to attract an audience to engage with your brand and products. The benefits are the same too. Social Media Today identify six big advantages to have an Instagram influencer on your side:
- Influencers let you quickly build trust with an audience because their followers trust them. If it seems the individual trusts you, then you’ll seem more legitimate to their following.
- They help improve brand awareness.
- They help you to enrich your content strategy – and give you a more varied approach to marketing.
- Influencers allow you to effectively reach your target audience.
- They help to provide amazing value to your audience.
- Influencer marketing helps to build winning partnerships.
Does Instagram Influencer Marketing Actually Work?
There’s an influencer for every industry, with individuals in fields such as travel, fashion, fitness and health, baking and cooking and more! And it does work!
Grin have shared their top Instagram Influencer case studies, one being Glossier – a fast growing beauty and skincare start-up! Have you seen their ads on social media yet, because Grin state Glossier were pretty much born out of it? ‘Glossier girls’ have been promoting the range all over Instagram, and targeted micro-influencers with only a thousand or more followers, that when all combined gave Glossier a pretty decent sized audience after people were encouraged to follow them! It’s a really good case study that shows that slow and steady really does win the race. You need to know that you’re small and just starting up and utilise a smaller pool of influencers that are more likely to interact, and when combined can produce incredible results!
