I started my IM (Influencer Marketing) journey on Instagram because it is the widely used social media platform in the world.
By adding IM to my overall Instagram strategy, I gained access to a huge number of potential customers.
In the end, all efforts paid off because of the increase in sales and brand recognition.
I want to share my success especially to beginners and those struggling with brand recognition and generating sales.
Here are some tips to master IM on Instagram:
Plan ahead
The first thing that I do is establishing my goals. When establishing a goal, it should answer the “whys” of the campaign.
Once this is done, I move to another aspect – budget. I work with micro-influencers because there are those willing to exchange free products for promotion.
I will soon tell why it is crucial to partner with micro-influencers.
Partner with micro-influencers
Before I explain why it is good to partner with micro-influencers, let me illustrate the three types of social media influencers – celebrities, macro-influencers, and micro-influencers.
Celebrities have more than 1,000,000 followers while macro-influencers have more than 100,000 followers.
Finally, micro-influencers have more than 1,000 followers.
It is good to partner with micro-influencers because of their tight-knit relationship to their audience.
Despite a small number of followers, the average engagement rate of micro-influencers is quite high – 6.7 times more compared to macro-influencers.
Sponsor contests and giveaways
I know that many love free stuff. With this, I sponsor contests and giveaways consistently.
This is how I raise brand awareness and find new customers. By sponsoring such, it can also help with my website traffic.
I actually love engaging with followers.
To make my campaigns known, I work with opinion leaders. These people can effectively sway their followers to join – even if they might not win.
At the end of the day, contests and giveaways will create more emotional connections.
Promote brand through hashtags
Like any IM, I want my user to learn more about my products to increase brand recognition.
By maintaining a good relationship with my influencers, I try to reach out and collaborate to promote a unique hashtag for a particular campaign.
The influencers can boost engagement rate by encouraging the followers to use a unique hashtag.
I always keep in mind that the more hashtag, the more popular my brand will get.
Since I am keen on sponsoring contests and giveaways, I incorporate hashtags in my contests.
The influencers will then incite excitement by mentioning my contest together with the rules.
Schedule social content
The influencers will share the content together with my branded hashtag. If I don’t care enough, I will just let it be.
However, it is crucial that I keep tabs on all the new posts. To help me, I use tools that helped me greatly in staying on top of the content.
I enjoy uncovering all the videos and photos containing my branded hashtags.
It is also important to schedule posts. I discovered that this makes my life less stressful especially during the holiday season.
By scheduling my posts, it gave me the chance to spend more time actually engaging with the community.
Final words
Before anything, I took a step back and carefully considered my approach.
This helped me put together a strategy to increase potential sales and boost brand recognition.