Alex DittyFollow these steps to grow your Instagram marketing with influencers.
Influencer marketing on Instagram is a valuable asset for your social media activations. Implementing influencers into your Instagram marketing strategy will help you reach a new, targeted audience with your promotions. Today’s influencers are the tastemakers of the social web, defining the experiences that your consumers are living and deciding the products that they will buy. And most importantly, influencers can share about your brand in a more authentic way that will yield positive results.
We’ve expressed the value of these programs before, bringing marketers returns of “$ 6.50 in earned media value for every $ 1.00 of paid media,” but this value is best seen when you’re following the right process for your influencer campaigns on Instagram. Creating, implementing and analyzing every aspect of your campaign will help you prepare for social media marketing success. This is done when you go into the campaign with the right resources and a thoughtful and trusted partner. By launching a campaign with the Snapfluence network, you can trust that all of the necessary phases of the campaign will be thought out and executed properly. To help activate your next Instagram influencer campaign, we’ve outlined all of the stages of a successful influencer promotion.
Define a campaign plan & strategy
The first step to any successful campaign is to determine what it is that you want to promote and how you’re going to do it. Any influencer campaign is only as effective as the plan and strategy that is laid out for it. In order to plan a successful influencer campaign, you’ll need to get familiar with all of the details that go into smart campaigns. Influencer personas, posting style, and posting timeline are just some of the aspects to consider when planning your campaign. The strategy that you define here will have an impact on all of the other phases moving forward with your campaign’s planning, execution, and analysis.
Refine influencer characteristics
When you have the campaign plan & strategy in place, now you’ll begin to build the characteristics of the influencers who will be necessary to fulfill this execution. Refining these characteristics will be paramount to your campaign’s success. The authenticity that’s created from influencer promotions is only achieved when the message is being communicated by the right influencers to the right audience. Authenticity between the influencers and your brand promotion comes from their followers’ expectations. The influencer is sharing content that their followers expect and look to that influencer to see. Understanding who you’re trying to reach and what influencers are currently reaching those individuals is what will create a successful campaign for your brand. Snapfluence excels in these goals since it isn’t limited to a finite network. With industry leading analytics, SEEN & Snapfluence are able to scour through Instagram to find the right influencers to engage your audience.
Create campaign #hashtag to drive discovery
The hashtag that the campaign revolves around is one of the most important aspects that determines its success. This is what centers all of the sharing from the influencers and the community that gets involved. It may seem simple, but this isn’t a step to take lightly. The hashtag you create can mean the difference between a successful campaign and an underachieving one. Consider the goals of the campaign when creating your hashtag and make sure that the promotion follows the most up-to-date FTC guidelines. If the campaign is a sweepstakes or a contest, it needs to be labeled as such. Make the hashtag short and simple yet unique to your brand and the promotion. Following these tips will help you create the right hashtag for your campaign, which will lead to increased sharing from your community.
Devise posting guidelines
Successful influencers have a large following that interacts with the content they share for a reason. They know what to post and how to engage their community. But when you’re getting these influencers involved in a promotion for your brand, you need to make sure that they’re communicating your brand in the proper ways. By creating posting guidelines for the influencers, you’re giving them the ability to share the way they know best but within your brand’s appropriate communication and messaging. This is what keeps the campaign focused as well as helps participants get involved in the right ways. Snapfluence is a helpful partner for this phase because of extensive experience working with top brands on Instagram campaigns.
Brand + Influencer matchmaking
With the influencer personas and the proper sharing guidelines in place, you can begin the recruitment process to find people who match those details. The recruitment and matchmaking is critical to determining if they’re a good fit for your brand’s promotion. A successful and authentic campaign depends on alignment between the influencer, their audience, and your brand. This is what drives the authenticity. The matchmaking process though can only occur once the influencer recruitment is completed, which can be a cumbersome process if you try to do it yourself. Manually searching for the right influencers is an exhaustive and incomplete process. Smart social media marketers who’ve experienced this process know that it’s often more efficient and effective to work with influencer networks like Snapfluence for the recruitment and matchmaking process.
Delivery of branded swag/materials for influencer packages
The next step in your process is to send the influencers the promotional materials and swag that they’ll be sharing to promote the campaign. Sometimes sending product may not be applicable for your campaign but when there’s an opportunity to have your product in the influencers’ hands then you need to take advantage of it. This will play into the campaign’s authenticity and helps with your overall sharing.
Create & manage the posting schedule
The posting schedule is often the most overlooked aspect of the influencer campaign planning. Although, when you take the time to plan who will be posting when, you can better anticipate the viral growth of the campaign and create bumps in sharing and awareness. In some cases, you’ll want to overload the sharing with all of the influencers posting at once in hopes of building a trend on Instagram. In other cases, you’ll want to spread out the sharing in order to even out who is being reached and better guarantee the spread of the messaging. Consider your campaign’s goals and the strategy to build a posting schedule that achieves your desired results.
Coordinate file transfer of images
One of the biggest advantages of running an influencer campaign is the content creation from the influencers. These are targeted individuals who know how to share content that your community will want to interact with. You don’t want to leave this visual content to a single use on Instagram. Rather, leverage it on your website and in future marketing initiatives with full rights transfer. In all Snapfluence campaigns, we guarantee full content rights transfer for your campaigns to increase your user-generated content.
Comprehensive auditing and analytics
During the campaign and at its conclusion, you need to be able to answer how you did to achieve the goals you set out for. You want to analyze your efforts to see how everything worked and how the influencers performed. There are key metrics that you’ll need to measure to determine the campaign’s success. The auditing serves the purpose of ensuring that what you wanted to happen, happened. And analysis of these results gives you the opportunity to learn from the campaign to gain insights about your community.
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