Instagram is one of the most popular social networks. Today, there are over 1 billion monthly active users in the world. At the end of 2020, Instagram’s advertising audience in Russia amounted to 55.4 million people. Bloggers choose this platform because of its high engagement, with an average of 2.2%, which is 18 times higher than Facebook.
It can be difficult for brands to find the right approach in communicating with their target audience. The modern consumer is very picky, he sees too many ads, which he has already ceased to trust. Therefore, companies are increasingly using influencers in their marketing strategies.
Why work with bloggers
Promotion through bloggers has several advantages over targeted advertising:
- Bloggers are perceived by the audience as authoritative sources of information. The content they create attracts attention, and the opinions of the leaders are listened to and trusted. For the user, a recommendation from an influencer equals a recommendation from a friend or family member. And this, of course, is a huge plus for the brand – it gives the opportunity to advertise itself not only to the subscribers of the brand, but also to their friends and acquaintances. By partnering with influencers who have the right audience and support brand values, the brand becomes closer to its potential customers.
- A blogger can create great content related to a company’s product. Moreover, he will make it much more native, since he works in his own visual style, to which subscribers are already accustomed. The company’s marketers only need to tell as much as possible about the goods or services sold by the company, and provide creative freedom to make the content the most interesting.
- The target audience. Subscribers of a particular blogger are a loyal audience interested in the topic of the account that the blogger is talking about.
It’s important to choose your strategy
To properly implement an effective blogger campaign on Instagram, you need a solid strategy.
First of all, you need to determine the goals and highlight the key performance indicators (KPI), which will determine how successful the strategy is. The most common goals of a campaign are to increase brand awareness or engagement, follower numbers, and reach.
In addition, technology has made it possible to track how bloggers are driving sales. Many companies are convinced from their own experience that cooperation with bloggers has a positive effect on financial performance.
The manufacturer of online cash registers “Evotor” pursued the goal of bringing the brand to top positions among competitors, as well as increasing the sales of its devices. As a result, based on the results of the influencer campaign alone, 252,000 smart terminals were sold, and the company became the leader, occupying 30% of the market.
The large online pharmacy service SBER EAPTEKA set the goal of increasing sales of Strepsils and NUROFEN pharmaceuticals. As a result of cooperation with bloggers, sales growth was 24%.
Target audience is the key to success
An important part of an Instagram campaign is the target audience that the brand is targeting.
The cost of placement with a blogger often depends not only on the number of subscribers, but also on the quality of the audience, the format of integration. With a small budget, it is worth considering cooperation with bloggers with an audience of up to 100 thousand subscribers, the so-called microbloggers.
Often people trust these kind of influencers and listen to their opinions. Advertising in their feed is more perceived as friendly advice. The audience is very loyal, subscribers follow every blog post, they seem to live life with him. Engagement rates are usually much higher compared to over-million bloggers.
But it is important to remember that the right mix of micro-, macro-bloggers and millionaires works most effectively in an influencer campaign. Accounts with large reach provide enough contact with the audience, and with the help of others, you can motivate users to take the necessary actions and reduce the cost of conversion.
How to find bloggers on Instagram
Influencers can be searched for in different ways:
- Manually… The easiest way. But now the number of bloggers in Russian Instagram is more than 200 thousand and it is extremely difficult to find suitable for cooperation manually.
- Specialized exchanges… As a rule, bloggers are gathered there who have agreed to cooperate with the exchange. Cooperation with bloggers through the exchange protects the advertiser from unscrupulous influencers – advertising failure or non-compliance with agreements. However, there are also pitfalls. For example, overpriced placements. Exchanges live on commission and, as a rule, it falls on bloggers, not advertisers. Therefore, opinion leaders inflate the cost when buying advertising through the exchange. You can also find out the statistics of bloggers through the exchange, but the analytics capabilities are limited there. It shows advertising publications and statistics on them: views, likes, comments and engagement. But likes and comments can be increased, and it is important for an advertiser to understand how many comments are left by real subscribers.
- Influencer Marketing Marketplaces… There are special platforms that are powered by big data such as iFluenz and BuzzStream. They provide not only more complete statistics for bloggers, but also allow you to connect with bloggers right on the platform.
- Specialized agencies for working with bloggers… An experienced agency always has the advantage of having accumulated historical data over the course of hundreds of campaigns. Experts, as a rule, know which of the influencers is better to offer for specific tasks, which tools and formats will be more effective. In addition, large agencies have a technological base. For example, HypeFactory technology, thanks to machine learning and computer vision algorithms, is able to find an audience even for niche products, as well as identify bots and fraud with account data. It makes no sense for brands to create their own similar technology: it is expensive and long for a standard corporate volume.
What should be agreed with a blogger in advance
In order for an influencer campaign to be more effective, it is necessary to establish some rules at the very beginning of the work.
Work format… Agree on what you expect from the blogger: review, photo feed or Stories.
Timing… Establish a release schedule. Many bloggers plan the days when they display ads, so it’s worth discussing this in advance.
Content… Provide as much information as possible about the product so that the blogger can use it.
Monitoring and optimization
Constant monitoring is essential for a successful campaign. Keeping track of your campaign progress is a must to achieve your goals. It is necessary to pay attention to the key performance indicators that were identified at the very beginning.
The easiest way is to use Instagram’s internal statistics to track how your reach and engagement metrics are changing. Ask the blogger for post statistics or Stories 24 hours after publication to find out how many people clicked on your link.
You can effectively track purchases thanks to promotional codes. If you provide bloggers with a unique promo code that will give their subscribers some bonuses, you can determine how many of its subscribers have converted into buyers.
For example, in the influencer campaign for SBER EAPTEKA, different promotional codes were created for each blogger on Instagram to track conversions. Thus, it was possible to monitor the number of purchases made during the period of cooperation with bloggers.
Examples of Successful Instagram Blogger Campaigns
Swedish watch brand Daniel Wellington was able to earn $ 220 million thanks to collaboration with bloggers on Instagram. The founder of the company, Philip Tsiander, with $ 15,000 in start-up capital, decided to bet on promotion in social networks and sent watches to microbloggers for free. The only requirement was to place one photo in the feed. In 4 years, the company’s income has increased almost 15,000 times.
The popular clothing brand H&M attracted American fashion blogger Julie Sarinan to cooperation in 2017. She posted on her account, which has more than 5 million subscribers, one post that received more than 66 thousand likes. Thanks to this, the brand was able to advertise the new fall catalog well and increase sales.
The American shoe manufacturer Sperry used a non-standard way to promote it through Instagram. They used a social listening tool to find people on social media who had already posted information about the brand. As such, they partnered with over 100 micro-bloggers to create creative content for the brand’s account.
Instead of a conclusion
Instagram has tremendous potential to meet marketing goals for a variety of businesses. To create a promotion strategy for Instagram, you need to define your goals and then find the right influencers for your campaign.
It is better to create content that will be used in the campaign in conjunction with bloggers, so the posts will be more native. It is also necessary to establish a KPI for the campaign in order to track progress and make adjustments in time.