With its many pluses, Instagram is perhaps the clear choice for marketers to focus on building their brands and promoting e-commerce sales. However, for those who are just starting with a new business, the process of expanding reach, creating brand awareness, and driving traffic to the website or e-commerce platform can be quite long and frustrating. Engaging Instagram influencers can give brands the reach and credibility almost instantaneously giving them a head start in e-commerce sales. However, to achieve success, it is essential that the profile of the influencer is suitable for your brand and that the influencer’s followers are the right target audience. Some useful tips for identifying the best Instagram influencers for boosting your e-commerce revenues:
Stay Focused on Your Business Goals
Before you undertake an influencer hunt and start scanning metrics like the number of followers and the rate of engagement, you must evaluate why you are at all undertaking an influencer marketing campaign. Typically, these could be boosting sales or leads, increasing brand awareness or even growing the number of your followers. The selection of the influencer will depend on the objective of the campaign because the influencer will need to be adept in the tactics required to achieve the goal. It is also very important that the influencer has a proper alignment with the identity of the brand; otherwise, you will end up with a low ROI.
Make Sure That the Engagement Is Genuine
One of the most important metrics that influencer potential is measured by is the engagement rate. According to https://www.mobilemarketer.com, influencers with a minimum of 10,000 followers deliver an engagement rate of 3.6% averagely, while micro-influencers with followers for Instagram of less than 5,000 clocks up a rate as high as 8.8%. However, the accounts of influencer must be scrutinized to establish if the rates of engagement are genuine. Typically, a large number of likes without any comments or comments that are very general, often only with emojis, indicate that the engagement is fake. Real engagement involves personal statements, questions, and tagging of friends.
Explore Brand-Related Hashtags
Rather than engaging influencers who may be total strangers to your brand, it is better to partner with those who are already involved with your brand because they will be the best people to promote your brand. Extremely popular hashtags may be enticing; however, using these to locate influencers would generally be a complete waste of time due to the heavy volumes of posts. The more specific your hashtag is, the better the quality of results, however, the number of potential influencers can dip dramatically. It is a good tactic to search with hashtags that describe your target audience or the brand. Following #sponsored or #ad hashtags can be a good idea to identify potential influencers within your niche.
Use Influencer Platforms
If you don’t have the time to invest in manual search methods, you can take advantage of an influencer marketing platform that will help you to locate the right influencers with just a few mouse clicks. You can specify the number of followers, follower demographics, as well as experience to identify influencers of your choice as well as undertake complete campaigns management on the platform itself with complete control over every aspect, including budgets.
Conclusion
Using influencer marketing on Instagram to boost brand awareness and e-commerce revenues are fast becoming the order of the day to get ahead of intense competition and save on the lead time. However, the entire investment can be wasted if you don’t identify the right influencers.
