How To Find Influencers To Promote Your Product on Instagram

If you are planning a marketing strategy for your business, you are probably aware that while the traditional advertising might not yet become completely obsolete, it’s certainly losing a lot of ground. The erosion of trust in old-school big-budget overproduced ads has led to the emergence of word-of-mouth as a dominant approach to marketing. The modern consumer is savvy, sees through the gloss, and knows all the tricks that advertisers used to rely on. They are also very likely to do some research online before making a purchase, looking up reviews, testimonials, ratings – basically, a recommendation from a fellow consumer they could trust, someone who shares their interests. And social media influencers have a huge role to play in this. In fact, the majority of consumers in an age group between 18 and 34 have said that their decision making has been impacted by an online influencer. Naturally, most brands have figured this out and are retooling their online marketing strategies to incorporate influencer marketing.

Instagram is one of the social media platforms at the forefront of this trend. The very nature of the content on the app – photos and short videos – makes it a perfect medium for showcasing your product’s features, while the sheer number of users on the platform (around a billion) suggests that your business will almost certainly manage to find their target audience, one way or another. And while your organic reach is probably declining by now, producing content in partnerships with influencers can help you to meet your marketing goals and promote your product on Instagram without causing  dreaded ad fatigue in your audience.

However, identifying influencers who are best suited to relay your brand’s message to the audience requires time, effort, and knowledge – a luxury that a small start-up or a lean, focused business might not afford. How do you proceed then? In this case, Insense is a perfect platform for finding Instagram influencers. Insense is a social media creator marketplace that can turn the hassle of establishing a partnership into a time-efficient, streamlined procedure. But before we dive into how it helps you to find exactly the influencers you are looking for and facilitates your collaboration, let’s take a quick overview of the Instagram influencer marketing landscape in general.

Instagram influencers: macro vs. micro

First thing first, what exactly is a social media influencer? As the name suggests, an influencer is someone who leverages their social media following to, well, influence (shocking, I know) a trend, a lifestyle choice, or a decision to purchase a product or a service.

Some of those influencers are true celebrities, like Ariana Grande, Cristiano Ronaldo, or Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, with millions (or even hundreds of millions) followers. But is such a gigantic reach what really matters in influencer marketing? Turns out, not so much. It’s engagement data, such as comments and content shares, that is the real benchmark of success.

This brings us to so-called micro-influencers, Instagram content creators who have anywhere between 1,000 to 10,000 followers. Here are a few facts about micro-influencers that a business should consider when looking for a partner:

• Micro-influencers usually operate within a certain niche, produce more targeted and relatable content.
• Micro-influencers are more affordable which makes them perfect for brands and businesses that have limited marketing budgets.
• They are more accessible and have much higher engagement rates, typically bringing in a better ROI for their business partners.
• The true value of these partnerships is in authenticity and the audience’s trust rather than their reach (which can be amplified as needed with various tools provided by Instagram and Facebook Ads Manager).

Knowing the differences between various types of influencers and understanding how the market works is what will help you decide who are the best influencers for you to partner with.

Step one: determine the goals for your campaign

Formulating a set of concrete goals is a crucial first step for any influencer marketing campaign. If you want to have a productive collaboration, you need to have a clear picture in mind of what are you trying to achieve. Not only setting realistic and measurable goals helps you to pick the right influencers for your campaign and to produce better content, but it’ll give you an understanding of what metrics you’ll need to look at to measure its success once it’s over. Are you trying to increase brand awareness? Target a new segment? Drive your sales? Make a plan, don’t get overambitious, be precise, and stay focused on the results.

And if you have some doubts about your goals? Insense team will readily step in to help you with that since your brief, outlining your brand’s identity, your goals, your vision of the campaign and specific content needs, will be reviewed by the team at the very start of your campaign and you’ll be provided valuable expert input that’ll help you to make it flawless and concise.

The best place to find the Instagram influencers is your own niche.

Yes, you don’t have to stray too far from your home field to start looking for influencers. In fact, you might have already encountered those who are aligned with your industry, brand, or product. Maybe there are considered experts in your business? Or have already produced either paid or organic content for one of your competitors? It’s important to factor in the relevance of the content to make sure that posts and Stories produced in partnership with you do not seem out of place on the influencer’s page.

On Insense you can use various thematic hashtags to look for influencers in a particular niche. For example, if you are in a clothing business, you can just type in “fashion”, “style”, or “clothes” in a search bar and you’ll immediately get the list of influencers that produce relevant content. And you can customize your search even more and categorize your prospective partners by using different filters such as location, age, number of followers, or engagement rate.

How to find real Instagram influencers and not get scammed?

It comes as no surprise that the explosive growth of the influencer market has led to some less-than-savory characters faking their way into brand partnerships by artificially inflating their follower counts and engagement rates. Moreover, it’s been proven that with a little investment and enough knowledge it’s entirely possible to create a whole fake influencer persona with thousands of followers overnight and take advantage of businesses looking for a partnership. Even though Instagram continuously takes action to fight the spread of fake accounts, influencer fraud remains a serious concern for the industry.

How to avoid it? Vetting the candidates for partnership is an important part of the search process and you can do it by assessing their engagement patterns for telltale signs, like large numbers of likes with only a few identical comments. But, of course, a platform with an existing database of proven influencers can save you a significant amount of time. Insense gives you access to over 35,000 real and experienced creators with established track records. The number and variety of partners mean that you’ll be able to produce original content targeting different segments, allowing you to optimize your campaign and reduce ad fatigue.  

Finding the best Instagram influencers requires communication

At last, you have found an influencer who produces content in your niche, can help you to achieve your goals and has a proven track record. But you are not quite yet finished. You need to establish a line of communication with your partner. Constant feedback, productive exchange of ideas, and encouragement are necessary to make sure that the influencer is the right match for your brand. Only by interacting with your partner directly, you can truly understand if they share your values and will represent your brand on Instagram the way you’d like them to. Without proper communication, you may discover that you’ve wasted time and resources on a collaboration that doesn’t really bring the results you’ve expected.

Insense facilitates communication with your partners by allowing you to manage it in one streamlined workspace. The in-built chat allows businesses to remain in contact with creators throughout the collaboration process. Moreover, Insense is also integrated with Facebook Ads Manager which means that you can find influencers, communicate, and run your whole campaign all from the convenience of the same platform!

Start using Insense today to find Instagram influencers to support your business

With an easy-to-use and intuitive interface, large network of influencers, and the ability to produce any type of content for any social media platform or website, Insense can become your time-saving solution for managing an influencer campaign. Check out the website or set up a free demo-call to learn more about the platform’s features and how it can contribute to your social media marketing campaign’s success.

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