Posted by The influence of Instagram on the lives of common people and the success of businesses cannot be overlooked or denied. Often labeled as the most effective marketing channel of today, Instagram provides multiple ways to promote your brand and reach your audience.
Though Facebook still rules in the game of numbers and it is still the most crowded platform with over 2.853 billion users. But, statistically, Instagram is a platform that matters to marketers!
Over 1 billion people use Instagram every month, and over 88% of its users are not from the US. That simply means that is a platform that interests businesses and marketers from all over the world.
Digging more into it, people spend about 30 minutes every day on this social network on average. And about 81% of people use it to research for products and services they need.
What pulls the attention of marketers most is — over 130 million people tap on the shopping-related posts every month and about 500 million people watch Stories on Instagram. In addition, the average engagement rate for Instagram posts is 0.96% — which is far better than many other marketing channels.
These stats highlight how impactful this new-generation social network is! No other platform offers such value for marketers and organizations.
And that’s the reason why Instagram is the center of marketing, sales, and customer support for businesses of all walks. Even small and medium cap businesses — like iCustomLabel.com that offers custom-designed stickers and labels online — are making effective use of Instagram e-commerce marketing.
If you are planning to take your retail business online, or reshuffle your existing underperforming e-commerce marketing strategies, do it. This is time to include Instagram marketing, to be specific — Instagram influencer marketing.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Technically, you can call any form of marketing influencer marketing, because they are all designed to influence the decision-making of target audiences. But in modern scenarios, influencer marketing is when you involve an “influencer” to spread awareness about a brand or market your product among their followers and to create content that aims to engage and influence.
Instagram Influencers and Ecommerce Marketing
You can use influencer marketing to generate traction for your e-commerce. All you have to do is to have a dedicated Instagram influencer marketing strategy in place. This strategy should have elements that help you identify potential influencers, and connect you with your audience and convert them into your customers. That’s how a successful influencer marketing strategy works!
You should document what ultimate success is for you (or in other words, your expectations); along with a list of potential influencers and their profile links and contact information, the products you want to market, and preferred type or form of content. The best part of Instagram influencer marketing is, you can track the performance and measure the success of each of your campaigns.
Therefore, there should be one more element in your Instagram influencer marketing strategy, and that is flexibility. You should design it to be flexible, so you can improvise it based on the performance data of your past campaigns.
If you are getting started with your Instagram influencer marketing, this blog will give you tried and true tips to boost your e-commerce sales –
1. Hire Influencer Wisely
With “wisely”, I intend to imply that you should select an influencer that fits well for your e-commerce brand. If you are a fashion brand and sell apparel, accessories, and cosmetics on your e-commerce store, then you should be looking for an individual or influencer who posts frequently about their looks and the brands they wear and adore.
Likewise, if you are a technology company, it would make no sense to hire a beauty blogger as your influencer. Neither they nor their followers will understand your products!
Similarly, if you are a local brand, and your target audience is present in the same town or state.
Would you think it’s correct to hire an influencer who lives in a different country?
Make sure that the audience of the influencer you hire is your audience too!
2. Don’t Chase the Numbers
The cost of your influencer marketing campaign shoots up with the number of followers your influencer has!
At a number of times, the number of followers isn’t a guarantee of success. If you are targeting a large market and if your budget allows, you can always hire a celebrity with millions of followers.
If stats are to believe, influencers with a smaller follower base give better results. The reason? They have a more active and already engaged follower-base. And when they tell their followers about your brand, you have already won the half battle!
Instead of celebrity giants, you can consider hiring multiple small or micro-influencers (in the same budget) for your Instagram influencer marketing campaign and boost engagement, traffic, and e-commerce sales.
3. Use Hashtags
If you are marketing on Instagram, using hashtags can improve your outcomes. You can increase views and engagement on your posts, Reels, and Stories on Instagram.
But, hashtags help your audience find your brand and content easily using the search feature.
Further, you can create compelling content around popular hashtags to gain momentum and engagement on Instagram.
So, include all your brand and related hashtags in the caption with your updates. However, this might make your post a little unattractive, but there is a way you can hide your hashtags on Instagram.
But, remember, even though you want to hide hashtags, they are still of extreme significance for your influencer and non-influencer e-commerce Instagram marketing campaigns.
4. Monitor
A smart marketer is one who knows how well his last campaign performed!
There are various analytics tools that allow you to track insights about the performance of your influencer marketing campaigns. These are including the ones that come in-built on Instagram and Facebook too.
Monitoring your campaign data allows you to change the way campaigns and content are created and pitched to the audience. This makes way for improvisation and that brings you better engagement and conversion.
Bottom Line
Influencer marketing might seem simple; however, it starts testing your patience from the day you get into it. You already have a lot to deal with — such as combating competition, pleasing unsatisfied customers, tracking shipments, and onboarding partners in your supply chain. Wouldn’t you like to keep things streamlined with your Instagram influencer marketing journey?
You could surely consider integrating a social media marketing and analytics solution into your process. Using this tool, you will be able to manage all your social networks and influencers and track the performance post-wise.
And before you get started with Instagram influencer marketing, you must understand the terms and conditions of the platform. Also, the guidelines that are issued by the government in your country.