Instagram influencer marketing has grown rapidly in the past few years, this leads to constant changes on what is effective and what is not.
This includes the collaboration strategy. To succeed in a collaboration with Instagram influencers, brands need to adapt to the market situation quickly. However, no need to worry, we have covered a few tips on how to run a successful collaboration with Instagram influencers in this article.
Set Your Objectives and The Metrics You Will Use
Before starting the Instagram collaboration, you need to determine your goals and the indicator you’ll use to measure success. The goals that you want to reach will affect which influencers are suitable to work with and how you collaborate with them. Furthermore, your chosen metrics will help you evaluate the success of your Instagram collaboration campaign at the end of it. These are some examples of the possible objectives and how to measure success;
- Brand awareness – Reach of the campaign, growth in social media following, amount of social media mentions.
- Conversion – Growth in sales, the number of sales through an assigned voucher code for the influencer.
- Instagram engagement and customer retention – Engagement rate generated during the campaign.
After determining your goals and assigning your metrics, the next step is to record your current Instagram account analytics and then compare them with the result at the end of the campaign.
Choose The Right Instagram Influencer
Analyzing the Instagram influencers before selecting one to collaborate with is very important. Once a brand has determined what kind of campaign they want to run, the primary measures brands should consider from Instagram influencers are authenticity, consistency, reach, and engagement. However, some of the most crucial criteria to choose Instagram influencers are to make sure those influencers align with the brand’s core values and are relevant to your brand, industry, and audience. When selecting Instagram influencers, consider the influencers’ relevance, reach, resonance. To run your Instagram influencers campaign successfully, you need to pick an influencer whose niche is relevant to your brands and has an audience that aligns with your target audience.
Try not to choose influencers merely on the number of their followers because a huge number of followers isn’t always better. The big number of followers is insignificant if those followers aren’t aligned with your targeted audience. The right influencers, on the other hand, can have very devoted followers, this will help you to increase your Instagram engagement.
Don’t Hesitate to Accept New Ideas, Be Ready to Think Outside The Box
Instagram influencers are eager to collaborate with a brand that gives creative freedom. Try not to set enormous restrictions or strict editorial policies while collaborating with influencers. Creative freedom is needed to ensure their audiences can relate to the content that they create for your brand. By doing this, you will get better engagement. It’s better to be specific about brand guidelines and allow the influencers to know what you expect from them without giving too many limitations.
Brand-Influencers collaboration is an opportunity to be as creative as possible. Try not to follow the old strategy that constructs your campaigns. Collaboration is the perfect way for both brands and influencers to spark their best ideas and work together to reach new outstanding output.
Use Scarcity Marketing Strategy
Scarcity marketing is one of the most successful strategies brands can use when working together with an Instagram influencer. It is a marketing strategy based on the belief that customers are more enthusiastic to buy limited stuff. Combine this strategy with Brand – Instagram Influencers collaboration, because influencers can create a sensation around a product they promote or create together with a brand. This will enhance the result.
Pro Tip: Make the product exclusive by limiting the amount of the product. This will create more demand for the product.
Create Long-term Collaborations
Instagram influencer marketing has grown rapidly, this led to changes in marketing strategy. Brands need to adapt to this situation because what was successful a few years ago may no longer work today. For example, working with one or two mega influencers for a one-time collaboration was successful in the past. Today, long-term influencer partnerships are more effective for both parties.
Long-term collaborations will help the brand/product to be more credible.
When an influencer repeatedly collaborates with many different brands, their followers will not remember any of those. Moreover, it will decrease the influencer’s trustworthiness in the eyes of their followers if influencers promote a brand at one point and the competitors at the next. This way, their recommendations may no longer be taken seriously by their followers in the future.
There’s a significant tendency for the followers to try out the product or service that has become their favourite influencers’ lifestyle. This can be achieved by doing a long-term collaboration since they need to share on their Instagram frequently, to show their followers that they use the brand’s products/services daily the recommendation from the influencer will be remembered well by the followers.
Collaborating with Instagram influencers offers many benefits for your business growth and is still known to be the most effective way for a brand to succeed in its marketing campaign. This can be achieved by fixing up some strategies before starting the campaign. Brands need to set their goals and measurements before they start it, they also need to choose the right influencers, be open to new ideas, apply a scarcity marketing strategy, and arrange a long-term collaboration to triumph in their influencer marketing campaign.