Marketing on Instagram is getting tougher by day as more and more brands get on the bandwagon. One of the biggest challenges for brands is to increase the number of their followers. While all brands will benefit by posting great content and practicing other organic methods of increasing the number of their followers, it is a long and tedious process at the best of times. If you are a business that needs to quickly increase the reach of your brand and acquire new followers hiring an influencer to endorse your brand on Instagram can work wonders. However, influencer marketing is relatively expensive, and you could end up wasting your money unless you take care to pick the right influencer. Some important considerations that should influence your choice of an influencer:
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The Influencer Profile Must Be Relevant to Your Brand
All influencers have different demographic characteristics and exercise influence in varying spheres. You must pick an influencer that your target audience admires and trusts. This makes it essential that you get to know the profile of your target audience, which depends on your product design and pricing. The right influencer will not only have a lot of appeal to the target audience but also be credible and relevant to your brand. Your choice of an influencer will also depend a lot on your budget. Influencers with very large follower counts can charge a bomb, while micro-influencers can be more reasonable. Rather than looking at influencers with a universal appeal like actors or athletes, it may be better to consider influencers with specific domain authority relevant to the needs and expectations of your target audience. However, you should thoroughly scrutinize the content posted by the influencer to make sure it fits the tone of your brand.
Investigate the Evolution of the Influencer Account
Marketers who need to expand their brand reach and acquire followers more quickly than they can achieve through organic methods should consider influencer marketing. Influencers are essentially people with a large number of followers who are willing to endorse brands in exchange for remuneration. The rate charged per post depends on the number of followers and engagement. Only large brands can afford the steep fees of celebrity influencers who have followers running into millions. Small businesses will find it more affordable to engage micro-influencers who have only tens of thousands of followers. According to Huffpost.com, micro-influencers typically have follower counts ranging from 1,000 to 100,000.
The good thing is that they tend to have a better rate of engagement. While you need to watch your wallet, you should be confident that the influencer you hire has a good fit with your brand image and values. If they have gained followers in a surge, you should attempt to find out the reasons. Since an influencer career can be very lucrative, it has also attracted people who think nothing of padding their follower counts and rates of engagement with the help of computer programs. As important as the follower count and rate of engagement are for an influencer, brands should also look closely into the quality of the content posted to make sure that it is aligned to the brand profile.
Scrutinize the Posting Frequency
Posting consistently acts to remind your followers of your brand and facilitates the engagement and brand recognition businesses hanker after. When you hire an influencer, you will need to work with one who is in the habit of posting regularly. Influencers who post regularly will tend to get far more interactions than those who do so sporadically. It is well known that users do not like unpredictability and this makes it mandatory for your brand to appear in their Instagram feed consistently. The more dependable influencers invariably are seen to have more followers and engagement. Marketers desiring a boost in the engagement rate quickly can engage social media marketing agencies like Blastup to buy likes and followers quite cheaply.
Study the Influencer Content
Users on Instagram are demanding regarding the content they consume. Not only should the content be interesting, informative, relevant, and timely but also be diverse. While examining the analytics will give you all the information regarding the engagement the influencer can achieve, you can also run a manual check on the content quality and diversity by looking closely at their posts. You can also use specialized tools to find out the best performing posts and see if the content pertains to only one subject or spans a large variety. It is seen that influencers who post about various things are more likely to have a better-engaged audience. Naturally, followers will find it boring if the same kind of content is posted repeatedly. Also, you should investigate the kind of content that works the best with your audiences and whether the influencer posts similar content.
Conduct aHashtag Search
All marketers are familiar with the vital importance of hashtags in Instagram. However, most of them do not investigate the hashtags they have used apart from figuring out which content has been searched for the most. By studying your hashtags, you can find out who has been engaging the most and have the potential of acting as an influencer. A brand should hire an influencer who has already been interacting with the brand and has a genuine interest in it as they are more likely to be interested in a commercial association. Conducting a hashtag search will also throw up suggestions of influencers who have a track record of posting content that is relevant to your niche.
Conclusion
Even though influencer marketing is relatively new, the environment is dynamic. The influencer you choose should be adept in following and making use of the latest development and trends on Instagram. For example, you will want an influencer who can use the popular Instagram Stories feature in addition to the conventional image and video posts. Identifying an influencer who has the potential to bring the maximum to the table is not easy, which is why the more information you have about him and his account performance, the better it is.