Influencer Marketing In Instagram 2021 Guide

A powerful way to grow your brand’s presence on Instagram is through collaborating with other influencers on the platform, such as bloggers, vloggers, public figures, celebrities and any other influential accounts with a large social media presence and following SMM World – Instagram Likes relates.

This type of marketing will not only allow your message to reach a wider audience, but it will also help it to resonate more with the target consumer and thus achieve a higher conversion rate.

One of Instagram’s advantages over other platforms is how well it pairs with influencer marketing, as this kind of marketing draws upon consumers’ desire to participate in a certain type of lifestyle or emulate a particular person living that lifestyle. Instagram allows influencers to showcase their best, most photogenic moments and thus present an ideal lifestyle to their followers.

So when an influencer advertises a particular product or brand, it naturally becomes appealing to their followers, who now perceive this product or brand as helping them to achieve this lifestyle.

Today, more and more people are consuming content published by influencers on social media, as these platforms allow people to see an exclusive, personal peek into the lives of their favorite celebrities and public figures, something that was previously unavailable to them.

It would be a mistake for brands not to take advantage of this phenomenon by collaborating with these influencers and allowing them to interpret the brand’s message in their own unique voice that thousands, or millions, of people, already know and love.

Bloggers in particular are an effective resource for influencer marketing because their followers already follow them in order to hear their recommendations and reviews on products and brands, so marketing a brand or product will not seem out of place in their feeds.

Bloggers make a living off of trying new products and brands that they’re interested in and documenting their experiences online, sharing their personal favorite products with hundreds or thousands of subscribers. Because they are just regular consumers, rather than elite individuals like celebrities, marketing from a blogger may come off as more personable, relatable, and sincere.

Furthermore, people who follow a certain blogger typically trust that person’s opinion and have similar tastes and preferences, meaning that the conversion rate is likely going to be high.

There is a nearly infinite range of bloggers on Instagram?—?and social media in general?—?from fashion bloggers to lifestyle bloggers, travel bloggers to sports bloggers or cooking bloggers. It is very likely that whatever your brand sells, there is a blogger out there willing to try it out and share their opinions with their followers.

A good tactic is to search for bloggers that have already stated that they love your products or brand?—?they are more likely to agree to be sponsored, and their fans are more likely to believe that the advertising is genuine. Madewell is a brand that is known for using influencer marketing particularly well?—?they often reach out to fashion or lifestyle bloggers and influencers, who then market their products to a large audience of potential customers. Some influencers leverage the most entertaining TikTok platform to connect with their audience. Some may also buy TikTok likes to grow instant engagement rate on TikTok.

For their Instagram campaign for the anniversary of one of their trademark tote bags, they asked influencers on the social media platform to share original posts?—?such as a photo of them carrying the tote bag?—?along with the campaign hashtag.

As a result, they were able to reach over 1 million targeted users within a short time period. Utilizing these influencers in their marketing allows Madewell to reinforce its reputation as an approachable, everyday fashion brand that is still high quality and thoughtful.

It’s important to not just look for influencers who have a large following but for influencers who have a strong following within your brand’s specific niche.

You don’t want to just pick a random influencer to market your products who isn’t a good fit for your company or whose followers aren’t within your target market?—?your marketing likely will not be very effective and you will have wasted your dollars. Instead, look for influencers within your field, industry, or niche that can market your products in an organic and authentic fashion, so that the pairing makes sense to their followers and does not come across as contrived or possibly even jarring.

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Try to get as targeted as possible when choosing an influencer?—?for example, if you are a company that sells hiking gear, target influencers who are known specifically for hiking, rather than just a generally athletic or active person.

How do you go about finding the right influencer? There are a variety of ways.

One way is to simply search-relevant keywords or hashtags on Instagram that your target audience would be interested in, and look for posts that have a lot of likes and comments in order to identify accounts with a strong following.

Then, examine these account owners to see if they are a good fit for your brand.

While this method is effective, it could be a bit tedious. Another route is to use one of the many tools available for connecting brands with the right Instagram influencers.

Here are some of the top platforms to help you find and partner with Instagram influencers:

1) Revfluence

Revfluence is a software solution with four components: a searchable database with 500,000 influencers, CRM software to coordinate with hundreds of influencers, an analytics dashboard to track performance per influencer/content by things like engagement, followers driven and sales, and a content library for exporting assets and tracking results of pictures and video in other places like Facebook and Instagram ads.

Revfluence is best suited for brands that are looking to build influencer relationships and content at a significant scale. This solution is also a good choice because unlike many of the other platforms listed, they do not take a percentage of any of the payments, and relationships are direct with each influencer.

2) Shoutcart

Shoutcart is essentially a self-serve platform, similar to Adwords. For $50, you can get started in just a few minutes, where you can browse thousands of influencers that collectively reach over 200 million followers. Shoutcart has a variety of great features, including tools to vet influencer and provide statistics on specific campaigns you are running, as well as the ability to browse influencers that would sell you a link spot in their bio?—?which is very beneficial for direct product promotions and affiliate offers.

3) Ifluenz

As the first Instagram-focused influencer marketing platform, Ifluenz has over 7,000 registered Instagram influencers reaching a total audience of over 500 million followers. Ifluenz has powerful algorithms that allow you to review, sort and classify influencers using various criteria including following, engagement rate, area of interests, location, gender, age, and more.

These algorithms select and match the best influencers with corresponding brand campaigns. With Ifluenz’s powerful algorithms, you can begin an Influencer marketing campaign in just five minutes.

Furthermore, the pricing is based on the average market price for a given audience, so you can start a campaign for as low as $15, with no subscription fee. It is also completely free to preview matching influencers.

Lastly, all influencers registered on Ifluenz have to undergo a process to verify the engagement rate of their audience in order to ensure that their campaigns will achieve high results.

4) Famebit

Famebit reaches about 1.9 billion people across various social media platforms, with a total of 33,992 influencers.

The platform initially focused on YouTube when it first launched but has since expanded to Instagram and other social networks. Since its launch, Famebit has been used by over 7,003 brands for influencer marketing.

5) Instabrand

Instabrand is on the opposite spectrum of Reyfluence or Shoutcart in that the company is very involved in the partnership between the brand and the influencer?—?the campaign managers engage influencers on your brand’s behalf, as well as help to craft the right message. This sort of concierge strategy appears to be working for them, as the company has an impressive portfolio of past customers. Although the company name references Instagram, Instabrand also puts a large emphasis on Snapchat in their influencer marketing.

6) Hypetap

Hypetap consists of 1240 influencers reaching over 136 million followers, calling itself “Curated Influencer Marketing?—?a marketplace for brands, agencies, influencers and talent managers.”

Their main point of differentiation is the technology they’ve developed to enable both parties?—?brands and influencers?—?to post campaigns on the platform. Additionally, the platform has curated the quality of its influencers exceptionally well, so that brands are basically guaranteed high levels of engagement on Instagram. Hypetap costs around $50 per month, but posting campaigns and previewing what’s available is free.

7) Tribe

Tribe focuses more on influencers than other solutions listed, so they have put more effort into ensuring that both parties?—?brands and influencers?—?are satisfied and their needs are met. The platform also prides itself on making influencer marketing a simpler and easier process. Tribe requires businesses to create campaign briefs, then influencers can pitch a social media post for that brief, which the brand can then accept or reject.

While there is no exact total of how many brands or influencers are currently on the platform, a recent marketing email from the company stated that over 100 brands are currently using the platform. Influencers must have at least 5,000 followers in order to connect on the platform.

8) Exposely

Exposely is another self-serve type of social advertising platform, like Shoutcart. The brand does have somewhat of a focus on Twitter, but it still serves Instagram as well and has engaged over 350 million people across the various social platforms.

9) Weconnect

Weconnect has a global audience of influencers across a variety of channels and target audiences, reaching over 2.7 million followers. The platform has an impressive portfolio of consumer brands that have used the site, as well as 40,000 verified and vetted influencers.

10) Tapinfluence

Tapinfluence is a platform that focuses more on the enterprise side, with analytical software that can scour the entire web to find the best quality influencers.
The company also focuses more on traditional influencer marketing, in the form of blogging, than on social media influencer marketing so it may not be the ideal choice for Instagram marketing?—?however, most bloggers are also heavily engaged on social media, so this solution could still be beneficial. The platform is quite expensive
to use, so only consider if you have a large budget?—?$50,000 or so?—?to spend on influencer marketing.

11) Neoreach

Neoreach competes largely with Tapinfluence, as it also appears to be an expensive platform to use and focuses on pitching to Fortune 1000 brands and their agencies. The company markets itself as the end-to-end influencer marketing platform.

12) Speakr

Speakr is one of the longest-running platforms on this list, as they have been operating since 2010. In 2015, Speakr powered nearly 40% of the top 100 most impactful influencer campaigns, and they boast a high-quality network of over 20,000 influencers. However, they also focus more on Fortune 1000 brands and are quite expensive to use.

13) Influicity

Influicity has the most influencers on a single platform, with one million influencers. However, with so many influencers, the quality is likely not going to be up to the standard of previously listed platforms like Speakr or Ifluenz.

14) Readypulse

Readypulse is a budding platform that does not have a ton of influencers on its platform yet, but appears to have a great software set to aid the process of influencer marketing for brands. According to the case studies and brands on the company’s homepage, they appear to have been successful in delivering on their value proposition thus far. The company aims to become the #1 influencer marketing platform.

15) Snapfluence

Finally, Snapfluence is an agency that focuses heavily on Instagram and has a tight knit community of Instagrammers. The company claims to give influencers creative control over the content they produce through engaging with Snapfluence’s unique photo campaigns and hashtags.

How to Begin the Brand/Influencer Partnership

So, once you have found the right influencer, it is time to reach out to them. Influencers on Instagram will usually have an email address in their bio that you can reach them at, or some other form of contact information, as they want to make it easy for brands to reach out to them for sponsorships.

When you do reach out, the best thing to do in your initial communication is to send them a brief of your brand, the product or products you want to promote, and the type of content that you would like for them to post.

Most influencers would ideally like to have creative freedom when creating content for their own feeds, but a partnership involves at least some input from both parties, so giving them a general idea of the images you want to be associated with your brand would be beneficial.

To do this, creating a Mood Board ahead of time can help the influencer quickly grasp the visual aesthetic and content that you would like to achieve. Doing this will also help the influencer to have a better sense of how to convey your brand’s message to their audience.

As a side note, your influencer marketing strategy should be to form long-term partnerships?—?an influencer’s followers should be able to see that they are consistently promoting the same product or brand, so that the marketing will be seen as trustworthy and sincere.

Hopping from one influencer to the next is not a good way to build trust among the Instagram community.
Keep in mind when you are beginning the influencer marketing process that you will need to compensate the influencer for a variety of services, including creating the content, promoting the content, and gaining usage rights to the content that they create. Paying for these rights will allow you to use the content in any way you wish, such as repurposing it for your blog, website, Facebook ads and more.

According to Later.com, an influencer marketer’s services can cost anywhere from $500 to $50,000, depending on the audience size.

Influencer marketing can manifest itself in a variety of ways; it does not need to be solely original content from the influencer and can also include having the influencer repost your brand’s Instagrams on their feed or the influencer being featured in photos or videos on your brand’s feed.

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