Why Instagram Influencer Marketing Is Still Booming
There is one kind of marketing that has stood the test of time, and remains strong. Referral marketing. Regardless of how much you spend to promote a product, up to 78% of consumers would buy a product when recommended by someone they feel they know and trust.
And that’s why, even though influencer marketing is coming under increased scrutiny, it still comes out on top – it’s another form of referral marketing after all. Users opt in to influencer content. Rather than be disrupted by traditional forms of advertising.
And within influencer marketing, Instagram remains the choice du jour for collaborations, and is also a channel that has moved with the market by creating new products that serve the influencer marketing industry (e.g. Instagram click to buy).
The Challenges of Instagram Influencer Marketing
While influencer marketing on Instagram can prove extremely lucrative, it poses some big challenges.
- Transparency of Influencer Data: Transparency is still a challenge for those trying to run targeted campaigns at scale. Without the use of an influencer marketing tool like ZINE, to understand who your campaign will reach through, you will need to request follower data from your influencers on an individual basis – which they will only have if they have switched to the business account.
- Influencer Fraud: Transparency pt 2. as highlighted by Unilever earlier in the year. With Instagram being the most popular channel in influencer marketing, the issue of influencer fraud (fake followers and paid for engagements) still plagues the industry, with some estimates that up to 12%* of UK influencers are still buying fake followers.
- Visibility of True Reach: Till now, we have mainly focused on CPM as cost per thousand (followers). As the industry matures, marketers want a more definitive measure – cost per eyes on the post. Even though Instagram has made waves amongst the social platforms with its trackable swipe ups and click to buy features, visibility can still pose a bit of a challenge.
- Supporting Creativity: Influencers / content creators and bloggers are not actors, employees or your kids. That means, while they do need your detailed campaign guidelines – it really is best for you to leave them to it. Handing over the creative reigns to someone outside of your team can be a scary concept, but over prescriptive guidelines won’t resonate with your audience.
Read more about creating campaign guidelines for your campaigns
The Benefit Of Instagram Influencer Marketing
- Building Trust: Influencer marketing is an extreme form of referral marketing – which we all agree has the greatest effect on the consumer. Working with influencers who have a genuine affinity to your product, and allowing them creative freedom on their post(s) will resonate with their followers and help build trust around your brand or product.
- High Conversion Imagery: User generated photos are 5x* more likely to convert customers than non UGC images, and working with influencers will enable you to stack up a huge repository of this hyper-converting content. Just remember to agree content rights during the negotiation phase.
- Keeping Budgets Lean: Instagram influencer marketing helps to keep you budgets lean. A 30 second advert on ITV can cost as much as £30K* to air – without the production costs. With influencer campaigns on Instagram, you can spread your budget across more influencers resulting in greater potential reach, and across more mediums – ranging from low cost stories to videos or carousels. In addition to this, a single influencer acts effectively as an entire production team, reducing the need for big teams to feed both web and social content.
- Highly Targeted Campaigns: When done correctly, Instagram influencer marketing campaigns can be much better targeted that other traditional forms of advertising such as bill board or TV ads – with the added opportunity for the content to be shared – maybe even going viral. At ZINE, our 50k+ influencers have signed up and connected their social media channels. Because we have this rich data on both the influencer and their followers, brands who use ZINE can build highly targeted lists of influencers in seconds – based on follower data or influencer data. This ensures you’ll be paying for the right eyes to see the collaboration.
ZINE has the most Instagram analytics on over 50K influencers. Schedule a short demo to see how you can build lists for highly targeted campaigns in seconds!
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Maeve Sugrue
I’m Head of Marketing at ZINE where I am helping peers and customers who want to revolutionise their influencer marketing strategy. I love food, fitness and Min Pins.
**https://www.digitaldoughnut.com/articles/2018/february/six-striking-stats-signalling-the-strength-of-ugc
***https://www.thedrum.com/news/2017/02/22/how-much-does-it-cost-advertise-uk-tv-heres-what-channel-4-itv-and-more-charge-slots
