What is influencer marketing? Influencer Marketing is a form of marketing that focuses on targeting key industry leaders to drive brand messaging and awareness to a specific market of customers. Many brands leverage social media influencers to positively affect brand trust, engagement, retention, and sales.
But not all influencers are created equal, and sometimes being popular doesn’t pay off. Instagram influencers with between 10,000-100,000 followers have a higher engagement rate than influencers with 1 million to 10 million followers. Brands should target influencers with a following in the 10,000-100,000 range to see maximum impact.
While the payoff of working with smaller influencers is greater, it can be work-intensive for brands to find them. Brands need to find an influencer search engine to identify smaller influencers more quickly. An influencer marketing platform can help you find these social media influencers more quickly and more efficiently.
Why partner with brand influencers?
Influencer marketing is an inbound marketing strategy. Brand influencers are storytellers for the digital age. They have built followings with their ability to tell stories that resonate with their audiences. By partnering with brand influencers, brands can leverage influencers’ storytelling expertise to achieve business goals.
If you’re looking to increase your influencer marketing efforts, you’re in good company. The vast majority (84%) of marketing professionals are expected to launch at least one social influencer campaign in the next 12 months. From content creation and distribution to a new product launch, working with social media influencers is an investment that will help your business see returns long term.
Why use Instagram influencers for business?
It's clear that if you haven't already, it's time to launch an influencer marketing program. But why Instagram influencers? Instagram is the most engaging social media platform that your brand can be active on. It has more than 400 million monthly users (as compared to Twitter at 310 million, Snapchat at 200 million, and Pinterest at around 100 million.) The size of Instagram’s user base alone should encourage brands to create an account on the social network. But Instagram also gives brands 58X more engagement per follower than Facebook, and 120X more engagement per follower than Twitter. This large user base coupled with high levels of engagement is the reason why Forrester Research has listed Instagram as the number one engagement tool for brands multiple years in a row.
How to choose the best Instagram influencer marketing tool
Before you start looking into influencer marketing tools, start with a clear objective for your influencer marketing and use it to guide your technology platform selection. The five key capabilities that marketers should look for in any baseline influencer marketing tool should be the ability to discover, connect, engage, recruit, and measure success within the platform.
The ability to quantify the value of your Instagram influencer word-of-mouth marketing and to build relationships with these brand influencers is key. Some influencer marketing platforms, such as Pixlee, even offer marketers a way to see which customers influence the most sales and engagement.
Here are some influencer marketing tools that we recommend if you’re looking to launch or improve your influencer marketing program:
Top recommended influencer marketing tools
Pixlee (now Emplifi): Centralized platform to discover, manage, and measure influencer relationships across social media.
Famebit: Influencer marketplace where brands and influencers can meet and negotiate contracts.
HYPR: Influencer network to find brand influencers to collaborate with.
Influicity: Search engine for brand influencers to book social media posts for your brand. Influencer marketing often involves tedious spreadsheets and manual reporting and measurement—but it doesn’t have to. A strong influencer marketing platform will allow you to easily discover, reach out to, manage, and measure Instagram influencer relationships automatically in one centralized platform.
