Everyone talks about influencer marketing like it’s a gift from the gods, and they’re right
Since the dawn of modern advertising, marketers have used celebrities, politicians, and thought-leaders to push products on the public.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for your entire life, you’d probably notice this.
Influencer marketing isn’t any different. Instead of calling them celebrities, these days we call them influencers. Honestly, what’s the difference? Maybe the scale they’re known, and that’s about it. Some of them are bigger than celebrities because more people are online than go to movie theaters.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing uses industry personalities to driver your brand’s message to enlarge your audience. It’s a huge business. Think of the value it brings. If you can get someone with a huge following to recommend you’re brand, you’re guaranteed tons of sales.
All you have to do is find influencers that support your products or mission. How good is your product?
Develop Your Instagram Influencer Marketing Strategy
It’s Going Down in the DM (Direct Message)
It’s not hard to get influencers to promote your products. What it takes is the dedication to reaching out to influencers and showing them value. As Gary Vaynerchuck, the legendary marketer would say “Give, Give, Give.” Check out one of Gary’s videos where he shows his strategy on getting influencers to work with you. It’s a super simple approach that everyone overlooks, but it works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEuTM6dmL_E
Shoutouts
Ever wonder how Instagram accounts go from zero to hero overnight? Overnight Instagram celebrities are pretty common these days, because of shoutouts. If you get the right shoutouts you can blow up your account like your on steroids.
Below are some tips for getting quality shoutouts, but first…
What’s a Shoutout?
If you didn’t Google it yet, a shoutout is simply a screenshot of your profile page uploaded to an influencer’s account to build your account by showing it off to the influencer’s audience.
This has actually become a good business for Instagram addicts that know how to build up accounts. They sell the shoutouts for a fee. The way they build the accounts is by asking other Instagrammers in the same niche and have a good following to trade shoutouts to each other. They cold-dm each other and ask for a “shout for shout.”
A quicker way to get more followers and engagement is to pay for shoutouts. Check out Shoutcart to buy and sell your shoutouts. All you have to do is make sure there is plenty of engagement on the account. Engagement means people are posting real comments, and not just liking and typing “nice” a thousand times. It’s up to you to do your homework on this. This will get your account from zero to whatever in the shortest amount of time, unless you want to try the last strategy.
Choosing an Influencer Marketing Agency
Remember, what I said about big business. This is the biggest part.
Do yourself a favor and Google, “influencer marketing agency.” You’ll get a plethora of websites and ads trying to get you to use their services to connect with influencers for every niche and social platform.
If you were one of the forward-thinking marketers 10 years ago, you could have predicted your huge following would be valuable someday. You probably thought maybe worthy of some beer money, but I doubt you would have predicted this.
How do you pick one?
If you do decide to use one of these services, you better study up and know everything they say they’ll provide. If you have a great product, this is going to be sheer gold for you, but if you have a mediocre product you might overpay. Be careful and don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Link Your E-commerce Website to Your Instagram
Let’s say you sell custom men’s shaving kits. A really nice trend these days is hooking up influencers with your e-commerce site.
Here’s an actionable plan for just for you…
You can use Gary V’s technique from above and reach out to models with cool facial hair and a large following. Then ask them if you can send them a free kit. If they like it, they’ll most likely promote the kit on their Instagram and you’ll get more traffic to your e-commerce site.
You can also promote the influencer model’s profile on your profile using your shaving kit. What’s that called again?
A shoutout, and it’s a win, win!
Summary
Consider what’s been written on this blog as a simple way for you to get your Instagram account off the ground running. It’s really not that hard. Do all three of these concepts, and you’ll have a ton of success if you’re niche is something people care about.
Lastly, if you’re looking to up your game on Instagram, you’ve got make some videos worth watching. Influencers always make awesome videos. For more information on video marketing, check out my article, What You Need To Know About Video Marketing in 2018.
