Influencer marketing is a type of marketing that uses social media celebrities and opinion leaders to broadcast your brand name, products or services to a large audience. The difference between influencer marketing and conventional marketing is you pay/ hire /inspire influencers (opinion leaders) to spread the message. Influencer marketing falls into two subcategories which are social media marketing and content marketing. In social media networks like Instagram influencers are expected to make a content go viral and spread the word via their personal Instagram accounts. Most social media influencer campaign carries a content element, so either you create the content for the influencers or they are tasked with both creating and promoting the content.
There are some common methods for carrying out an influencer marketing strategy; depending on the scope of campaign and budget, brands and agencies make use of search engines like google or specialized services to find influencers to connect with, this method requires individual searches and using a spreadsheet to keep track of the information of all likely influencers.
Celebrity influencers on social media with a huge 1 mil+ fan page charge huge sums of money to deliver your message, they leverage on their cache of followers and their own unique brand to broadcast a product or service. While micro influencers with 100,000 and less followers charge less and may suite your target audience better so there’s a chance of getting better ROI using a large number of micro influencers instead of couple of huge ones.
One of the best ways to predict the return on investment of an influencer marketing campaign is to determine your audience it reached, the engagement it received, the dollar value for the content itself, all the above factors determine the total value of your influencer content. You can also use data to optimize your social media influencing effort. As you collect data, it enables you to:
- determine what content resonates with your audience
- rank your influencers based on potential output
- which social media channels and accounts are best for your brand.
- and finally what influencers have bigger share of your target audience
Usually marketers and agencies pick a list of influencers first, then check who their followers are and whether they suit the target audience of the product or brand to be promoted, that’s the common way to do it, but not always the most effective one. There’s still a significant chance big share of influencer followers will not coincide with the target audience of brand or product to be promoted.
A new smart way to identify influencers
There is a smarter way to pick followers for Instagram marketing campaign, which is getting more and more popular because of significant improve in ROI. The idea is to start from the target audience side, find out their interests and pick Influencers who are really interesting for the target audience.
I discovered the tool for that, it tracks all actions as likes, comments and follows of any public Instagram account and provides the group report, representing common actions of the group of Instagram users, so you can analyze the trends and influencers for the certain group of users. Sounds interesting, but you need to add the list of accounts in order start the monitoring first.
Usually it’s not a big deal, as marketers and business owners know the image of their audience the best of all. The easiest way to create the list of users to track is to check the likers list on recent posts of your business Instagram account and the accounts of your competitors, validate if those users fit your target audience portrait and get rid of bots in your list. The number of users you need to track depends on your market size, according to sociology studies it’s enough to track 100-500 users for most of cases. The result will be more accurate as you choose users to track more carefully and track more of them.
When the list is done, you just need to add them at the dashboard, buy the monitoring time and start monitoring. In my experience, the best results will be in 2-4 weeks of monitoring. After 2-4 weeks past you need to click Get Group Report button, select all users and maximum date range possible and you will get report as below, the list will continue for pages and pages and you will be able to see all influencers for your target audience starting from the ones with most engagement rate and ending with micro influencers, you will even get to know implicit influencers you would never think about.
Now we are ready to study the accounts these users engage mostly and this way we’ll get the list of huge and micro influencers, that are really interesting for exact audience we’ve been tracking.
The data for this article is provided by Snoopreport, the service which tracks Instagram user actions such as likes, comments and follows. From $0.69 per user per week. This type of Influencers research will save you hundreds of thousands dollars and provide you with the best targeted influencers on the market.
You can read more about Snoopreport platform here and also learn about its professional use in our article.
If you’re a marketer or analyst and you are interested in using Snoopreport service for free, check how you can do that.
