In our last article, we explained what is influence marketing and what are the different levels of Instagram influencers, as well as how they represent a real lever for brands.
Today, Eminence, your digital marketing agency, explains how companies should choose their influencers to ensure that they are appropriate for their products and overall strategy. We will then examine how a person can become an influencer on Instagram.
How to correctly choose an influencer for your brand?
You need an influencer for your new advertising campaign but you do not know how to choose him/her? You have two options at your disposal depending on the strategy you have defined and the objectives you wish to achieve.
- Influence agency
First, you can contact an agency of influence. To do this, you must first know the essential criteria necessary to choose the right influence agency for you and therefore ensure that it will correspond to the campaign you want to launch.
The main advantage of this option is that the agency will assist you throughout your campaign and relieve you of the weight that can represent the management of a relationship with an influencer since it is the agency that manages its own influencers.
In order to ensure that the influence agency corresponds to your campaign based on influence marketing, here are the fundamental elements you need to take into account when choosing an influence agency:
- The agency must have a strong ability and sensitivity to establish close relationships with its clients (brands) in order to know them perfectly and have enough insight about which influencer will be the most pertinent ambassador for the advertising campaign in question.
- In a similar way, the agency must also have close relationships with the influencers it manages in order to know them in depth in terms of personality, taste, editorial line, statistics, etc. This will help to determine which influencer is the most relevant to the campaign in question.
- The agency must have many different influencers in order to be able to respond to all types of requests from prospects and customers. It is therefore necessary to have influencers at hand at different community scales and representing different sectors, which will make it possible to meet various objectives and strategies.
- The agency must finally be able to maintain its many relationships, whether with clients or influencers. This implies great flexibility and tolerance on the part of the influence agency to adapt to different demands, whether from influencers or brands.
- Individual search for influencers
Another solution is to do your own research to find an influencer for your campaign. This will start by mapping existing influencers, which will allow you to highlight the different profiles.
Indeed, there are many profiles belonging to a certain type (e.g. profile at ease in front of the camera, sports profile, profile not wishing to be highlighted, profile with experience, etc.), but then you will have to refine your search in order to bring out different profiles in the category that suits you.
If you are looking for an easier solution, you also have the possibility to go to platforms such as Heepsy. It allows you to search for potential influencers in several of the most effective influence marketing areas in the world.
Once you have selected several influencers, Heepsy compiles the results of these profiles for you to provide you with their different statistics.
In short, this platform is very interesting because it makes it much easier to find influencers by allowing you to refine your selection criteria in order to find the ideal influencer for your campaign.
I want to be an influencer. Where should I start?
Let’s start at the beginning and clarify a false belief: no, to be an influencer, it is not enough to have a large number of followers on your account.
However, the community remains the elementary basis for being an influencer. Indeed, to become an Instagram influencer everything depends on the ability to form a community around the same interest, which is therefore a passion for this subject but also a strong motivation to get involved in it, as well as being very creative.
Why is community so important then? Because if the influencer succeeds in creating an engaged community, the followers in the community will relay the content published by the influencers on the various networks on which they are located (Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, etc.). It is not enough to have tens of thousands of subscribers on your account, what really matters is the commitment of these followers because it is there that the power of influence will be demonstrated.
Then where do we start? When starting from scratch, creating a community is not easy at first. However, once it is launched, it is above all the monitoring that will be difficult. Indeed, the influencer will have to provide interesting content that generates interest and reactions on a regular basis in order not to lose its subscribers and not see its engagement rate decrease.
Then how can I become an influencer on Instagram?
First of all, you will have to start by analysing the behaviour of influencers on Instagram (because it is not the same thing to be an influencer on Instagram as on Facebook for example). It is not a question of copying other influencers, but of understanding why an influencer does what he does and how he does it. After that you can develop your own strategy and add your own style to it, allowing users to identify you as such.
The next step consists in determining what your “argument of influence” is. To be an influencer, you obviously need passion and creativity. But you also need to make people understand how your creativity is different from that of your competitors and why your account is unique.
Among the many qualities that an influencer must have to be successful on Instagram, the most important are the following:
- Be creative, passionate and original
- Be able to choose the right theme
- Be able to engage your community and communicate
- Elaborate a logical and robust editorial line, accompanied by an editorial plan that allows for a regular frequency of publications
- Be highly motivated and willing to invest a lot of time. This can mean participating in events, meeting community members to build commitment and engagement, etc.
- Create partnerships to increase virality
- Have some technical knowledge in terms of photography and video editing
- Use the right Instagram hashtags without exaggerating (5 to 6 per post)
How to obtain partnerships and create relationships?
There are many platforms that connect companies and influencers. These platforms allow new influencers to set foot in this world. Indeed, these platforms highlight campaigns to be relayed on Instagram. All you have to do is register and apply to the various publications offered.
This is mainly the case for platforms that launch micro-influence campaigns and want to use small influencers, knowing that macro-influencers often work with agencies or directly with brands. Platforms are therefore the perfect first step to start your activity as an influencer.
However, the most common mistake of influencers is to stop at these platforms, whereas becoming an influencer also means knowing how to approach brands and solicit them in a relevant way.
In fact, becoming an influencer requires above all a lot of motivation and perseverance and the ability to seize opportunities at the right time. You will not see your efforts crowned with success in just a few weeks. It is through work, time and effort that you will be rewarded and it is important to remember to have a long-term vision .
→ Everything you need to know about influencer marketing – 1st part