Instagram is one of the strongest platforms for marketing, and it’s here to stay.
With 2 billion users, it’s a relatively large target audience that businesses of all sizes can reach through it. The platform has been updating regularly since its inception to keep up with the changing times, so marketers have more tools at their disposal than ever before.
With a massive chunk of your audience actively lurking here, it pays to know about all the latest and new Instagram updates.
As a social media monitoring tool, we at Radarr always watch all social platforms closely.
In this post, we aim to keep you informed about all the new Instagram updates – bookmark it for easy reference!
New Instagram updates and features your marketing team needs to know
While there have been several new Instagram updates lately – some features and others in terms of the interface, here are the ones you shouldn’t miss out on:
Every video will be a Reel
Instagram started experimenting with the concept that all videos creators share will be in a reel format. This feature was only rolled out on June 30, 2022, for selected creators. As of now, the official date for the rollout of this feature is still unknown – but most users see the change.
What’s in it for you?
If this feature takes off, marketers may have to start diverting their focus to this format since most of the updates are centered around Reels. A great incentive for brands is that it increases their likelihood of being discovered in the Reels tab, which boosts their organic growth.
Longer Reels
In late April this year, Instagram introduced a new feature for Reels that allows content creators to share videos of up to 90 seconds which was 60 seconds before the rollout of this feature.
What’s in it for you?
Since most users spend a significant time scrolling through Reels, marketers have a better chance of engaging their current audiences and attracting new ones. With longer Reels, brands can highlight their products and share their story to draw in customers.
Captions on Reels
With this latest Instagram update, social media marketers can turn on ‘auto-generated captions’ for a seamless reel experience or have ‘AR closed captions’ for a more stylized and entertaining result.
By using the auto-generated caption feature, you can expand your content’s reach to communities that are hard of hearing. Further, with the AR caption feature, marketers can make their content with captions that look like a text message or from a comic book.
Multiple audio options
The three recent audio features include adjusting the video volume and adding voiceover, audio importing, and a text-to-speech function.
What’s in it for you?
Marketers can overlay audio from their existing Reel library or have a delightful voice option for their video for consistency.
‘Take a break’
Intended for users to concentrate on their well-being, this feature lets them schedule breaks for when they can’t use or are overwhelmed by Instagram.
In conjunction with this, another feature has been released that could act as a double-edged sword for marketers. In May 2022, Matt Navarra tweeted about how Instagram tested out a feature that would hide excessive story posting. It will show users three stories, after which they will be asked if they want to continue by clicking on the “show all” button.
What’s in it for you?
Well, the feature hasn’t rolled out for all accounts, but social media marketers must be savvy and convey their message in three stories or under. Further, it can also be a relief since you won’t have to remain active constantly.
Post pinning
This is a super helpful feature for individual creators and brands since you can pin up to three posts to your profile. This means they will show at the top of your grid and allow audiences to catch up with your key content.
This feature allows you to highlight important announcements, your brand’s story, or your top-performing content.
Got a new product release? Upgrading your services? Running a contest? Pin it to your profile!
‘Get a quote’ for online businesses
Own an online store? You can now leverage the ‘Get Quote’ feature, which will show up on your business profile on Instagram. It is also available on stories to let your followers quickly inquire about your products.
What’s in it for you?
This update is a fantastic solution to filter requests and take qualified leads to your direct messages. It saves social media managers the hassle of responding to every passive query.
Full-screen feed experience
Instagram has been going above and beyond to create an immersive user experience. Now, Instagrammers can enjoy a full-screen vertical feed layout. Creators can directly upload 9:16 photos owing to the company’s mobile-friendly approach.
What’s in it for you?
With this Instagram update, you won’t have to crop pictures awkwardly. Instead, you can focus on sharing quality content to drive engagement with a much better perspective.
NFTs for your community
With this Instagram update, brands can create their own NFTs and share them with their community. Not only do creators win with this feature, but brands too can share their NFTs in Instagram stories or through their feeds.
An NFT is a great way to monetize your brand on the platform. Moreover, the more visibility you gain through your creations, your brand awareness, and loyalty will be more substantial. This, in turn, could snowball into popularity for all your content formats on the platform.
Expanded product tagging
This feature allows accounts to add product tags to their posts. When a user clicks on this tag, they will directly be able to see all the details about the said product. Moreover, they can even purchase directly through the app without leaving it and taking multiple actions to get the details.
However, there is a catch. This feature is available only to accounts based in the United States. Further, it can only be done via posts and not on stories or reels. As per reports, they may soon expand this feature to be accessible via Stories.
What’s in it for you?
If you are currently in the U.S., you can enhance your customer experience and get them to shop from you directly on Instagram. It will even save you the bother of responding to individual direct messages since all the details will be available at the click of a button.
Content collaboration for broader reach
Are you collaborating with another brand or an Instagram creator? Then this update is for you! This super cool feature allows all Instagram users to create joint posts. The post or Reel you upload will be visible on your account and your collaborator’s profile. All you have to do is click on ‘tag people’ and then ‘invite collaborator.’
If your brand collaborates with influencers often or wants to highlight more user-generated content on your profile, this feature will help you draw in a larger audience. Since both account names show up simultaneously, it is easy for audiences to click on your account and follow you for more content.
Since audiences of two accounts will view your content, your post impressions can go through the roof and improve your engagement rate. Additionally, since Instagram has recently been favoring the Reel format, you can collaborate with other accounts using reels for an even better reach.
Chronological feed order
This Instagram feature allows Instagrammers to view their feed based on either of these options — favorites or following. However, it should not be considered a scary change since the algorithm can also come to your rescue and help your content get viewed once the user clicks on the ‘home’ button.
What’s in it for you?
An exciting and value-adding content strategy can help you remain relevant and increase your brand reach since the algorithm tends to favor it. By clicking on the ‘home’ button, your followers will have the same Instagram experience they enjoy.
Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, said in his video tweet that the ‘following’ feed would let users check their feed chronologically. This means your day and time of posting will still be crucial to your performance. Again, creating quality content your audience will engage with is vital to better your chances of pleasing the Instagram algorithm gods and reaching more accounts organically.
Lastly, with the ‘favorites’ feed, Instagram users can catch up on content created by their favorite accounts. Want to be a part of this category and increase your content impressions? All you have to do is have a robust content strategy that compels your audience to engage with it.
Final thoughts
Instagram updates are headed in the right direction with minor tweaks that enhance the user experience to pinning posts and uploading longer reels that help marketers bring more meaningful topics into focus.
With these tools in your marketing arsenal, creating an immersive experience for your followers isn’t a distant dream. All you have to do is align your content with your marketing initiatives, and you’ll do better than most businesses!
The social media landscape is changing by the day. With Instagram launching new features every month and Meta being deeply involved in NFTs, there’s no telling what may come your way from other channels.
Worst of it all? If you’re not quickly catching up with these updates, your marketing strategy starts to suffer almost instantly.
As social media marketers managing multiple channels and creating so much content, it’s normal to miss out on a few changes. But there’s a way to keep up with it all – subscribing to the best social media marketing blogs.
Radarr is a social media listening, monitoring, and analytics tool which helps businesses stay on top of what’s happening online. It’s a one-stop shop for detailed marketing strategies for Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and other digital platforms.
Radarr’s social media marketing blogs also cover more complex topics like audience intelligence, algorithm breakdowns, predictive analytics, and more, apart from social media channel updates. This helps you understand the complete picture before you even begin adopting the changes in your strategy.
Called the “queen of Facebook,” Mari Smith knows the inside out of Facebook marketing and shares her expertise in her Facebook marketing blogs. Mari’s blogs cover everything from creating an excellent Facebook business account to growing with reels and using hashtags to increase your reach on the social platform.
She shares strategies for digital agency owners, SMBs, and newbies in her blogs on Facebook. Mari’s blog is the way to go if you want to grow an audience on Facebook.
The Social Media Examiner blog aims to help marketers tackle platform updates and use them for business growth. The social media marketing blogs cover basic information like editing an Instagram video and deep-diving into paid ads and organic marketing strategies.
Social Media Examiner helps you with LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook marketing. It also shares expert interviews on community development, video engagement, and copywriting. The blog has also recently started covering technologies and their impact on marketing.
Jon Loomer is a blog for advanced Facebook marketers who’ve been in the game for a long time. It covers all new Facebook updates and how businesses can tweak their strategies to align with them.
The blog provides information about audience fragmentation and automation in Meta so you can target different groups of customers with personalized marketing techniques. Jon Loomer’s blog also offers multiple guides for creating reports and optimizing campaigns, making it very useful for agency owners.
Social Media Week publishes blogs on building and growing communities on social media for business growth. It’s more of a news blog for social media that publishes trends and updates across all channels.
They also conduct events to create networking opportunities for new businesses and summarize the insights on their blogs. So, if you cannot attend their events, read their blogs to get insider information.
The Neal Schaffer blog is about utilizing social media to grow your business online. It touches on different aspects of content marketing, like effective newsletter headlines, how to pay influencers for various campaigns, and generating hashtags for Twitter and Instagram.
It’s much more than tips and tricks as it discusses practical aspects of content marketing for business growth. If you like done-for-you templates, the Neal Schaffer blog has got you covered. He shares templates like Facebook post ideas and LinkedIn background picture samples which you can customize to your desire.
Gary Vee is the five times New York best-selling author who talks about marketing and the power of the Internet. In his blogs on social media marketing, Gary Vee talks about motivation and building businesses on social media and shares his personal experiences.
He preaches documenting whatever you do and using it as marketing collateral for your business. The blogs also serve as recaps and summaries of his other endeavors like podcasts, live shows, and AMAs, so if you miss them, you can read the highlights on his blogs.
Brian Fanzo, the Founder of iSocialFanz and a futurist keynote speaker, provides tips for building a brand via event marketing and social media. He also talks about public speaking in his blogs. Most of his blogs are centered around nailing virtual events with the right strategies to create an interactive and immersive experience.
Fanzo’s blogs are about connecting with the audience and “future-proofing” your business. If you’re looking to establish yourself as a professional keynote speaker on social media, Brian Fanzo’s blogs will help you a lot.
Social Media Today should be your go-to blog for all things marketing. It covers trends, updates, and news across all social media platforms. It busts myths and shares the best practices on new trends like data collaboration and programmatic advertising with real-life examples.
It’s almost like a newspaper for social media that talks about marketing for all brands – B2B, B2B, and DTC – across the globe. The topics range from digital marketing, influencer marketing, AI, machine learning, ESPs, and automation. You get fresh ideas on content strategy, marketing, and social media updates under one roof.
Neil Patel is one of the oldest and most respected names in digital marketing. He started with content writing, moved to digital marketing years back, and now works with Fortune 500 companies to grow their business.
In his digital marketing blogs, he teaches SEO, social media marketing, paid ads, and blogging to newbies and pros alike. Neil Patel’s digital marketing blog covers everything from getting a domain name to ranking high on SERP. He shares interviews, lessons, and many secret tips and tricks to help you reach more people on Google.
HubSpot blog is famous for its content marketing lessons, tips, and tricks to make your CMOs life easier. The digital marketing blogs help with writing tips, SEO guides, and content creation for social media.
HubSpot should be your go-to blog if you’re a fan of done-for-you templates. They share post ideas, headlines, and video content to ease your content creation process. In their blogs, HubSpot also shares yearly trends and reports of data-laden research that can be shared on your social media channels or used in making data-driven decisions.
Jeremiah’s blog is for you if you’re a business owner by profession and techy at heart. He preaches about technological advancements that help companies connect better with customers. Owyang identifies marketing trends and allows companies to adopt them into their social media marketing frameworks. In his blogs, he talks about corporate innovation and autonomous technology and touches upon well-being from time to time.
He analyzes big brands’ experiments with NFTs and provides insights into their success and failures. Jeremiah Owyang’s blog helps you understand the direction the market is going in marketing and consumer trends. You use his insights as inspiration for your social media page.
Sue B. Zimmerman is an Instagram coach who shares her insight on generating leads on Instagram. She has elaborate blogs on writing engaging captions and creating reels and posts to attract your audience’s attention.
Zimmerman’s blog is divided into posts, live, reels, and stories. You can dive deep into each topic and implement her strategies on your Instagram. The blogs are beginner-friendly with topics like ‘how to grow more followers on Instagram’ but also provide a detailed understanding of how the Instagram algorithm works.
As the name suggests, Content Marketing Institute covers everything around marketing and content creation. It’s one of the most popular marketing blogs in the industry. They discuss SEO, hiring content creators, content strategy, creation, editing, and repurposing. They also publish industry reports and research papers on various social media marketing trends and compare different marketing methods to suggest the best one, which makes the blog valuable among marketing agencies.
Content Marketing Institute shares real-life examples in their blogs, which helps better understand. For instance, one blog, ‘how to avoid common slip-ups with your B2B Ads creative’, contains real examples of businesses with attention-grabbing social media ads. Real-life examples and advice with legit data make up for trustworthy blogs.
Andrea Vahl is a social media consultant and speaker who helps brands grow their businesses with ads. She covers strategies to make the most of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter ads in her blogs. The blogs guide you from the beginning by helping you set an ad budget and testing your current ads’ performance.
She covers various topics like video vs. text ads and ads on iOS vs. Android, so you understand how your ads work with different customer personas. She also touches on content creation on Facebook, so you can say that Andrea’s blogs are a complete guide to marketing your business on Facebook.
The Future Buzz blogs cover everything required to build and grow a brand on social media. It explains branding with all its aspects, including design and logo, and goes further with content creation across all online platforms.
Learn influencer marketing, SEO, and Facebook marketing under one roof. You’ll find social media content ideas and ways to improve sales, engagement, ROI, awareness, and reach.
Pro blogger guides bloggers across the globe to create, manage and grow their blogs. They have team building and managing content for when your blog is big enough to hire subcontractors. Their goal is to help bloggers convert their readers into paying customers. They also explain how multi-channel marketing works so you can reach more readers via email marketing and multiple social media channels.
Blogging combines writing, SEO, and backend technicalities of the CRM and Pro Bloggers cover everything. They’ve got you covered with blogs like ‘a new way to protect yourself from data-loss nightmares’ and ‘giving underperforming posts a second chance with updates.’
The Moz blog revolves around SEO and online marketing. It brings prolific writers from across the globe to curate top-notch blogs that guide you to increase audience and engagement across all social media platforms. Moz also shares tips on content writing, so your posts are both reader- and SEO-friendly. The blogs constitute reports summarizing research papers on SEO, link building, and social media trends.
Moz conducts its research, so its reports are trustworthy. Use their data report blogs to understand consumer behavior as they extensively discuss customer search patterns on Google, Instagram, and Facebook. They also help you write better social media posts with blog topics like, ‘title rewrites: 3 patterns to avoid’.
It’s already hard to compete with established companies with high domain authority. The Duct Tape Marketing blog helps you with keyword research for your small business. It also covers the nitty-gritty of running a business, like increasing prices without losing customers and building a brand that seems relatable to your audience.
You can go to Duct Tape Marketing for recommendations on social media tools, learning referral programs, social media marketing with paid ads, and launching and growing your podcast. They also publish content for marketing agencies with tips to manage their workflows.
Subscribe only to the best social media marketing blogs
That was our list of the best social media marketing blogs you should look up to for inspiration. But you don’t have to subscribe to all of them and clutter your resource list. Take a look at the type of topics and depth they cover. Start with a few and unsubscribe if you don’t like any.
Create a balanced list of platform-specific and all-around social media marketing blogs.
Radarr provides in-depth information on advanced marketing and guides you to grow your brand on social media.
Subscribe now to get monthly updates in your inbox!
Influencer marketing has become increasingly popular in recent years as brands realize the tremendous value of partnering with individuals with large followers on social media platforms. In fact, according to a study, companies generate on average $5.78 for every dollar invested in influencer marketing, which has led to the global industry value of influencer marketing having doubled since 2019.
While many brands have started embracing this trend, finding the right influencers for your brand can be tricky. After all, there are so many factors that go into choosing an influencer who will be able to represent your brand well and share similar values with you. Moreover, with it comes unprecedented complexity and the question of being able to plan, execute, manage and track these campaigns.
That’s where an influencer management platform comes into play. It provides a streamlined way to keep track of all your influencer relationships in one place, so you can focus on what matters most: working with your partners to create content that brings in new customers.
What is an influencer management platform?
An influencer management platform (or IFP) is a software platform that helps you manage relationships with influencers and their audience. It allows you to see what types of posts work well with each influencer so that you can tailor your campaigns accordingly.
Influencer marketing is an increasingly important part of most companies’ marketing mix and is becoming indispensable in their marketing ammunition. As companies scale, the need to plan, structure, and track influencer marketing campaigns grows. However, spreadsheets have limits, and an Influencer Management Platform outnumbers them in several ways. It is not a regular database that stores details of influencers but a whole powerhouse that fuels your influencer marketing campaigns.
What does an influencer management platform do?
Finding the right influencer can be challenging—especially if you are looking for someone who is highly engaged with your target audience, has strong reach and influence in their niche, is open to working with other brands, and has the time to manage collaborations.
Then there’s managing the collaboration: negotiating terms, sending out contracts, and managing ongoing communications between the two parties. Again, this can take up lots of time and resources—resources that could instead be used for other parts of your business.
An influencer management platform helps brands do just that – in a few clicks! It enables them to manage all their influencer marketing activities in one place. In addition, it helps marketing teams do the following:
1. Discover the right set of influencers
Most influencer management platforms either have a built-in database of active influencers or have access to one. Using these databases, you can discover a vast set of influencers who’d otherwise remain elusive if you use manual search methods on social media. These databases include influencer-level metadata—the genre of content, activity patterns (daily vs. weekly vs. monthly posting frequency), areas of interest, brand mentions, etc.—and based on this metadata, brands can make informed choices of influencers for their campaign.
2. Managing influencer relationships
An influencer management platform allows brands to manage relationships with influencers. Reactivation campaigns, barter deals based on goodwill, product launch announcements, etc., are a few things brands do to regularly engage with their influencer pool. An influencer management platform lets you manage and utilize details like payout, last date of posting on social media, email touch basing, etc.
3. Managing influencer campaigns
An influencer management platform lets you systematically plan and execute influencer marketing campaigns. For example, you can use the tools to apportion budget and choose influencers of different statures accordingly. You can also track the campaign’s progress after its launch (e.g., how many influencers have posted and when).
4. Analyze influencer and campaign performance
One of the biggest advantages of using an influencer management platform is the ability to access analytics on campaign performance. You can see your RoI in real-time and make changes to the campaign accordingly. You’ll be able to see no. of impressions, mentions, engagement on the posts, etc. in one place. You can analyze them at a more significant level and also go down to the level of checking the performance of each influencer. This learning goes a long way in planning your next campaign with only the high-return yielding influencers from the campaign.
5. Generate easy-to-consume campaign reports
Lastly, an influencer management platform lets you consume updated campaign reports at a click of a button. No more stressing over manual errors in data entry in Excel sheets! And no more breaking your heads over writing macros or beseeching the analyst for actionable reports. Instead, an influencer management platform has you sorted with automated reports that lead to super-efficient, actionable insights.
Important things to look for in an influencer management platform
1. Ease of use
An influencer management platform must be easy to use. You don’t want to be dunked into a spiral of technical terms and tools that make you lose it! A good influencer management platform should have an easy-to-glance-through dashboard and a set of easy-to-use tools to set up and manage a campaign. The user interface should be conducive and not cluttered with technical terms thrown in out of context for a general marketer. You can make an informed choice by requesting a product demo before signing up for their services. Any good and credible platform will never deny you one!
2. Influencer search capabilities
Another thing to look for in an influencer management platform is its search capabilities. A good search tool will allow you to find and target the right influencers for your business based on their niche, reach, engagement level, and other essential criteria.
It should also allow you to search by location and language so that you can reach out only to those who speak the language of your audience and are located in countries where your products are sold. You should also be able to filter results by follower count, likes/comments/shares per post, and average engagement rate per post.
3. Campaign management
End-to-end campaign management tools and capabilities is the hallmark of a good influencer management platform. From being able to create a new campaign using preset, comprehensive templates to seeing campaign performance – all of it should take just a few clicks. Campaign management also includes being able to track deliverables for each of the influencers i.e.:
Date and time of posting
Hashtags and descriptions used
Tags added, etc.
4. Covers all Social platforms
A lot of influencer management platforms focus on just 1-2 key social media platforms. That however isn’t the most ideal case. Today, influencer marketing campaigns span TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitch, Twitter, YouTube, and even LinkedIn! Look out for a platform that supports most, if not all, of these social media platforms.
5. Social media listening
Tracking the conversations initiated by the influencers is also very important so that you can respond to them, tap into opportunities and drive business. Social media listening is all about tracking and identifying mentions of your brand and conversations around it. A lot of times with good social media listening capabilities brands are able to subvert negative PR and boost positive conversations.
6. Sentiment analysis
Influencer marketing doesn’t just target direct sales out of an influencer. It also targets a build-up of good word of mouth about the brand by the influencers. Hence, a good influencer management platform should be able to analyze the sentiment behind all the conversations an influencer generates around the brand (or the campaign). This gives the marketers a double-click on the campaign’s RoI. The qualitative insights from sentiment analysis are often the most precious fruit one can expect to harvest from an influencer marketing campaign. The sales of course follow a good sentiment!
7. Data depth and collection
Influencers often beef up their follower count by spending some bucks on buying bots. They can also mislead you at times with planted comments and mentions. Hence, the depth of data collected by an influencer management platform becomes critical to a campaign’s success. A good influencer management platform will go two levels deeper into the influencers’ profiles and track things like:
Follower count across different social media platforms
Video vs. static post comparisons in terms of engagement rate, etc.
8. Influencer communication management capabilities
Managing unstructured influencer conversations often wastes a large part of a marketing team’s effort. An influencer management platform can help you keep a track of these conversations while facilitating them. So, you don’t have to go to every influencer’s profile literally, request for their WhatsApp no. and chat! It can all be done through the platform itself and hence, this is one capability you must look out for.
9. Cost management and customer support
Lastly, while choosing an influencer management platform, you must be aware of the costs involved. Most platforms offer different packages for access to different tech capabilities. Depending on your campaign’s requirements and long-term plans, you can choose a plan that suits you the best. Often, companies choose mid-to-long-term plans since they’re the most cost-optimal. Striking the right cost and capability trade-off is of the essence and every marketer must choose with utmost understanding.
Also, the platform you choose must offer post-subscription support. It means if you get stuck while using the platform, you should have an automated chatbot and a customer care rep at your help. And trust us, as a new user you will need support at one point or the other while setting up your first few campaigns – no matter how easy-to-use an interface it is!
Radarr is the game-changer your influencer marketing strategy needs!
There’s no question that influencer marketing is a powerful way to reach new audiences and build brand awareness.
But you can’t just throw money at an influencer campaign and hope for the best. You need to be able to measure it, optimize it, and get the most bang for your buck. You need to use a tool that will help you find the best influencers for your brand, who will work within your budget and deliver on their promises.
Radarr gives you a competitive edge over other companies when it comes to influencer marketing. We help you optimize your campaigns so that you can get the most out of them. Because when it comes to influencer marketing, there’s no room for guesswork—or for traditional tools that won’t help with social listening and sentiment analysis.
Our AI-powered solution aggregates all digital conversations into a unified dashboard, making it easy to understand your audience, identify brand sentiment, manage reputation (and crises), predict and keep up with trends and everything your marketing strategy needs!
Are you ready to try out an influencer management platform that’s super easy to use and extremely effective?
Struggling to increase your campaign reach? Find the right influencer.
With social commerce gaining immense popularity over the past few years, it is no surprise that an increasing number of marketers are trying to leverage this channel for their brands. In fact, about 71% of brands plan on increasing their influencer marketing budget this year.
Surprisingly, a significant chunk of marketers are not aware of influencer discovery platforms and tools to find influencers.
In this blog, we will share a step-by-step guide on how you can do a thorough influencer search.
Why is it important to find the right influencer?
Finding the right influencer is important for your brand to come across as genuine as possible. When you collaborate with an influencer who understands your brand well and shares similar values, it does not look like a marketing campaign. Instead, it looks like a genuine brand endorsement.
By typing up with the right influencers, you can not only reach wider audiences who could have potential interest in your brand but also increase your return on investment exponentially without appearing too sales-y.
When an influencer campaign is carried out effectively with the right partner, here are some of the additional benefits your brand can reap:
It boosts your company’s bottom line
It can improve your SEO efforts
Eases the buyer’s purchase decision, thus increasing sales drastically
It acts as a time and cost-effective method of marketing
Greater visibility in lesser time
For example, cashing in on Squid Games actress — HoYeon Jung — overnight global success, brands like Louis Vuitton, Calvin Klein and Adidas were quick to collaborate with the model-turned-actress to reach new audiences.
10 steps to find the right influencers for your campaign
Here is a simple step-by-step guide that will help you assess which influencers you should be working with:
1. Define your campaign goals and objectives
The first step to choosing the right influencers for your campaign is deciding what your campaign goals are. Are you looking for increased brand awareness, increased traffic, more conversions, etc.? This is your objective and defines the type of influencers you will work with.
Secondly, when it comes to finding influencers for your product, you need to first decide what kind of influencers you need for your campaigns such as social media influencers or highly-followed bloggers that align with the product.
If you’re trying to reach a mass audience, you might want to work with social media influencers that have large audiences. For a more specific target audience, you could work with micro-influencers that have small but highly engaged audiences. This will act as the foundation of your campaign strategy when figuring out the best influencers to work with.
2. Define the target audience
Having a clear idea of who you are targeting is vital to a successful campaign. If there is no clear target audience for a campaign then it’s unlikely to achieve its goal. Therefore, you should spend some time clearly defining your target audience to get a better idea of who you want to reach out to.
Here are some questions to ask yourself:
Who do I want to reach? What are their demographics? What do they like? What do they dislike? How do they like to consume media? Once you’ve completed this exercise you can start to think about which influencers are likely to have influence within your target audience. This will help you to formulate a strategy to approach them and will make sure your influencer campaign has the best chance of getting results.
By understanding the demographics and psychographics of your audience, you’ll be able to narrow down the list of influencers who fit the bill.
3. Document your vision and mission
It really is important for the influencer to align with your brand’s mission and vision because that is the only way they can create something completely genuine and authentic to what you stand for. Work with influencers who you feel can strive to create content and engage with their audiences in a way that aligns with your brand’s message.
The most important reason to remember this is that you want your influencers to deliver the kind of content that is useful and helpful to your audience. If the content focuses on the wrong things, it could be detrimental to your brand’s image and could lead to the campaign being a major flop.
So, even if the influencer you eventually partner up with is great at their job, they may not know what to create if both parties aren’t on the same page.
For example, if your brand sells vegan, health-focused products, you can’t work with an influencer who actively posts about meat or an unhealthy lifestyle.
4. Identify topics and themes associated with your campaign
The next step is to identify things that are relevant to your campaign. For example, themes, goals and objectives are factors that play a huge role in determining which influencer is right for your campaign and will help you better understand which direction to take your campaign in.
Whether you are doing a product launch or advertising specific services, you will have to spend time researching the best matches for your campaign. Influencers, whether they are bloggers, YouTube creators or Instagrammers, will have a wide range of demographics they appeal to. By choosing the right type of influencer based on your goals and the topics you want to cover, you can make sure that your campaign reaches the right people.
5. Make use of social listening
If you are going to make use of digital platforms for your campaigns for products you are promoting, social listening is crucial to your strategy. You want to reach out to the people who are already talking about similar topics online and get in touch with them.
You might want to find influencers with a significant following in your industry that can help spread the word. Alternatively, you can also look at micro-influencers who talk about similar topics in a positive light frequently. Of course, you will also need to assess whether there are people looking up to them in this niche.
If you want your campaign to be successful with an influencer, you must ensure that they have real, active engagement on their channel. However, simply having a large following does not guarantee good engagement and a successful brand-influencer partnership.
It is important to look at how many comments, likes, shares and views each influencer has. If you want to develop a successful partnership, look for those influencers on social media platforms that have consistent engagement. To find out the engagement rate of an influencer, you will need to assess the number of likes their content is getting, the average number of comments, how many people find their content interesting enough to share and more such factors.
While it’s important to know these numbers, you also need to look at the content quality. A lot of times, influencers will have a high number of followers and engagement, but their actual photography and content may not be that appealing. Check out the content and make sure it’s something you’re happy to associate your brand with.
7. Do a sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining and lexical analysis, has been a hot topic of discussion in the social media world. In order to find out the opinion of the users on a particular topic, this area of study pokes away at the sentiments and emotions of the users and their language. There are a number of software and platforms available in the market, but one needs to know what to look for when conducting sentiment analysis.
Sentiment analysis is paramount to any influencer collaboration. With it, you can gauge how the audience will react to your message once the influencer posts it to their page. It is not just beneficial for influencer marketing, but with sentiment analysis platforms, you can use them for other campaigns and to also figure out what people think about your brand as a whole.
Not sure if your influencers are stimulating the right sentiment in your audience? Let’s find out with Radarr.
8. Shortlist from the list of influencers
If you have a business goal or vision that you are trying to accomplish, consider the following- who will be the most interested in doing business with you and when?
There are many types of influencers and each of them has different goals, values and ways of communicating with their audience. Some influencers focus on building relationships that result in long-term value while other influencers rely on short-term gains.
For example, a small business that is trying to get new customers might benefit the most from working with micro-influencers, who have a relatively small reach but quality engagement. Additionally, they are also a cost-effective solution if your influencer budget is limited.
For a business trying to increase their brand awareness, a macro-influencer with a wide reach and high engagement might be the most effective.
9. Document your requirements and clearly discuss them
It’s important to be transparent about your expectations. Before you start working with an influencer, you should talk about how you want to collaborate, how you want to work together, what you want them to produce, how they will need to deliver the final product, what your brand’s guidelines are, how photos and videos will be used, and anything else that is important for you to consider.
By making sure you both agree on this, you’ll ensure that there are no unpleasant surprises which, in turn, will ensure the campaign is a success and that there is room for a long-term relationship with scope for future collaborations.
Be sure to clearly document all this information and discuss it with them before you start working on the campaign. By doing this, you can make sure to work together more effectively and avoid misunderstandings. It is also a good idea to provide them with an official contract that includes the expectations for the campaign and takes care of all the legal aspects before both parties enter the working relationship.
10. Monitor progress to decide future steps
Once you sign the contract with an influencer, it’s important to closely monitor and assist them with work to ensure the campaign’s success. Even if you have given the campaign outline and brief details to an influencer, it is necessary that you remain focused on ways to improve their results for other content items related to your arrangement.
You should still be flexible and ready with plans for changes along the way should certain changes be required. If the final content makes followers question your product or service or maybe even details of a giveaway you might be hosting, then you will need to do another round of revisions and upload other creatives that provide clarity.
Be sure to provide them with guidance in order to create more effective assets that will not ensure the success of the ongoing campaign but something that can also be repurposed later down the line for your brand’s social media pages.
To get rich, real-time insights from your ongoing influencer campaigns and to optimize them in a manner that sets your brand up for success, consider using Radarr.
Summing up
Influencer marketing is a powerful way to promote your brand, but it can be tricky to find the right people to collaborate with. The right influencers don’t necessarily need to be celebrities or those with millions of followers. They can even be micro-influencers with a voice in their community and can get people excited about your brand.
But it doesn’t work if the people who are speaking on behalf of your brand don’t resonate with their followers.
That’s where Radarr comes in. We help brands connect with influencers who have an authentic voice and a loyal following within their community. We’ll help you find the right influencers so that when they speak on behalf of your brand, people will listen!
Learn more about the best influencer marketing campaigns and how to run one yourself.
Influencer marketing is a method used by brands to increase their return on investment. It is a new way of using word of mouth and merging it with social media to push products on a large scale.
Earlier, businesses were skeptical of influencer marketing campaigns but with the rise of social media and the increase in power of influencers, it is now a commonly adopted way of marketing.
Here are some statistics that demonstrate the success of influencer marketing campaigns:
The industry is expected to increase by 2.6 billion in 2022, taking it to an estimated 16.4 billion dollars
79% of brands choose Instagram as the platform for their influencer campaigns
93% of marketers have relied on influencer marketing at some point
More brands are opting for micro-influencers to reduce costs and get higher engagement
This only goes to show that when marketers move in a strategic manner with these campaigns, they are likely to achieve higher success.
In this blog, we will talk about how to run influencer marketing campaigns. We have also included some of the best influencer campaign examples to put things into better perspective.
Influencer marketing campaign best practices
Let’s review some of the best practices along with influencer marketing campaign examples to help you get started:
1. Have a clear understanding of your KPIs
At the beginning of any influencer marketing campaign, it’s important to have a clear direction on what you want out of that campaign. Are you aiming for sales or growing brand awareness? Or perhaps your goal is to achieve both. Your campaign’s KPIs really depend on what you’re trying to achieve with your influencer marketing strategy.
Marketers who are new to influencer marketing campaigns may find it a little too complicated, but as long as you know what you want and how to gain it, things should go well! There are many strategies that bring different results. It all depends on your overall goal itself which will set the tone for executing a successful campaign.
But the first step in doing so is knowing where to keep an eye on your performance i.e KPIs and what success looks like for you. You will need to adjust them accordingly during post-campaign analysis.
2. Define your target audience
When it comes to influencer selection, your target audience should be a fairly obvious starting point. The ideal influencer campaign is one where there’s overlap between the creator and their followers’ interests being similar to your brand’s offerings as it makes for a far more successful campaign.
For example, Daniel Wellington — the watch and jewelry brand — who earlier used to work with major influencers, started involving micro-influencers in their campaigns to get a wider reach and increase their ROI.
3. Decide the campaign type
There are different types of campaigns you can initiate based on your end goal. Here are a few influencer marketing campaign types you can choose from:
Giveaways
Sponsored posts
Sponsored long-form content like YouTube videos and podcasts
Affiliate marketing
Product reviews and unboxing
Contests and events
Social media takeover for a set duration
Collection or product release campaigns
Programs devised around brand ambassadors
A good example of this is the G Fuel Energy X Pewdiepie collaboration. The shoutouts on his Instagram page and YouTube videos have garnered the brand such great attention that G Fuel has even created a flavor called PewDiePie.
4. Map out the key deliverables, approach and assets before creating a contract
When you’re using an influencer to promote your brand and you want to make sure they’re giving you what you want, you need to make sure that you nail down specifics early on. Make sure you decide on the products they are going to use, if your logo needs to be in the post, and if other guidelines need to be considered for the campaign.
It’s a good idea to allow them the freedom to create their own content – but only if the deliverables will meet your goal of driving customers to your website and product pages.
When working with influencers, it’s important to set guidelines and expectations right away. This will keep both parties aligned and be sure that everyone is on the same page!
A contract should be sent over to the influencer as soon as possible and you can include a list of brand assets and what the deliverables will be. This way, you can easily track progress and make sure that you’re getting what you need from the influencer. You can include a clear and concise timeline and instructions for the tasks.
5. Create a list of influencers and pitch to the right ones
It’s easy to get carried away by the number of influencers out there on the Internet. This is why you need to take into account your brand image and requirements before you zero in on influencers to invest in. Look for the ones who associate themselves with brands that align with your own values, have considerable numbers of followers and have a high engagement rate.
If a person has a high engagement rate and passes the other statistics you are considering, but does not fit your brand image, it will not benefit your company. After you make the list, shortlist the influencers you would like to work with and pitch to them. When choosing which influencers to partner with, you must also consider the compatibility between the influencer’s audience and your product.
A few things to be mindful about while pitching is that macro-influencers will require some kind of compensation since they get offered brand deals often. Whereas, nano and micro-influencers might even accept free products. Whatever your offering, just remember to make it beneficial enough for them to accept the pitch.
6. Start your influencer marketing campaign
Once you have everything in place, you can work with your influencers to grow your customer base and reach more people through their marketing channels. There are a few different ways to do this, but whatever you decide upon, make sure you keep in touch with the influencers throughout the campaign. They will likely have questions that you can answer to help the campaign run smoothly, and focused communication is key to a successful influencer campaign.
7. Follow up on the performance
Following up is an important step once your influencer campaign starts. You want to see how the campaign is performing, get feedback on your products and ask questions about how to improve your campaign.
You can also follow up with the influencer at the end of the campaign to see how they found the product and if there is scope for future collaborations then what they would improve in the process of the campaigns.
8. Repurpose and broadcast as much as possible
If you want your influencer marketing campaign to be successful, you have to maximize the reach of the influencer on all platforms. That will require more time and effort from you, but you’ll be working with a higher caliber of influencers with more followers and a better reach.
To get the most out of your campaign, you’ll also want to repurpose your content in different formats. This means you’ll have to make sure the content is high-quality, which can be costly. But it’s worth it to ensure your campaign is seen by as many people as possible!
9. Analyze the performance against pre decided metrics
Lastly, there will come a time when you have to evaluate just how effective an influencer campaign really was. While it is definitely important to outline the success and return on investment of your overall program, you will also become wiser in different aspects of marketing and management for future campaigns.
You may find that audience targeting could be improved or perhaps that one particular influencer is not quite as effective as you may have originally anticipated. Either way, there are many valuable lessons to be learned from every single performance of a marketing campaign.
Bonus tips to consider for your influencer marketing campaigns
Influencer marketing campaigns are often hard to crack owing to the aspects that are immeasurable and dynamic. But here are a few tips you can make use of to measure the success of campaigns in a more effective way:
1. Monitor conversations your influencer campaign generates with social listening
Social listening is the act of monitoring and analyzing the content people share on social media, forums, blogs, and other sources to make sure you’re staying up to date on trends. You can also use it to see what people have to say about specific topics, as well as what people say about your brand.
It’s a great way to find out what people are saying about your brand and the kinds of interactions they are having. You can analyze this information to improve your marketing strategy and get the most out of your efforts.
Using social listening to monitor your influencer campaign is a great idea. It’ll give you an idea of the level of interaction your campaign is getting. On top of that, it’ll help you improve it by seeing how users are interacting with your campaign.
The easiest way to do this is by using social listening to find mentions. Once you’ve found mentions, you can see how users are engaging with your campaign. You can take this data and improve your campaign by making it more interesting, more captivating, and more engaging.
2. Monitor sentiment behind conversations
Monitor the response to your influencer campaigns. It’s not enough to see how many people are talking about your product or brand, you should also pay attention to what they are saying. Are they saying something positive or negative? Are they able to provide a valuable contribution to your campaign or is it just one-sided?
If your campaign is going to be successful, it’s important to make sure that influencers are triggering active participation from their audience and increasing your ROI.
To be on top of your campaign, you can work with Radarr’s Sentiment API and streamline the data around online campaigns.
3. Respond to comments
The content being produced by the influencers is already useful and engaging. In order to help increase visitor conversion, it may be beneficial to have your brand not only share this content but also respond to comments on the influencer’s post. This way, the influencers can focus on what they do best and your social media accounts can get more visitors and followers.
Now you and your team can benefit from one powerful dashboard as we enable you to monitor your brand on every channel. With Radarr, you can find and respond to all of your mentions on one screen with an almost instant response time.
4. Finally, optimize your strategy
Your organization has recently been getting into influencer marketing. You’re not sure if it has been effective yet but you have been obsessively reading articles about it. You take a look at the key performance indicators and metrics of previous influencer marketing campaigns from other players in the industry. You analyze them and try to figure out what the best KPIs are that you can use to judge the performance of the campaign.
Now, with this new information, you can make a more educated decision about implementing influencer marketing strategies and set yourself up for success.
In closing
Influencer marketing is a proven method for brand growth and increased ROI. This strategy allows for brands to analyze the various influencers who may be a good fit for their product or service.
By leveraging influential figures, brands are able to reach a broader audience. It is important to note that the power of influencers is not in the number of followers they have but in the number of actions they can compel their followers to take.
You should take caution while choosing the right influencer for your campaign. The number of followers an influencer has is not a good way to gauge the effectiveness of your collaboration efforts. It is better to look at the percentage of followers that actually engage with the influencer’s posts.
Using influencers with a high engagement rate will lead you to higher conversions, which is why always look for quality over quantity.
By looking at the audience that the influencer has and their previous posts and campaigns, brands can determine whether the influencer has effective methods of increasing ROI.
