Ecommerce markets are in all likelihood spinning the game with thousands of online tools and platforms available to grow your business. It has made it super easy for brands to influence their customers by making use of social platforms. Instagram Influencer Marketing has come out to be great reliever of sorts helping smaller and bigger businesses to showcase their brands and make them popular. Instagram marketing has exponentially grown in a very short time span that gives many advantages; you not only grow your followers but leverage your brand identity.

Kissmetrics report states that over 70% of Instagram users look up on varied brands on the platform and looking forward to consume the content. Instagram is an effective tool for your ecommerce business with over 300 million monthly users. Every marketer has a dream to show their product to its customers in the most prominent manner. The trick is to display your product strongly in front of customers but not overly trying it. Hence, Instagram Influencer marketing is best regarded when it comes to show your brand. You can make use of Instagram in two methods; one is by building your own following and second is by Influencer Marketing.

Building your own Instagram Audience

Online tools like Webstagram or Iconosquare helps to build Organic following on Instagram, through these tools one can select relevant hashtags and reach out to right people interested in your industry. Webstagram is a wonder tool that provides excellent way to search for popular hashtags. Webstagram search helps to search for key information that is relevant to Instagram marketing strategy. However, it is highly important to know how to do posting on the right day to get optimum benefits. Iconosquare is another most awesome tools online that tell you exact times where most engagement happens.

The tools help to make your brands popular by indulging in marketing at perfect times. The above image shows sample data from Iconosquare. Shopify study indicates that the dark circles are the ones which you usually post and light grey are the ones which get most engagement. The ideal time for posting is represented by large light grey circles.

Siphoning the followers – although there are several means that you can directly touch base to attract your customers, the easiest ways are the ones that do not require any efforts. Like in the case of this marketing strategy that is to siphon the followers from competition. You already have correct knowledge and audiences that are following your competitor’s account, you know which products they are interested in, how they are selling it. Once you start siphoning, you know you have at least some targeted audience. One can easily do this, by “following” competitors account and then engage with them by following them, liking their pictures, commenting on their photos. A shopify’s test run showed that by following an account you at least get 14% follow backs, 22% followbacks and likes and over 34% of comments, likes and followbacks. It can look pretty much tough at first but once when you are into it, you get the solid data with you to implement your strategy right.

First let us understand the concept of Instagram Influencer and Influencer Marketing!

Instagram is all about reaching your audiences; brands are marketing their products with the objective of getting many followers and get some proportion of those followers into conversions. That is where the role of Influencer marketing kicks in. Influencers on Instagram could be any person having a celebrity status or a person having a huge following. These are the people who are influencers they have great following up of people and people might just be interested in your brand. You can turn your small new business having minimum following to a larger following in a matter of just few days through the power of Influencer Marketing. You just have to search for influencer in your niche, contact them and agree on terms through which they will market your product or brand.

Companies like Boxed water uses Instagram Influencer Marketing for their campaign The ReTree Project, it was a simple campaign in which users had to post a photo with hashtag #retree. For each of this post, the company used to plant two trees. Social media examiner report states that in a time of just one month, they have generated more than 2,600 posts having #retree hashtag. Visually appealing products have larger influencing factor when it comes to Instagram influencer marketing, it could be a great booster to get larger following in a short span of time.

Now, the most important question is How to convince the Influencers on Instagram to market your products?

Influencers are basically the people having larger reach, hence any brand would want to get accustomed to them providing they are somewhere related to your industry or the product or services relating to yours. Entrepreneurs who are just starting out may find this as little intimidating. Its very difficult to get started at first because first brand has to figure out what kind of influencers they need, searching the right influencer, how to reach out to them, how to impress them with your product or brand, how it will affect the sales, so on and so forth. Its not a rocket science, but with slow and gradual steps, it all can be achieved. Given below are few of the steps that help you get started:

Building Influencer Marketing audience on Instagram

• Finding the right Influencer

The foremost step to start marketing on Instagram is to find the influencer that belongs to your industry or product line. Influencers from your industry have higher chances to fetch more following because people of similar interest are already their followers. Targeting specific customer from your industry cuts down your work by half. Free online analytics tool are really helpful to find relevant keywords on Instagram that will help you with Instagram marketing strategy. You can select from a bunch of hashtags and keywords where you think audiences may be interested in. Finding the right influencer with all the research work is worth your time otherwise it may get expensive for losing your money as well as time.

• Negotiating with Influencer

You can get good success in your Instagram marketing strategy once you have right influencer. People are more likely to follow the product or brand, which they see Influencer promoting on their feeds regularly. Hence it is of vital importance to check if your product aligns with what your influencer have been regularly promoting on their page. You can form a partnership with the Influencer by first introducing yourself and the brand and the product that you like to market. Influencers usually are monetarily working; hence you can provide product samples also talk about money they will work for. You can find their contact details and information on their page.

Contact them and giving your influencers a brief idea about your product and what you want them to market will set their intentions on it. Creating a Mood Board for your product brand will help them getting connected and feel your brand.

Mood Boards are nothing but a collection of images that gives some sense of the product to the on-lookers. The above is a sample of Mood Board created by Neil Waller for promoting his business brand – Shore Projects. It gives influencer good sense of conveying brand’s message to its audiences that makes your marketing all the more successful. Remember, that no influencer will work for free so it is best to talk out deals with them and have all things sorted on paper. Agree on terms together and give them some samples that they can try and be sure of.

• Measuring the output

Campaigns with good framework always give better results hence It is also important to measure the results. You would know what works and what doesn’t work. Online tools like Bitly helps to keep multiple trackable links for every influencer you want to target. You can ask influencers to post your business link on their bio page, that way you would know how many visitors are coming from their page.

Instagram Marketing has been of great help for Ecommerce merchants; visually appealing products have greater outreach. Organic following in Instagram is an achievement one should draw in Instagram marketing strategy plan. It is a great platform for building brand and growing Ecommerce business.