Since its launch in 2010, Instagram, the popular photo and video sharing application has managed to engage more than 400 million users and is now one of the leading platforms used by brands to build on their digital marketing strategy. Brands are busy crafting innovative social influencer strategies and executing wide-reaching influencer marketing campaigns. The way to succeed on Instagram via influencer marketing is to develop long-term collaborations with top Instagram influencers.
So how many brands have managed to accomplish their ROI goals through influencer marketing on Instagram? Let’s find out!
How brands are making use of Instagram influencers
The user base of Instagram is topping the charts and more and more celebrity and celebrity-like Instagrammers are endorsing some of the top brands of the world including Levi’s, Maybelline, McDonald’s, Mercedes-Benz and others. In addition to this, several interesting start-up companies such as Blue Apron and Nature Box are also gaining momentum in their marketing strategy thanks to Instagram influencers.
Here are some of the best examples of how brands used influencer marketing on Instagram to reach out more effectively to their target audience:
1. Birchbox
Birchbox is a beauty brand that wanted its Instagram followers to get acquainted with the latest grooming tools and lifestyle products. To accomplish this goal, it partnered with the most trending beauty influencers on Instagram. These influencers basically showcased the brand’s newest products (through modeling) and promoted exclusive giveaways.
For example, Birchbox collaborated with Emily Schuman, a lifestyle blogger (Cupcakes and Cashmere) in order to curate its May box. Emily has over 260,000 followers on Instagram and she promoted her partnership with Birchbox by posting five photos on Instagram. These pictured received more than 18,000 likes reaching out to over 550,000 consumers !
2. SHREDZ
SHREDZ is a nutritional supplement brand which reported collecting $90,000 as revenue for year ending 2012. Further, the company had posted gross revenue of $5 million by year ending 2013 and attributed this success to its Instagram influencer marketing campaign. So what did SHREDZ do to boost its ROI to such an extent? According to the marketing team of SHREDZ, the company identified and built connections with several dozen influential Instagram users who had huge followings. They offered these influencers free supplements along with monthly payments for posting pictures of them exercising while consuming SHREDZ products.
3. Boxed Water
Now here’s a brilliant example of a brand that worked for an environmental cause in collaboration with Instagram influencers. Boxed Water decided to partner up with influencers Megan DeAngelis, Aidan Alexander and Jaime King to promote its philanthropic campaign in association with the National Forest Foundation. It was called ‘The Retree Project’. How did it work? Each time someone posted a photo on Instagram with #Retree added as a hashtag, Boxed Water planted two trees. After a month of the campaign’s launch, Instagram had over 2,600 photos carrying the Retree hashtag.
These brands and several others serve as examples of you can use influencer marketing to your advantage on thriving social media platforms such as Instagram. The popularity and effectiveness of Instagram is not something that brands need to be made aware of. It is quickly surpassing the likes of Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook to become the most widely used social media platform for brand promotion. You can easily tap into the amazing power of Instagram and use it to expand your customer base, boost sales and improve engagement through influencer marketing campaigns.