A Simple Guide to do Affiliate Marketing Using Instagram.

As an individual, we all use Instagram, now people are quite active on Instagram and love to share our day to day moments and a lot more since Instagram is gaining popularity among users. Even it allows marketers to do affiliate marketing to reap the benefit.

According to statistics, Instagram has the potential to generate 100 million users every four months.

 Of course, sponsors have taken notice of the number of 2 million leveraging the platform for ad purposes. But what’s fascinating is the primary type of “advertising” or “marketing” people think when it comes to Instagram. It’s not the ads displaying in the feed; instead, it’s the influencers who have been trusted by users.

In this article, we are going to learn how to do affiliate marketing by using influencers on Instagram. And how it has the potential to bring the market into your favour.

Why Instagram?

Instagram is one of those simple platforms to use. At the same time, it’s simple to scroll right beyond an ad on Instagram of some random company; it’s more appealing when one actively follows an Influencer who happens to be promoting a product that day in his/her feed. It bears out in the data as well:

According to the stat, Instagram has the highest engagement rate of the common social media platforms. That’s why affiliate marketing via influencer (aka Influencer Marketing) has become so effective and popular. 

So, in brief, working with Influencers on Instagram is an excellent venue for useful affiliate marketing, and you should be doing it. Maximize your affiliate marketing efforts by collaborating with Instagram influencers. Their influence can skyrocket your brand’s exposure and drive conversions. Don’t forget to leverage the power of repost on Instagram to extend your reach even further

How to choose a potential influencer for Affiliate Marketing

The primary thing you should keep in mind that this process is based on trust.

The reason behind the success of Instagram Influencer Marketing is the inherent trust that they have developed within their followers. Social media influencers are more trusted than any celebrity, and what your company is doing is bestowing that trust onto your brand.

So, the primary thing you should look for in an Influencer is

1. They are trusted by followers & niche.

 Research your potential partner. Influencers that you have chosen should have a positive influence on the market.  Check if there is any bad buzz around them in their particular niche? Do they perform well with other Influencers and brands? Do they get enough Instagram likes? It is crucial because the minute you associate your brand with the wrong influencer, it may take a long time for your goodwill to recover. The more positive influence he has, the more he has the potential to attract new customers.

2. Go for a micro-influencer

Micro-influencers are those influencers who have followers from 2000 to 15000. Does this range seem low? But there is a valid reason we think you should aim for that these influencers have a high interaction rate with their followers, and their audience is far more hooked and loyal than those with millions of casual followers. According to a survey, there is more likeness for micro-influencer than macro-influencer.

And another big reason? Expense. Most of the enormous Influencers work solely on a pay-per-post model, where companies have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single Instagram post. 

Every business doesn’t have a budget for this much. Therefore we’re hoping most of you a) don’t want to pay anywhere near that much, and b) want to work with Influencers on a conventional affiliate marketing model (commission on sale). It’s much more likely that micro-influencers will work on this model.

For example, according to an editorial on The Verge, an Instagram influencer with about 30,000 followers costs between $2500 to $4500 for sponsored content. This price range is much more in the field of possibility for smaller companies, and if anything, it can be a great way to “test the waters” of working with an influencer in this capacity.

So unless your business has a massive money pit for marketing, you should aim for micro-influencers. You can always snag more prominent Influencers later.

3. Choose those who fit with your product.

Once you recognize that an Influencer is reliable and famous in their niche, it’s time to do an in-depth check of their Instagram feed. Let’s say you’re in the shoe business, and now, you have to find an influencer who loves shoes and frequently posts about them.

Keep checking that your product fits in the influencer’s feed. Would their followers meet the profile of your potential customers? It’s essential to do some analysis into both your potential Influencer and their followers to see if this affiliate marketing is a great fit.

 While there’s no need to go overboard and check every single post, scrolling in and reading the comments on a few posts

will give you a sense of whether this influencer is appropriate for your business or not.

How to find your Instagram Influencer

Now, that we understand how to find the influencer, and it’s time to know the sources from where we can get the Instagram influencers.

• Your most-engaged customers.

 The best place to find the influencer is to check your customer base. As they already raised their support and spent money on your products or services, even you have their contact information due to their transaction, which makes it simpler to reach out to them.

 But you need to rush for every single customer. You have to work smartly and know those customers who are quite active on social media. The one who has the habit of posting reviews, experiences, and feedback of the products and services they use, and since they share genuine reviews, people are likely to react to their posts.

• Search for your niche influencer

Focus on finding the micro-influencers on Instagram that post within your particular niche. There are three ideas to go here:

• Low Price/High Effort — Doing your research via hashtags, clicking into posts, clicking into profiles, and scrolling continuously. It cost you nothing.

In this case, you can simply search for relevant hashtags and see who has posted quality content on it. This process is time-consuming. But people with a small niche can take advantage of it. But the one with the broader niche will find it difficult to get relevant posts.

• Medium Expense/Medium Effort — You can use social media analytics tools. There are various analytic platforms where you can pay a fee to use to get quick insights into the Influencers in your niche, do an in-depth

analysis for specific names you have in mind and observe how they interact with their followers regularly.

• High Cost/Low Effort — Get a company to send you potential Influencers. They can connect you with a famous social influencer by charging a fee. Unless you’ve got money to burn and are looking to launch a massive Instagram Influencer campaign, this choice is one to avoid for now. It’s there if you want to go big!

Here’s how NOT to do it:

Even if they’re not on Kim’s level, most Influencers with even a few thousand followers won’t notice every comment on a casual post. It also doesn’t make you look very professional.

A Direct Message on Instagram is only somewhat better. But it can get mixed with other DMs, and it’s often a boisterous issue as to whether they will even read it since if they don’t follow you on Instagram, your message will show up as a “message request” in their inbox. These are often just ignored.

 Nonetheless, Influencers on the micro-level are more likely to check these DMs, so for those with smaller followings, it’s worth a shot. The go-to method is still a good email. 

Some Influencers will list their business email top on their profiles. Others will require some sleuthing, but anyone with a private website will usually have an email address listed. When you email them, keep it brief! It’s just like any other cold sales email.  Keep in mind that even with offers to pay these Influencers, it’s still a numbers game (though money talks. So keep sending these emails out, and you’ll get acknowledgements soon enough. 

Start with the aim of 25 emails a week. It’s common to get rare responses from these emails, so don’t worry about the lower response rate too much. Tweak your offering and keep at it.

What to pay your Instagram Influencers

There’s a big difference between conventional Influencer marketing and strategic affiliate Influencer marketing.

The old method is a pay-per-post model where you would give X amount for Y posts in a given week/month/quarter. Here you’re not tracking conversions, but instead getting brand publicity to their followers via their feed.

Research by TapInfluence showed that the ROI of these campaigns could be 11 times more than other forms of digital marketing. However, that oft-cited stat hasn’t played out in real-world scenarios. Another study by Linqia reported that 78% of marketers saw managing the ROI to be a top challenge:

What we advise is an affiliate marketing Influencer model where payments are paid on every sale, traced through a unique coupon code your influencer would put in their Instagram profile and post captions.

There are various benefits to this model:

• It’s trackable, as mentioned.
• You only have to pay when the sale is completed
• You can still boost brand awareness by using pay per post model.

The top Influencers may hesitate at this payment model since they are used to pay-per-post. But again, it’s much more likely that micro-influencers will be open to this model. And to attract them more, you should offer an introductory “signing bonus” of free products for them to have, and also a higher commission rate unique for these affiliate Influencers.

 If your commission rate is 10–20% for the ordinary influencer, consider going as high as 50%. Even if the ROI isn’t 11 times, but say five times, it’s still well worth the commission costs.

Wrap up

In this article, we have seen the effectiveness of Instagram and how you can expand your business by using it. Influencer marketing is becoming very powerful nowadays, so it is essential to read about it carefully. Kindly read this article with patience, and you will get an insight into how you can do affiliate marketing with Instagram. I hope this article will help you to understand it better. In case if I have missed out on any point, do let us know about it, and we will cover it.

Keep learning and experimenting.