Influencer Marketing on Social Media - How Does It Work?

Influencer marketing is quickly becoming one of the most effective ways for brands and businesses to market their products and services. It allows direct access to a very targeted group of potential customers, while being capable of generating a huge return on the promotion costs.

But for social media influencers, this means more and more opportunities in a growing industry. So let us talk about a lot of important areas to consider when discussing Influencer Marketing on Social Media in 2020.

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is one of the more modern types of online marketing. It involves a social media influencer – an individual with a large, engaged following in a particular niche on a social media platform – promoting your product, service, brand or campaign.

It often turns out to be one of the most effective types of marketing since you will be able to get direct exposure from your target audience as the influencer would be in your niche. Furthermore, as the influencer has a large and engaged following, it means that their followers trust them and are more likely to act on their endorsement than some celebrity who isn’t into their niche.

Does Influencer Marketing Pay Well?

As with a lot of things when it comes to influencer marketing, the answer to this question would be that it depends.

Brands and companies would happily pay you if you can get them customers, leads or even an improved brand image and visibility. But then doing that isn’t exactly easy, or everyone would be doing it.

The thing is, depending on your niche, you need a fairly large follower base. But more importantly, you must be able to generate a good amount of engagement with your followers.

If you can do that, you’re sure to land some great, lucrative deals with brands in your niche. Even when you’re still small and not yet ready to work with big brands, you will likely land smaller gigs from businesses either requesting to buy shoutouts on your account or in some cases even offering you a gig to manage and grow their account.

Furthermore, it’s very common to get requests to review different products or sometimes even services for free in return of a post on your Instagram handle. This may be when your account is still growing so you may not yet make a lot of money but you can certainly get a lot of cool stuff related to your niche for free.

How to Become a Social Media Influencer?

As we mentioned above, becoming a successful social media influencer can be lucrative but not easy. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication to build a large, loyal following, and also a lot of time.

Sure, there are some ways to speed up the process a bit that we will get to later, but for now we would just say that you shouldn’t expect the results to come easily.

With that said, let us walk you through the entire process of becoming a social media platform.

Find Your Niche

You would never be able to become an influencer if you post random stuff on Instagram, unless perhaps if you’re a celebrity.

In other words, you would need to find a niche that you’re passionate or knowledgeable about. And then only make posts related to that niche.

You need to choose a niche in which you can consistently create useful and interesting content. Remember, mediocre content has no place on Instagram, and it takes both quantity and quality to stand out.

In some cases, even posting about 2-3 different but related niches can work well. However, if you go too broad it becomes much harder to establish yourself.

Optimizing Your Instagram Presence

It’s important to optimize your presence on Instagram in order to be in the best possible position to become an influencer.

Let us discuss a few things you could do to build a good presence on Instagram.

Turning Into a Business Account

The first step is to simply turn your Instagram account to a business account. A business account allows you to access a lot of useful tools and features that goes a long way in growing your account faster.

On the other hand, a personal account would have a few limitations that would make it harder for you to grow a large following.

A Bio that Stands Out

Perhaps nothing helps your account make a good first impression better than your bio. Make sure your bio is both informative and engaging.

Being able to convey your brand’s important information in the form of a story is usually the best approach you can take to writing a bio.

Profile Pic and Cover Photo

Your profile pic and cover photo must be unique and attractive as well. They are an important component of your overall personal identity on Instagram.

Users and followers remember your account from your profile pic, so make sure it’s unique and don’t change it too often.

Understanding Your Target Audience

Understanding your target audience would help you figure out what type of content you need to post. Posting the right type of content is key to growing a large, loyal follower base.

You can start by analyzing the content being posted by the top accounts and influencers in your niche. Similarly, you need to find and take a note of the most engaging posts in your niche.

This will help you come up with post ideas that are most likely to get you great engagement.

Instagram also has a lot of in-built analytic tools that help you refine your content strategy. Understanding your target audience’s interests and demographics better would help you develop a stronger connection with them.

Buying Followers for the Initial Push

While being able to grow your Instagram account to become a social media influencer is great, it’s also very time-consuming and demanding.

A good way to speed things up quite a bit is buying real Instagram followers. When you have a few thousand followers on your Instagram account, your real target audience becomes more likely of converting into your followers.

We at Fanexplozion offer a great quality of followers at very reasonable prices. They work very effectively at helping you get the ball rolling and gaining real followers quickly.

Wait for Brands to Reach Out to You

Once you have grown enough to be a noticeable authority in your niche, you will soon have brands and businesses reaching out to you to endorse or promote their products, services or just help build a brand image.

However, you can also reach out to a few brands in your niche that you think may benefit and be interested in building a collaboration with you.