Growing one’s audience on Instagram organically is a slow process that needs time, knowledge, consistency, and patience. That’s why many brands are working with influencers to speed up the process. Here are some tips on how to use influencer marketing for Instagram growth! 📈
Wait, why should I use influencer marketing for Instagram growth?
Instagram followers are the community of your brand. They are the people who want to be informed about your news, product updates, and behind-the-scenes adventures. They are also the people who talk about your brand and therefore help to spread the word! Considering that, you probably want to grow your community by reaching new people, and have them follow you by offering them great content.
Influencer marketing is an amazing tool for building awareness and interest in your brand – and when people become interested, they often start following the brand on Instagram.
* We use the word “brand” here – but it doesn’t mean companies only. Influencer marketing can be an efficient way to grow your personal Instagram account, too!
@henricorattasepp x River Island collaboration photo
1. Work with influencers who already love your brand
The best influencer for your brand would be someone who is already using your products, understand the benefits, have a powerful story, and can sincerely recommend your brand to their followers. Thus, you should search for influencers from your customers and followers – is there anyone you could work with? Those are the people who already follow you and see the value of your content so they can also convey it to their followers.
Using Promoty, you can also see suggested influencers for your brand, based on who follows you and who has been engaging with your content. Just create a free account, enter your Instagram or TikTok handle (we won’t ask for your password), and check out your influencer recommendations.
Suggested influencers on Promoty (learn more)
2. Use a clear call to action
Before running an influencer marketing campaign, you need to know the purpose of the campaign and communicate it to the influencer. If your goal is to get more followers on Instagram, the call to action of the collaboration post should be to go check out your brand’s Instagram.
To make it easier for the followers, ask influencers to tag the brand in their stories or feed posts and mention the brand in the caption – this way, it’s really easy for their followers to go to the brand’s profile.
A mistake to avoid here is having multiple call-to-actions: if the influencer directs people to the brand’s website, encourages them to follow the brand, and checks out their stories all at once, their followers will probably get confused and not act on any of it.
@katriinhu x Fazer Domino collaboration photo
3. Give influencers a proper campaign brief
A successful influencer campaign starts with a well-written influencer campaign brief.
Besides clearly stating the goal of the campaign, it’d be good to give influencers some background info – such as a one-liner that they can use to introduce your account. For example: “Follow @promoty.ee for daily tips on Instagram content creation, latest Instagram updates, and new collaboration offers on their app!”
However, make sure to avoid giving too much information, sounding too promotional, or asking influencers to use copy-paste text. Influencers know their audience the best and saying it in their own words feels the most authentic. Ideally, influencers would also add their personal story with your brand – such as “I’ve been following @promoty.ee for a couple of months now and I find the content really useful!”
4. Throw a giveaway together
This is the most effective way to get more followers in a short period of time: run a giveaway on the influencer’s profile where following the brand on Instagram is the requirement for participation.
Of course, all the new followers won’t continue following the brand after the giveaway is over – but in general, giveaways are still an amazing tool to reach new people, build brand awareness and get new followers.
Micro-influencers case study: Halva
When launching a new product line, Finnish candy brand Halva worked with 99 local Instagram micro-influencers with a goal to maximize the brand’s visibility and get more followers for their Instagram pages.
Each creator got a selection of products to throw a giveaway. To participate, their followers had to follow both the influencer and the brand – therefore, both got new followers!
In total, the campaign reached 380 000+ people and the brand got 6852 new followers on Instagram – in a small market like Finland, those numbers are pretty impressive! The campaign budget was 1014€ which means that in total, Halva paid less than 0,15€ per new follower!
Halva’s Kingis Product Launch
Reward: Product
Posts: 99
Reach: 389 845
Likes: 28 826
CPE: 0,02€
New followers: 6852
If you have a more expensive product or you don’t want to throw many giveaways, you can also do a giveaway on the brand’s profile and ask influencers to spread the word. In this case, the call to action of the influencer’s post should be to “check out the giveaway on @brand’s profile”.
5. Leverage Instagram story collaborations
Influencers often do non-paid story shoutouts to their favorite brands, products, or influencers they find inspiring. It means that paid shoutouts in stories feel more authentic, too!
In addition, story-based collaborations are more interactive and unlike regular posts, it’s also possible to add links. Not to mention that most influencers charge less for story-based collaborations as they usually require less effort!
On Promoty, brands sometimes set up two campaigns to get the most out of their marketing budget: a post-campaign for micro-influencers and a story campaign for bigger influencers. This way, they’ll still get the reach from bigger influencers’ accounts as well as branded posts that will stay on Instagram even after 24 hours.
6. Do reels and posts with Collabs feature
In autumn 2021, Instagram launched the Collabs feature that allows users to co-author Instagram reels and feed posts.
If the co-author accepts the collaboration invite, the post will be shown on both accounts, and both account titles will appear in the header – therefore, it’s a great feature to grow your Instagram in collaboration with influencers!
The posts and reels made with the Collabs feature also have a shared like count, view count, and comment section which means higher engagement and higher reach for the posts.
@leosharkpark and @alekskoha, founders of Promoty, using the Collab feature
7. Make sure your profile looks appealing
Let’s go back to basics here: does your profile look appealing enough for first-time visitors?
Make sure to have an attractive profile photo (as a brand, you probably want to use your logo here) and a clear description of what you do or why should anyone follow you.
After reading the bio, highlights are often the second thing that a first-time visitor checks. Thus, you can save there a little more detailed intro about your company, introduce your team, or share answers to frequently asked questions.
And finally, a first-time visitor will probably check your latest posts to understand what kind of content you are sharing and if it’s worth their time. Therefore, make sure you are already posting good, valuable content.
Having an aesthetic Instagram feed also plays an important role here as Instagram is such a visual channel. An attractive profile catches attention and determines if the visitor even wants to delve into your content!
8. As a brand, be social yourself
As a brand, you should definitely be active on social media yourself, actively building relationships with both influencers and your (potential) customers.
If someone tags or mentions your brand in their post, reply with a short comment. Even a simple 🖤 or “thank you” would be enough here!
Commenting is a great way to catch the eye of new followers. Especially in the case when someone has just mentioned your brand – their followers probably would like to check you out!
If someone tags you in their Story, you could repost it. Not only does it express appreciation for sharing your brand but also builds social proof for your followers.
9. Leverage influencers’ visuals
As we already said, the best way to grow one’s followers is to share eye-catching, inspiring, insightful or entertaining content on a consistent basis.
Creating visuals is one of the superpowers of influencers: as they do it daily, they know perfectly well what kind of content works on Instagram. Not to mention that it’s a lot more affordable than organizing an entire photo session yourself!
Hence, increasingly more brands work with influencers to get visuals for their social media. For example, a Danish jewelry brand Zilver Danmark ran a campaign on Promoty to get content for their own social media – resulting in clear brand identity, an increase in their followers’ number as well as the engagement rate. Here’s the before and after of their Instagram feed! 👇🏼
Visuals created by influencers feel authentic and easily relatable – it’s basically user-generated content with a trendy twist! That’s why such visuals often get a better engagement on Instagram and thus reach more people.
Our Estonian Country Manager Mirjam-Johanna Loddes conducted a small study where she analyzed collaborations of six local brand’s Instagram profiles influencers over a 3-month period.
In total, there were 43 collaborations during this period. Surprisingly, only 50% of these brands used the visual created by the influencer also in the brand’s Instagram feed. For those brands, the engagement of the posts with the influencer on them was twice as high as their other posts!
“From those numbers, you can tell that brands should share the content created by the influencer on their own Instagram,” Mirjam said.
Therefore, influencer marketing is an amazing tool for Instagram growth: besides reaching influencers’ audience, increasing brand awareness, and getting new followers, you can also get amazing visuals that help your account grow even faster!
What is it all to do with us?
Promoty is an influencer relationship management platform that allows brands to manage all their (potential) influencers, collaborations, chats, and content in one place. Here’s a short demo video of how it works! 👇🏼
Using Promoty’s Influencer Discovery, you can search for influencers worldwide, filtering by their social media metrics or audience data. Additionally, you can see detailed account insights for every influencer – which helps you to find the right TikTok and Instagram influencers for your brand. 🤍
Additionally, you can use our influencer CRM to manage your current and potential collaboration partners, detect branded content, and chat with influencers. Create a free account to get started!
