How to Grow Your Brand’s Instagram Following with the Help of Influencers

Want to attract more followers to your brand’s Instagram account? Maybe you’re a small brand looking to get your name out there. Or maybe you’re a large brand trying to make headway into a new niche or geographical market. Whatever the case, Instagram influencers can help you out.

Keep reading to learn about some of the ways you can gain new Instagram followers through collaborations with influencers.

The Golden Rule: Find the Right Influence for Your Brand

Find the right influencer for your brand . Influencers aren’t one size fits all; the perfect influencer for your direct competitor might not work for you. The right influencer is determined by your brand’s core valuesand missionas well as your campaign objectives.

If your campaign objective is to increase your number of Instagram followers, you need to make sure you’re reaching people who will be interested in your brands. So before you can even try to find influencers , do your market research and establish your target audience.

Think carefully about who you hope to reach with your campaign– who are they, where do they come from, what are they interested in? Are you targeting a certain niche interest? A certain geographical location?

Also establish your campaign’s timelineand budget. When you start looking for influencers, you’ll need to know what to tell them with respect to deadlines and incentive.

Once you know who your target audience is, you need to find an influencer who can be the liaison between your brand and the audience. Look for influencers who share your brand’s valuesand style. Also check into influencers’ performance-driven statistics, like:

• Number of followers
• Follower growthover time
• Engagement rate(level of interaction between an influencer and their followers)
• Audience demographicslike age, gender, location, language, and interests
• Audience authenticity
• Post frequency

As a final tip, remember that more followers doesn’t make an influencer better. In fact, for a lot of brands, nano and micro influencersactually bring in higher ROIs than their celebrity counterparts. The reason for this? First, they cost less, so the initial investment is lower. Second, they have great engagement rates and their audiences see them as authentic people, which leads to greater trust in their content and the brands they promote.

Finally, you might be wondering how or where you can find the right influencers. You can search directly on Instagram, sure. But for a much more streamlined experience, try out an influencer marketing platform . This type of software lets you narrow down your influencer search with filters. It also provides detailed analytics to help you make informed decisions.

The Quick Fix: Giveaways

If you’re looking for a quick boost in followers, a giveawayis a good shout. For Instagram giveaways, participants usually need to follow the influencer and brand accounts and like or comment on the giveaway post. People love the chance to win free stuff, so giveaways can bring in a lot of new followers fast.

Fitness and rollerblading micro influencer @mrs_dariakuznetsova hosting a giveaway with new fitness apparel brand @topissimaofficial. Notice that to enter, users have to follow both accounts.

Just keep in mind that once the giveaway is over, some of these followers will stop following you. You’ll still probably gain some brand awareness, but that doesn’t help if your campaign objective is to accumulate followers.

The chance that you’ll retain more followers after the giveaway ends is again tied to whether or not the influencer is a good fit for your brand. If you chose the influencer well, and their followers are genuinely interested in your brand and its products, they may stick around.

In order to run a giveaway, you should walk through the following steps:

1. Choose an influencer with good engagement(this shows an active audience)
2. Decide on the prize package(or voucher, download, experience, etc.)
3. Define the entry requirements
4. Have the influencer create an attractive, eye-catching giveaway post
5. Collect the entriesand choose a winnerwith an Instagram giveaway tool
6. Announce the winners!

If the giveaway is open for a while, you might also want the influencer to publish remindersto their posts or stories. This way, any of their followers who didn’t see the first post have a chance to participate (and to follow your brand).

The Long Play: Value-Driven Content

If giveaways are a quick fix, value-driven contentis a longer play. This strategy doesn’t work overnight, but it can lead to higher retention of new followers. This means you might attract followers more slowly, but these new followers are more likely to stick with your brand.

What is value-driven content exactly? It’s content that doesn’t only show off your products, but shows how your brand and products can fit into someone’s life and experience in a meaningful way.

Value-driven content may show how your products can solve particular problems. Or it may give ideas about how to use those productsin different contexts. Or it may be educational contentdesigned to teach followers about certain issues or processes related to your brand.

Some ideas of content that can drive value, depending on your brand, are:

• DIY tutorials
• Recipes
• Gift guides
• FAQsor themed guides
• Live events

To understand this better, let’s look at an example. We analyzed how houseplant ecommerce Bloomscapewas able to cultivate organic growth , and we saw that they used influencers from several categories to produce a variety of content.

Food influencer @dudethatcookz collaborated with Bloomscape to show how he uses the brand’s edible garden collection in his meatball recipe.

The brand got some plant influencers on board to provide plant care tips, to answer plant FAQs, and share their healthy plant routines. Other influencers from various categories also produced content that showed how you can use plants in the kitchen, yoga studio, home decor, and more.

Bloomscape actually doubled their Instagram follower countin 2020. Why did this strategy work? We can’t say for sure, but the type of influencer content published for the brand must have helped.

@bloomscape’s follower growth from October 2018 up until now. We can see that growth was steady, meaning the brand has a good retention of followers.

When influencers promote your products in context to their followers (and especially when they show how the products can help solve a problem), the collaboration comes across as more organicand authentic. The influencer isn’t merely pushing a product. They’re showing how you can use it, interact with it, and derive value from it. That gives people more impetus to pay attention to the brand.

Take Away

These are by no means the only ways to attract new followers to your Instagram accounts. We wanted to provide two examples of different strategies, one that’s more short-term and one that’s more long-term.

But regardless of if you use one of these strategies or another not featured here, your success all comes down to this: find influencers with healthy metrics and who can communicate your brand in an authentic way to engaged followers.