Influencers now form the pillars of Instagram. Social media has opened up unlimited opportunities for people with talent and wits to entertain the crowd and they end up earning a full-fledged career through Instagram. 

Why is Influencer marketing necessary? 

Influencers based on the niche and their content type show a different and creative means through which their audience get a detailed review on the product or service they are endorsing. Further most of the influencers create a personal relationship and intimacy with the followers through interactive sessions, live chats, comments which help to build trust in them and in turn allow the business to endorse their products through them. Not to mention the wide range of audience who follow them, which adds as an additional benefit. Plus, they also help businesses by partnering with them and hence increase the sales, leads. 

How to find influential content creators in your niche? 

Put hashtags to work: Start by exploring the hashtags of your niche. You can do this by going to the explore page of Instagram and typing the hashtags, a list of posts, contents and reels with respect to your niche and the most popular ones will appear on top. We can check their profiles and even book mark the good ones to review later. 

Location tags: If your business has or works at a particular location and you need traffic from there, this feature will definitely help you. Similar to hashtags, we can search for the location in the explore page of Instagram and get the details of people who have created content at that location. 

Explore the tag section: Content creators while posting content will tag relevant accounts in the particular niche. In your account itself, go to the tagged section and you can see people who have tagged you in their posts and reels. Repeat the bookmark-review part for later. 

Keep an eye on the competitors: We can also check the competitors page and check the people who have tagged them. In this way we can find the fans of our competitors at the same time influencers in the same niche. 

Social Listing Tools: It is not necessary that influencers tag each and every account, but still social listing tools like Mention will help us find the posts and influencers who are posting related to our business. We can also create custom alerts that notify brand mentions. 

Influencer marketing Tools: Tools like BuzzSumo help list out influencers with the help of keywords. They track the domain authority of the influencers and list out the best ones. 

How can you partner with potential influencers? 

Build personal relationship with creators: List the influencers in your particular niche and follow the content they are posting and regularly engage with it. Comment, like share on story and tag them are a few ways in which you can make them notice your business. 

Track the influencers in your Instagram inbox: Instagram allows the labeling of messages from content creators as we prioritize which helps to keep track of the messages from the prominent ones. 

Setup a clear-cut plan for campaigns: Decide on the type of content and type of campaigns that you want to go with. Whether it's reels, giveaways we should have a clear-cut idea on which type of content we should provide to the audience. 



Clear idea on the goals: Experienced influencers will be able to estimate if your goal is reachable within the audience limit, they have. 

Pitch Potential Partners: Once we have finalized the campaign plan, we can put forward our proposal to the potential influencers through DM. We can also use Instagram's branded content tools to add paid partnership labels to any sponsored contents. 

Measure Campaign Results: Results can be measured manually or using tools like #paid. If the results are to be measured manually then we need to benchmark the goal like monthly account growth and monitor them consequently. We can also use promo codes for necessary products, so we can track the performance of influencer marketing separately. 

Like any other marketing campaign, influencer marketing also involves careful planning, strategy & execution to get the best results.