INSTAGRAM INFLUENCER

PROGRAM

Hao Liu, Digital Marketing Specialist Intern

UOFT BOOKSTORE 214 College Street, Toronto, ON, M5T 3A1 | A Division of University of Toronto Press
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Contents
Successful Ambassador Programs ........................................................... 2
Daniel Wellington ................................................................................. 2
How to Get Influencers ........................................................................... 4
Finding the right influencers ................................................................. 4
Reaching out to influencers .................................................................. 6
Timeline ................................................................................................... 8
Phase 1 – Preparation and finding influencers ..................................... 8
Phase 2 – Interacting with influencers ................................................. 9
Phase 3 – Outreach ............................................................................... 9
Phase 4 – Establish contracts.............................................................. 10
Phase 5 – Metrics ............................................................................... 11
Phase 6 – Evaluation ........................................................................... 12
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Successful Ambassador Programs

Daniel Wellington

Founded in 2011, Swedish watch brand Daniel Wellington pioneered

social media influencer marketing. The company initially started with a
$15,000 investment that they turned into $220 million in 4 years. Their
secret? Teaming up with Instagram and YouTube stars.
Their strategy:
• Seeking out influencers instead of celebrities
o Celebrity endorsements feel too artificial. Influencers are
more relatable and feel more like “real people” as opposed
to celebrities.
o Celebrity endorsements are very expensive. However, many
influencers are happy to work with your brand even if you
don’t have much to offer in monetary compensation; they
are willing to receive free merchandise in exchange for
posting promotional photos and posts of your products.
o Gave influencers a lot of creative freedom with the type of
sponsored content they posted. After all, they know their
followers best.
• Having a natural, authentic looking social media account
o Using lifestyle photos, user-generated content, etc. instead
of professional models
o Encouraged people to post user-generated content with
regular photo contests
§ “Pic of the Day” contests – winners were featured on
the company’s Instagram feed and received free
watches
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• Using targeted hashtags to measure success of digital marketing

campaigns
o #danielwellington, #dwpicoftheday
o Targeted hashtags can also be used as a Key Performance
Indicator (KPI) –> more posts with high levels of engagement
tagged with your targeted hashtags = successful campaign
§ Other KPIs and metrics to keep track of:
• Trackable Google Analytics links -> UTM
parameters https://ga-dev-
tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/
• Discount codes and links associated with
individual influencers i.e. partnership with John
Doe: typing in discount code JOHN10 at checkout
for 10% off or uoftbookstore.com/john -> if a lot
of people are using JOHN10 at checkout or
coming in to the website from
uoftbookstore.com/john that means your
partnership with John Doe is successful
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How to Get Influencers

Finding the right influencers

Working with micro- and nano-influencers instead of mega-influencers

• Nano-influencers: usually fewer than 1,000 followers, some in the
thousands
• Micro-influencers: 10,000 to 100,000 followers
• Mega-influencers: +1 million followers

Benefits of working with micro- and nano-influencers

• Higher engagement vs follower ratio
o Smaller Instagram accounts tend to have a higher % of their
followers commenting and liking their posts compared to
bigger Instagram accounts
o Nano-influencers usually see about 7.2% engagement vs
1.1% engagement on accounts with over 100,000 followers

Factors to keep in consideration when choosing influencers

• Engagement levels
o Ideal engagement levels are between 2% to 3%, 4% to 6% is
excellent, +20% is considered viral
o Higher engagement levels = higher percentage of Instagram
followers are interacting with an influencer’s content (more
likes and comments)
• Quality of followers
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o Followers of the influencers should be similar to your own

followers i.e. UofT students living in the GTA, aged 18-25,
middle income, English-speakers
• Quality of content
o Consistent posts, similar niche as your brand
• Other brands they’ve partnered with
o Avoid partnering with influencers who have partnered with
other brands competing with your brand i.e.
Chapters/Indigo
• Budget
o Paying influencers vs. gifting products to influencers
o Flat rate vs. paying for # of sales or leads that the influencer
has generated for your brand
• Authenticity of influencers
o Follower vs following counts – if they follow a lot of
accounts relative to their follower count, chances are that
their followers aren’t engaged and are only following
because of a “follow train” or follow/like/comment bots
§ Ideally they should follow 1% to 5% of their total
follower count i.e. 1000 followers, following 10 to 50
people
o Engagement ratios
§ Check at least 10 of their posts for at least 2% to 3%
engagement rate
o How old their account is
§ New accounts with a lot of followers are likely to be
using bots or follow trains. It takes time to build a solid
following.
o Past sponsorships
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§ If they’ve partnered with brands before, check to see

how their followers responded to their sponsored
posts
o Third-party influencer tools
§ https://www.fohr.co/
§ https://socialblade.com/

Reaching out to influencers

• Follow and interact with influencers

o Comment on their posts, make personalized messages (try
not to sound like you’re copy/pasting a message for
everyone)
o Try to build a relationship with the influencers so when it’s
time for you to contact them formally about partnerships,
they will recognize your brand
• Optional: creating influencer “decks” or media kits (guidelines for
creating sponsored content)
o Hashtags to use, timeline with specific dates for posts, type
of content, etc.
o IMPORTANT: MUST DISCLOSE THAT SPONSORED POSTS
ARE ADVERTISEMENTS! You can use #sponsored or #ad near
the beginning so followers can easily tell that it’s a
sponsored post. You can also use a unique partnership
hashtag i.e. #UofTBookstore_partner
§ If you don’t want to use hashtags to disclose the
sponsorship, you must make it clear in the body of the
caption that it is a sponsorship. Example: “thanks to
@uoftbookstores for gifting me their new t-shirt”
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§ Paid partnership feature on Instagram clearly shows

that the post is sponsored
• Keep track of the influencers you’ve reached out to
o Spreadsheet with influencer handles, names, date/time of
contact so you can follow up in a day or 2 if they don’t
respond
• Ask if they have “media kits” to share with you (portfolio of
previous sponsored content they’ve created)
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Timeline

Phase 1 – Preparation and finding influencers

The first phase of this program is to decide on how we will compensate

influencers for being brand ambassadors and find and compile a list of
potential influencers that we can work with as brand ambassadors. This
phase should take 1 to 2 weeks. To find potential influencers, we can
look at our tagged posts and see which accounts are tagging us in their
posts. Look at each tagged post and the respective accounts.

Ideal influencers will be:

• Members of the UofT community – undergrad and graduate
students from any UofT campus
• Tagging us or @uoft @uoftstudentlife @utmengage or UofT
varsity sports accounts in posts relating to UofT student life i.e.
posts from UofT events such as Frosh Week or Homecoming or
Varsity sports games or Exam Jam, etc.
• Post regularly – a few times per week, no long time gaps between
posts

Compensation models:
• Free merch – stuffed animals, tshirts, books, stationary
• Discount codes and affiliate links
• Pay them
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Phase 2 – Interacting with influencers

The second phase of this program is to follow, like, and comment on

influencers’ posts. Make sure that your comments are relevant to each
post and personalized to individual influencers. Generic and vague
comments are off-putting and impersonal. Comment on at least 5 posts
for each influencer. This phase may take up to a month, depending on
how often they post.

Examples:
• Post: photography on campus
o Comment: “great shot! The colours really pop”
o Comment: “beautiful photo! Heart face emoji”
• Post: event photo at Exam Jam
o Comment: “we’re glad you could make it out to Exam Jam!
Good luck on your exams!”
• Post: shopping haul at UofT Bookstore
o Comment: “that’s a great book! Let us know what you think”
o Comment: “nice hoodie!”

Phase 3 – Outreach

Create a personalized “pitch” tailored to the individual influencers and

send it to them over direct messages. Include details of what being part
of the UofT Bookstore brand ambassador program would look like,
what they would get out it, their responsibilities as a brand
ambassador, our expectations of what kinds of posts they might post
about the UofT Bookstore, etc. Create a spreadsheet of which
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influencers we’ve reached out to and the time of initial contact so if

they haven’t responded in several days, we can follow up. Outreach
should take 1 week, ideally. Two weeks maximum.

Phase 4 – Establish contracts

Make another spreadsheet of all the influencers who have agreed to be

brand ambassadors and give them the option to choose how they want
to carry out promotions. This phase will take 2 weeks including writing
the contracts and getting signatures.

Examples:
• Influencers post once a week about our products on their
personal accounts and we reshare them to our page. They post
affiliate links in each post and discount code in their bio.
• Influencers come in and we take photos of them for our page

Outline the details of the brand ambassador program:

• How often they post, what exactly they post so we can coordinate
our own Instagram posts
• When they come in for photoshoots (time/date/location)
• How they share their photos with us
o File size limit for emails is too small – share full size photos
on Google Drive
o Shared drive for brand ambassadors – every individual
influencer has their own folder to minimize confusion and
facilitate organized filekeeping
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Phase 5 – Metrics

Discount codes and affiliate links are great ways to keep track of the
effectiveness of influencers’ promotional posts. To avoid double-
counting conversions from influencers, if influencers choose to have
affiliate links, their discount code will only work in-store. However, if
they choose not to have affiliate links and only a discount code, the
discount code will work online and in-store. This stage will last
throughout the duration of the brand ambassador program.

Discount codes
Pros
• Can use in-store
• Many people are more
inclined to buy a product if
they have a discount code
or if the item they want is
on sale
Cons
• Don’t know if people using
the discount codes are
getting them from the
influencer themselves or
from third-party apps that
crawl the web for discount
codes – difficult to gauge
effectiveness of marketing
campaigns strictly from
using discount codes
• Only measures number of
sales – doesn’t measure
other metrics such as clicks,
number of abandoned
shopping carts, conversion
rates
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Affiliate links
Pros Cons
• More accurate reflection of • Online only
the number of conversions • Broken links – people might
made by a particular copy/paste the affiliate link
influencer wrong and it won’t lead to
• Measures several metrics: the right page
clicks, number of
abandoned shopping carts,
where users are coming
from (Youtube, Instagram,
Facebook, an influencer’s
personal website, etc.),
conversion rates
• Can use UTM parameters on
Google Analytics to track
effectiveness of SPECIFIC
Instagram posts

Phase 6 – Evaluation

Final stage will be measuring the effectiveness of our brand

ambassador program. We will be looking at the Google Analytics
information generated from the UTM parameters in our affiliate links
and keeping track of customers’ usage of discount codes both online
and in-store. We will also look at engagement levels in our sponsored
posts on our own Instagram page as well as the Instagram pages of our
brand ambassadors. We will decide if we want to make changes to the
program in coming years, whether we will be doing this again in the
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future. We want to evaluate the success of our campaign regularly, at

least once a week to make sure we are on track.