Clever Influencer Marketing With

Instagram
Topic for Debate: Does Influencer Marketing through Instagram really help in improving
product Sales ?

It’s no longer a surprise that Instagram has grown to over 1 billion monthly active users
and more than 500 million of them use the platform every day. What is surprising is the
fact that only 90% of brands use it.
Why would anyone want to use Instagram to sell products or services? I mean it’s just a
place to post selfies, cat selfies, dinner pics, wedding pics, and baby pics… Right?
Wrong! Checkout these stats and the 4 Instagram case studies we show you below
the stats.
Instagram has become one of the top engaging social media platforms for businesses no
matter the size. With millions of users connected to the app, “right now” and with over 500
million users logging in every day, there is no shortage of Instagram stats and facts that
show how popular it is.
Over 40 billion photos have been shared.
Instagram clocks up 3.5 billion likes every day.
As of June 2016, 95 million posts are made every day, although this is likely to be far
higher today.
Instagram usage doubled between June 2016 and 2018.
63% of Instagram users use the app every day.
1) Bloom & Wild

Bloom & Wild are a luminous example of how you can grow your business through
Instagram ads without the big-brand budget. Bloom & Wild used the Power Editor feature
to create their Instagram ads. First, they took their existing email list and created
a lookalike audience from it.
Next, they tested their ad images by running a few low dollar campaigns posting like they
normally would. However now they would compare the engagement between the photos
and whichever photo received the most attention would be used for their main ad
campaign.
They found that videos performed best for them and had the highest conversion rate.
After selecting their winning ad they scaled up the ad spend and added a strong call to
action on their ads.
The Results
“With the use of Instagram ads, Bloom & Wild increased their bouquet orders by 62%, and
saw many new customers commenting on their account and buying bouquets from their
shop.”
This is a great example of how a small business can be successful on Instagram. They
didn’t have the money that a large corporation would. They simply created a small, but
engaged following on Instagram.
2) Adidas Neo

One way to market your brand is to spend millions of pounds on expensive ad placements.
Another way is to let your audience do the hard work for you.
As part of a campaign to promote their newly launched Neo brand, Adidas asked their
followers to create Adidas-inspired Instagram posts with the hashtag #MyNeoShoot. The
best content creators were then invited to model in a professional photo shoot, the results
of which would be rolled out on the Adidas Instagram channel. To help spread the word
about the contest, Adidas enlisted the support of one of Instagram’s most popular
celebrities: Selena Gomez.

The Results
Adidas generated 71,000 mentions of the #MyNeoShoot hashtag and gained 41,000 new
followers. It shows that an imaginative contest is enough to engage your audience and
highlights the power of social media influencers.
3) Lego: Hijacking A Worlwide Trending Event

Ever wondered how to make the most out of events that are trending worldwide, even if
they’re not in your industry?
Learn from Lego, because this is exactly what they did for the royal wedding in May of
2018. Even though they’re not a wedding company, they took the chance to share a
relevant video — one of the royal wedding with characters that were created using Lego
blocks.
The Results
This clever post increased Lego’s reach thanks to the trending #RoyalWedding hashtag,
garnering over 100,000 views and almost 400 comments.
4) Max Chafkin
If you’ve ever wondered how average people develop massive Instagram followings
seemingly overnight, you need to meet Max Chafkin.
Chafkin, a Bloomberg author, had a measly 212 Instagram followers when he started his
social experiment. A month later, he had 1,400.
How’d he do it?
After trying out 3 or 4 marketing strategies offered by professional influencers and after
almost winding down on his goal, he began to wonder whether there might be an easier
way to increase his Instagram followers.
The internet is full of services that purport to deliver followers by the thousands “he
thought”, so buying followers — or buying likes and comments, could easily be for sale
online —
However this tactic won’t trick sophisticated advertisers, because Instagram reports actual
impressions and audience size. But the tactic can help make your profile look a little more
impressive and there was a chance that a fake boost could turn into genuine momentum.
And so, with a week or so left until his experiment deadline, Chafkin logged on to a site
called Social Media Combo, to buy Instagram followers cheap and according to him, “high
quality.” At Social Media Combo packages range from $15 for 500 to $160 for 5,000. Not
wanting to gild the lily — and slightly concerned about corporate AmEx card ramifications
— Chafkin went for the base package.
According to Chafkin for two days, nothing happened. Then, without warning, his
Instagram account jumped from 885 followers to about 1,400 in a matter of hours. By the
time he posted his final influencer photo — a lifestyle shot of a flower shop that Siegel,
one of his influencer advicers, had sold him Instagram had already removed a bunch of
his new fake admirers, but he was adding enough followers to mostly offset the drop-off.
The Results
Chafkin later wrote on his Bloomberg.com article “Confessions of an Instagram influencer”
that out of the 1,400 followers he garnered buying followers from the mentioned page,
1,168 were real followers according to FollowerCheck, an app that purports to analyze an
Instagram account for authentic engagement.
In the End
You don’t have to question if your company would benefit on Instagram. You just need to
decide when you are ready to take advantage of those benefits.
Instagram marketing can be a tough nut to crack. But — as the case studies above show
— by no means is it impossible.