Instagram influencing isn’t just about becoming Instagram famous. It’s about monetizing your Instagram account. As an Instagram influencer, you make money by promoting or selling some type of product or service.

The options for what you can market on the platform are endless. You simply need an idea of what you want to promote in mind, believe in it, and then show your followers it’s worth believing in it as well. This is all done with a great Instagram influencer marketing strategy.

You might not have a strategy written out, or you might have one that’s yielding little results. Don’t give up just yet. In our guide below, you’ll learn how to funnel customers with killer content and an even better marketing strategy.

Continue reading to get the process started!

Decide on Your Niche

Your Instagram account gives you the freedom to post about anything you want (within Instagram’s guidelines, of course). You might have many wonderful things to share and talk about, but it’s essential you find your niche for whatever it is you want to promote or are interested in.

For example, if you’re into fitness and a healthy lifestyle, then you want that to be your main focus. You can post different workout videos or routines. You can post your meals and include recipes.

Make sure your entire account is based around that one niche you choose. This will help you find the right target audience and pinpoint them when creating new posts. As you begin to build a reputation in your specific niche, you’ll notice other related accounts reaching out to you for promotions and other opportunities as well.

Switch to a Public Account

You’re serious about growing your Instagram account and creating a brand for yourself. You want to do everything you can to be a successful influencer, but your account is private. This is a problem.

You want to switch to a public account as soon as possible if you want to start generating more traffic. The large world of Instagram won’t be able to see your posts on the explore page, while using hashtags, or while scrolling through reels. You want to get as much exposure as you can and this means switching to a public account.

Once you make your account public, you’ll then have access to “insights.” When on your profile, you’ll see the “insights” button. Click on this to get the following information about your account:

• Total accounts reached
• Top cities
• Top countries
• Top age ranges
• Gender
• Accounts engaged
• Total followers
• Growth
• Most active Times
• Post most engaged with
• and more

Use these insights to help you create a strong marketing strategy. These posts can let you know what’s working and what’s not, who your target audience is, when the best time to post is, and so much more.

Determine Your Target Audience

The insights tool can provide you with a lot of great information, including information about your target audience. This type of information is important because you need to have a good understanding of who your target audience is. Once you know just about everything in regards to who your target audience is, you can then create posts that are geared towards them.

There are a few factors to consider when determining your target audience. For starters, you want to know their age, gender, location, and the posts they engage with the most. What type of content does your target audience want to see?

What are they interested in? You can learn the answers to these questions by asking these questions to your followers on your stories, posts, reels, and live videos. Doing this will also help bring your engagement up.

Create a Posting Schedule

The next step is to create a posting schedule. This is a crucial part of your marketing strategy because you need to have some type of consistency. If you post one photo and then don’t post again for a whole month, then your engagement goes down.

When this goes down, you might also lose followers and not get as much exposure on the explore pages. Stay visible by posting on a regular basis. There’s no specific answer to how many times you need to post a week.

What matters most is that you’re posting often, but aren’t overdoing it. You want to avoid posting more than one post a day. You can make a post and also create a story, though.

Otherwise, stick to posting once a day or at least three times a week. Create a schedule that works well for you and stick to it so your followers know what to expect.

Generate Organic Traffic

There are a few different ways to generate traffic to your account, but let’s not forget the importance of organic traffic. Organic traffic is one of the best ways to climb to the top of Instagram’s algorithm ladder. To generate organic traffic, there are a few things you want to do.

You need to focus on high-quality posts, stories, live videos, and reels. Everything you post should have great lighting, be taken with a high-quality lens, and bring some type of value to your target audience. Review what you’re about to post before posting it.

Ask yourself if it’s something your target audience will enjoy or find useful. That’s the type of content that’s going to generate organic traffic.

Build a Genuine/Personal Relationship

Although it might seem easy enough to post a few photos or videos throughout the week and call it quits, Instagram influencer marketing is much more than that. You need to build a genuine and personal relationship with your followers. Show your followers your vulnerable side so they’re able to relate to you more.

Engage with followers, respond to them, ask questions, and post what they’re interested in. The more you communicate with your followers, the more you get to know them and what they want to see on your page. You’ll also notice your engagement levels rising, which is also good for generating traffic.

Connect With Other Influencers

Generating organic traffic is possible and will happen over time with consistency. It’s never a bad idea, however, to include other ways of generating traffic as well. For example, connecting with other influencers will help boost both their following and yours.

You want to connect with other influencers who have some type of relation to your niche. Going back to the fitness example, there are other fitness and healthy lifestyle influencers on Instagram. Imagine connecting with a couple of them.

You come together to post-workout routines or share one another’s content. Maybe your niche is more focused on healthy recipes and you find a fitness influencer who enjoys your content and shares it with their own followers. In return, you share their content.

Everyone wins in the situation by gaining more reach, new followers, and potentially new leads.

Invest in Instagram Ads

Instagram offers business accounts the option to purchase Instagram Ads. The ad tool works by allowing you to choose a post and promote it. Instagram will automatically show you one of your posts with the most engagement and then suggest you use that post for your ad.

The ad will help you find a bigger audience. How does it work? You first select a goal in mind. This goal might be gaining more profile visits, more messages, or more website visits.

You’ll then select a target audience. You can create your own category, select from a special ad category, or choose the automatic option (Instagram selects your target audience based on your followers). The next step is selecting your budget.

You’ll choose how much money you want to spend on these ads and then submit them. Instagram will show the post of your choice on the news feed more often than a regular post. This will help get more views from users both following you and not following you.

Consider Affiliate Marketing

There are lots of methods of getting money from Instagram. Many people have monetized their Instagram accounts in various ways. One tried and true way of doing so is affiliate marketing.

How does it work? Once you start gaining a following in your niche, you might have companies reach out to you. They’ll ask you to promote their products or services on your account for a percentage.

You’ll add a link to their website or offer your followers a discount code to use. Each time someone clicks on the link you provide them or uses your code, you’ll receive a percentage of the sales.

There’s a lot More to Instagram Influencer Marketing Than People Might Know

Although many people make it seem easy, Instagram influencer marketing takes commitment, skill, and strategy. You need to know how to create quality content, engage with your followers, keep them interested, and build a brand for yourself.

Use all of the information given in this guide above to do just that. Then, continue to check back here daily for more helpful posts similar to this one.