Since 2016, we’ve partnered with over 400 influencers and creators across different industries with incredible results. In this post, we’ll be sharing our best tips for how you can do the same to increase your reach on Instagram. Let’s dive in!

If you’d prefer to watch rather than read, hit the video below - otherwise keep scrolling!

True Influencers make great partners and are so valuable in marketing because they can help you increase brand awareness, co-sign your brand to a new, highly targeted audience and drive sales. 

But before you even consider a partnership you need to first…

Understand your target audience and your goals 

The most important thing you can do before approaching any Influencer partnership is to have a thorough understanding of who you want to reach and what you want to achieve.

We walked through the process you can take to set Social Media goals and develop your target audience in this Social Media Strategy video recently, so definitely check that out before you think about working with anyone.

In this post, we’re focused on reach so the goal here will be to increase visibility and engagement. We’ll look at the metrics you need to focus on to determine success around that goal later in the post.  

Find the right Influencer

Above all, you want to make sure the influencer you hire is just that - a creator who has built an engaged community around them that they can to market to and move to action. The right influencer will be hyper-relevant to your audience, and already talking about the topics related to your brand.

Let’s talk about how to find them and what to look for to know they’re legit.  

To find Influencers:

• The free, DIY way:

• Use the key hashtags your target audience is following and using (which you should be using, too) and enter those in the search bar on Instagram to find Influencers creating content that stands out to you.

• You can also just enter the relevant keywords for your niche, as any good Influencer has likely optimized their posts so well that Instagram knows who they are and they’ll appear in search based on keywords alone.

• For example, if you were looking for a foodie influencer to invite to your restaurant you would enter tags like “Toronto foodie” or “Toronto food blogger”. 

• Make a list of the profiles that come up and stand out to you, how many followers they have and any other other notes.

• The paid way:

• You can partner with an Influencer Marketing agency, or use a tool (there are so many on the market) to help you find and manage campaigns. For this post, we’ll focus on doing free and manual approaches.

Here’s what to look for in an Influencer: 

• Are they an Instagram power user? (For example, are they engaging with their audience? Are they creating content consistently? Are they using Instagram’s features - particularly Reels and Stories?) 

• Are they receiving genuine comments on their posts? Not just heart and fire emojis, but actual questions and comments that are relevant to their posts? 

• Are they talking about topics relevant to your audience? When you look at the comments, are their followers the same as your target audience?

• For example, we found a really sweet spot for a client. Their hotel spaces were apartment-style and had multiple rooms with a kitchen and bathrooms, which worked well with Mom bloggers travelling with kids.

• Are their followers real human beings? You can check this by scrolling through their likes and followers, selecting profiles at random to make sure they make sense and aren’t fake. Some red flags would include lots of foreign accounts (with an American Influencer, for example), or accounts that follow 7,500 people but don’t post a lot or have weird posts.

• What’s the size of their following? 

• The size of the Influencer’s following and their engagement rate will directly influence how and if you work with them. By industry standards, there are 3-4 types of Influencer segments - the exact size can vary depending on the source, but most are segmented around these numbers:

• Nano-Influencers - 1k-10K. Typically a small and mighty audience with really high engagement. 

• Micro-Influencers - 10K-100K (we used to say up to 50K back in the day, but that was before so many people became Influencers and it was rare for someone to have 100K). Highly niche audience, typically more seasoned and viewed as an expert. 

• Macro-Influencers - 100K-1M. This is when the audience can start expanding out a bit as it gets larger, and will start costing you some real investment which is best for larger campaigns. 

• Mega Influencers/Social Celebs - 1M+.

• Of course, the more followers an Influencer has, the more likely they are to charge a fee. It’s an unregulated world because so many factors are involved, like the criteria we mentioned earlier. Everyone sets their own price, however, an industry standard has been $100 per 1000 followers, so keep that in mind when you’re looking for the right influencer.

Keeping track of influencers in your space is important, not only for partnership campaigns but because you should already be engaging with them in order to drive awareness for your business, create that affinity in the algorithm, and of course, create relationships. We spoke to the importance of relationships as a signal in the algorithm in this video.

Now that you know what to look for, let’s talk about how to actually work with an Influencer and set up a true campaign and partnership to get you results 

We have a great free resource to kickstart your Influencer Marketing journey, The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing brought to you by HubSpot.

If you want to learn the fundamentals of some of the best Influencer Marketing strategies, look no further. If you’re a small business looking to get involved in Influencer Marketing, this is exactly what you need to get you moving in the right direction - it has everything you need to get started, learn the ropes and create actionable, engaging and spectacular campaigns.

It includes email templates for influencer outreach, how Influencer Marketing moves the needle, how to measure the success of your campaigns, best practices, standard payment rates, and setting up successful affiliate programs, HubSpot’s Influencer Marketing Guide has your entire strategy covered.

This guide will simplify the process for any business starting out in Influencer Marketing, or tighten things up for the more experienced entrepreneurs. It’s essential to have all the elements in place and Hubspot has made it so easy to get started successfully.

This amazing free resource was once again provided by HubSpot, the sponsor of this video and post, so much love to them for taking care of you guys. We’ve been big fans for a long time so this is a perfect partnership to get your Influencer Marketing journey started on the right foot.

Create a Campaign Brief

It’s going to be really important to keep yourself organized and outline your plans - like we always say, fail to plan, plan to fail.

The next step is to create a document or brief that outlines important points like your goals, the target audience, key messaging (what are you promoting, what do you want to make sure they mention, and what is the call-to-action), hashtags, budget if any, what your ask will be (deliverables), and what metrics you’ll track - Hubspot has a great template for this that you’ll find in their The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing.

You can also use these elements to brief your Influencer by email, so you’re both aligned on expectations. When you and an influencer agree to work with each other, giving them a brief is super important so that way you both are very clear on what is expected. An important consideration is the larger the ask, the larger the budget and there may be some negotiating in there - especially once you start working with larger Influencers and money is involved. 

Reach out to the Influencer 

Once your campaign brief is together and you have your list of Influencers - which you also can track using one of the HubSpot templates - you’ll want to reach out!

If your influencer is a power user, like they should be, they should already have their email available in their profile. If they don’t, you can DM them and ask for their email with a simple note like “Hey - we love your content and would love to talk about a potential partnership. If you’re interested, can we have your email to send you more details?”

Conveniently in the HubSpot guide, there is also a DM template and email template you can use. In that email, you’ll want to introduce yourself and your company, let the influencer know why they’re a great fit, and if you talked over DMs already, you can attach the brief or you can just ask them in that first email if a partnership is something they’re interested in. Then you can send the brief in that follow-up. 

Your brief must include deliverables, so what you are asking for, what you are offering in exchange, and creative guidance or messaging. 

• For the deliverables:

• We recommend that you always ask for at least an in-feed post (preferably a Reel) using the collaboration feature, and a story set (3 frames) with a CTA to either follow you or go to your offer. You should always be tagged, and so should your relevant hashtag.

• Giveaways are a great combination for this, too. 

• For the offer: 

• It is very possible to work with Influencers on a value exchange, which means content for product or service. This will typically be smaller influencers, and with that, a big caveat is that no Influencer has to say yes to this. This exchange has to be mutually beneficial in that they either very much value your product (for example, we’ve given away hotel stays, high-value experiences or credits) in lieu of a monetary offer, and you will have to be either flexible in negotiations with them or walk away if you’re not paying.

• If you are paying, then you’d need to be stronger with your ask and it will open you up to a wider influencer pool (micro/macro level). It’s too deep to get into pricing here because there are so many options based on your goals, but we recommend you go in with a firm budget and the deliverables you want for paid campaigns.

• For the creative: 

• Give the influencer the messaging and guidance, and then let them be the creative they are and execute on that. We’ve found that micromanaging or being too descriptive can stifle creativity and have the Influencer end up producing something that really looks like an ad - trust them to do their thing.

• Sometimes we’ve even had content come back from Influencers that we’ve side-eyed, but were like “Ah they know what their audience likes” and trust them, and then the content slayed.

Get a contract signed 

Once you and the Influencer decide it’s the right fit, have them sign a contract that outlines the campaign brief details, including dates, deadlines, deliverables and offer. Once that’s signed, send them the product or whatever they need to create the content and talk about your business. Don’t forget to look at any laws or regulations around Influencer Marketing for your region.

Check the metrics 

Once the campaign wraps, have them share screenshots of their back-end insights. This would include Reach, Plays/Views, Shares, Saves of their feed and Stories posts, since we’re looking at visibility. You’ll check profile visits, along with follower increase on your side.

And that’s it! Don’t forget to download HubSpot’s free The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing for all the tools you need to get going on Influencer Marketing.

Stay in the Know

Join our membership channel and become a High Season Insider for access to exclusive members-only content like:

• Live Q&As

• Free templates and resources

• Bonus vlogs and interviews with industry experts

• Members-only rates and promos on services

• Join here.