Affiliate marketing isn’t going anywhere. It’s growing in popularity and for good reason. Contrary to paid advertising or long-term promotion strategies, like content marketing, affiliate marketing doesn’t require so much time and effort (and money!) to start delivering positive results.
Winning referrals with the help of Instagram influencers is a strategy a lot of B2C brands go for. Let’s see why businesses choose it and how you can make it work for you.
Why affiliate marketing is an attractive model for brands
Affiliate marketing is a low-risk promotion strategy for businesses of all sizes. It’s a way to promote your product without investing in paid ads or expanding your marketing team. Sounds good, huh? But wait, there’s more!
- Affiliate programs generate an average of 23% of all sales for brands.
- To launch an affiliate marketing program, you don’t need starting capital. Although some influencers might want an ‘activation fee,’ you can always offer other compensation, like increased affiliate commission, special discount, or free stuff.
- It doesn’t take specific skills to launch your own affiliate marketing program. It’s easy to start and scale when you have the right tools at hand.
Of course, your affiliate program won’t work without influencer partnerships. With a variety of social media channels, why should you start working with Instagram influencers? Easy. It’s just effective:
- 31% of Gen Z respondents call Instagram ‘the platform with the most genuine influencers.’
- For people aged 25 and above, Facebook influencers appeared to be the most trustworthy, closely followed by Instagram.
That’s it. Instagram is still the most trusted platform for Gen Z and the second trusted platform for audiences over 25.
Now when you’re convinced Instagram affiliate marketing is what you need, let’s figure out how you get started.
How to start using affiliate marketing with Instagram influencers
These are your first steps toward getting referrals with the help of Instagram influencers. Where do you start?
Know the difference between brand ambassadors and affiliates
First of all, do not confuse brand ambassadors with affiliate marketers.
When you invite Instagram influencers to become your affiliate or referral partner, you offer them a commission for every sale generated as a result of their promotion activities. Typically, you don’t pay them any other fees, but sometimes influencer marketers might want to receive additional benefits or an activation fee. Affiliate marketing programs are performance-based.
The brand ambassador program involves inviting influencers to represent your brand and share company messaging on their accounts. In this model, you don’t pay for sales and leads brought to you by an ambassador but provide a set compensation depending on your agreement.
For instance, you might choose to pay a monthly salary to your ambassadors or assign a fixed fee per promotional content piece. Brand ambassador programs work toward growing brand awareness and building a strong brand image.
In this guide, we’re going to focus on setting up a performance-oriented affiliate program for partnering with Instagram influencers.
Set up an affiliate program
To build a result-oriented, measurable program you need to think it out very well. Are you going to provide your affiliate marketers with the resources? How do you make sure your affiliates comply with your policies? There are a lot of difficult questions for you to answer. But first, the basics.
Choose a platform
Setting up an affiliate program from scratch is a tedious process unless you use affiliate marketing software. A quality affiliate marketing tool will facilitate affiliate program management from creating links to monitoring the performance of each partner.
Scaleo will help you on the way. You can build a customizable referral program that enables you to add offers, access real-time data, manage payouts, and eliminate fraudulent traffic.
With the right affiliate marketing tool, you won’t need to set up a complicated solution for tracking and affiliate account management.
Define goals
Once your business account is set up, you can create offers. The process starts with defining the offer goal. This step will define the success of the entire campaign. Most often, businesses choose from the following options:
- Purchase
- Registration
- App install
‘Of course, I choose ‘purchase’!’ In fact, it’s not always the best choice. You might build a more effective funnel by encouraging your affiliates to drive leads (e.g. newsletter subscribers or free users) and then driving these leads to the purchase decision with targeted marketing campaigns.
The best way to go is to test different funnels with different influencers and see which goal drives the best outcomes for your business.
Set commission rates
How much are you ready to pay per conversion?
For purchases, a percentage commission model is most widely used. Affiliates receive a set percentage of the final check, which typically ranges between 5% and 30%. Commission rates might also grow as your partner drives more conversions.
To define the commission rate and keep the campaign profitable, know your net profit. Don’t forget to estimate the expenses of running the affiliate program and consider people hours spent on it.
When your goal is lead generation, the question is even more difficult.
You’ll need to build a lead scoring model and estimate the lead-to-sale conversion rate. When you know what it takes you to convert quality leads, you’ll be able to estimate how much you can pay per lead. After the first months, you might need to adjust commission rates based on the performance data.
Decide on the attribution model
Now, think of how you’re going to attribute conversions. The first decision to make is the attribution model you’ll use. The most commonly used would be first-click or last-click attribution. Other than that, you should also determine the cookie window. Cookie lifetime determines the duration of the association between prospects and an affiliate.
If cookie lifetime is 30 days, it means an affiliate will get credit for purchases made within 30 days after a user clicked on the affiliate link.
Find Instagram influencers in your niche
It’s time to find Instagram influencers to partner with!
If it’s your first experience with affiliate marketing on Instagram, start with micro-influencers. Along with high commission rates, macro- and mega-influencers are also known for having very diverse audiences. Invite micro-influencers to join your referral program as you take the first steps into influencer marketing. Accounts with 10-30K followers often have higher engagement rates than the ones with millions of followers because they manage to build a genuine relationship with their close-knit community.
Modash can help you find influencers that meet your very specific criteria. It has an influencer database of 200M+ creator profiles across Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, and there are a ton of filters available to find the perfect audience for your brand.
When you start the discovery process, you need to specify the requirements your future partners’ accounts should meet.
Next, you identify the audience parameters. If you want to find local influencers to reach people in certain locations, just choose the right cities or countries in the dropdown menu. You can specify what percentage of people from the selected location should be in your influencer’s network. It’s a great feature because you can hardly expect anyone to have 100% of their audience in one city.
When you’re ready, start the search and see the results. You can adjust your filters if the list is too short or too broad.
Reach out, and strike up a deal
When you have a list of relevant influencers, you can start the outreach process.
Remember that these people receive hundreds of messages every day. A lot of messages get ignored. With that in mind, you should do your best to make your offer appealing. Personalize your message and show why this partnership is a win-win.
It’s good to follow the influencer first and look through their posts carefully:
- What brands do they typically partner with?
- Do they participate in affiliate programs, or are they brand ambassadors? You can see it by following the links they typically promote.
- Do they prefer to create their own content rather than use content provided by brands?
- Can you notice anything that might help you personalize your offer?
Avoid being too formal and try to speak the language of the person you’re going to work with.
Analyze, monitor, and improve
When you have one affiliate, it’s easy to track their performance. Once you have 20 affiliates promoting your products, it’s getting complicated. You need to track every link and every post being published by your influencers. Without the right software, the process will take hours of work every day.
At this point, you can make Scaleo and Modash work together. With Scaleo, you’ll get insights into the number of conversions your influencers drive and other performance metrics. But performance isn’t the only thing you should track.
It’s also crucial to monitor the content that your influencers are posting. What messaging do they use? How do people perceive it? What could you improve? Modash includes an influencer monitoring platform, which collects Instagram Posts & Stories (you don’t expect to take screenshots of every story before it disappears, do you?). This helps you to quickly get an overview of influencer content, check if any important hashtags or disclosures are missing, and repurpose the content for reporting or anything else.
Writer bio
Adelina Karpenkova is a Content Marketer helping SaaS companies all over the world grow their online presence. She’s passionate about sharing her hands-on experience with marketing with the help of some good content.
Last Updated on January 19, 2024
