It was decided to write a detailed guide on working with bloggers. At first I wrote it for my team, then I decided to share it with you. All the best is always for you.
So, in order to start figuring out how to work with bloggers on Instagram, sit back and get ready for a long reading piece.
Go…
Purpose
Before you start working with bloggers, you need to understand what purpose you are pursuing.
Even before the start of all the work you need to determine what you or your client want to receive as a result of advertising. In accordance with this information, you will form a specific goal from the advertising campaign.
What goals can be generally?
- Getting followers
- Receipt of applications
- Sales
- Coverage, your target audience
Depending on your goal, your approach to working with bloggers will vary in places. Someone who has come across this at least once understands that a blogger who gives a large number of followers may not submit applications for a product at all, and vice versa. There are a lot of nuances, so a clear goal at the start or the purchase real followers for Instagram will warn you against unnecessary actions and unnecessary loss of the budget.
Target audience
“Defining the Target Audience” is like a marketer’s mantra that needs to be remembered at almost every stage of the work. You choose a blogger, write text or set up targeted advertising; you should always remember about the target audience with which you work or which you influence in one way or another.
For some reason, the definition of the target audience is given to beginning SMM specialists problematically, most likely because they lack the basic understanding of marketing and trite work experience.
Think a few times and determine who your brand’s audience really is.
If you already have an initial audience, the ideal way would be to conduct a chain of surveys in your account that will not only entertain users, so they will also help you to more accurately understand who your audience really is.
Also, look into your account statistics more often, you cannot blindly believe these numbers (we know that Instagram is still a “statistician” in this regard), but nonetheless a general understanding of the target audience (geo, age, gender) will be formed.
Sometimes it happens that the brand is niche, and you don’t want to work with anyone, because for effective promotion, the leader must have a certain set of requirements (for example, understand art, deeply understand modern fashion or have a detailed understanding of French perfumery). Accordingly, there will be few such bloggers, and the complexity of cooperation with them is higher.
At such moments I always think about the formation of a personal brand of the owner of the company. Roughly speaking, if there is no blogger with whom you want to cooperate, perhaps you should pay attention in the direction of a personal brand?
Market analysis
After a detailed analysis of the target audience, we proceed to the analysis of the market and your competitors.
Firstly, it will help you find out the best techniques and chips your competitors use, and secondly, you will understand from whom they are advertised.
Why do you need to know who the competitors are advertising?
If you know who your competitors are working with, you can:
- Cut off the extra bloggers from your potential list of cooperation, since advertising the same product of a different brand in one account often fails; moreover, normal bloggers will not go for it, which means you will save time and perhaps an advertising budget;
- Analysis of competitive advertising allows you to learn from experience without spending a budget on it. By activity in the profile after the advertisement, you can roughly evaluate the result of the campaign;
- Analysis of advertising allows you to find interesting approaches to the presentation of the advertised product;
- Watch the objections of the competitor’s audience in the comments, and close them at the stage of advertising by the blogger.
After analyzing competitors’ accounts, the potential list of blogger accounts for advertising is usually significantly reduced.
Search bloggers
Here it is necessary to mention that there are enough services in the network that provide an opportunity for quick selection of bloggers, coordination of advertising and payment for posts. But personally, my opinion is that you rarely find good bloggers in this way, because sometimes they have ads for 1-2 months, and accordingly they simply do not need to sit in these services. On the other hand, for those who have problems with a lack of advertisers, the use of the service is one of the ways out.
If you want to spend your budget quickly, you can use the services, if you want to make high-quality advertising, work all the same with “pens”.
Please note, I’m not saying that services cannot be used and this is a complete “bullshit”, not at some stages, it can speed up your work well, but nevertheless, services for the selection of bloggers are not a panacea, especially if you have a small budget.
In any case, regardless of the search for a blogger, you should not rely on only one service. However, I will also write an article about when the service is salvation, and why it is quite effective to use them.
Always check everything and test.
- When you have a portrait of the target audience, you start looking for such people on Instagram;
- We analyze and look at who has been signed, who your target audience is following;
- We request statistics from bloggers, followed by your target audience.
- If the statistics are similar to yours, then you are close to the goal. If not, go back to the first stage.
- Analysis of the content and audience of a potential blogger. See what posts are about, who comments, is this your audience?
- If you find a blogger with your audience then list it in a separate list. After that on the page of the blogger click on the button
- “Similar”, Instagram will pick you bloggers with a similar base of followers based on their data. The algorithm is called look-a-like and many are familiar with it.
- Turning to the pages of a similar blogger, you also watch the audience, and if it falls within the required framework, then click “Similar” and look further.
- Thus, you will form a large list of bloggers with the target audience you need.
After you have compiled a large list of potential bloggers, you need to check the bloggers for the quality of the audience and add a column to your plate with the list of bloggers, where there will be a brief conclusion on each of the bloggers.
I’ll run a little ahead and say that it’s not worth it at all to block out bloggers with low-quality audiences, as sometimes it happens that a blogger understands this himself (or you indicate this to him) and provides conditions for which you can work.
How are bloggers checked?
- 1. If you use the blogger checkout services, then you can pass the bloggers through the services, then you will get a general picture of the audience. But, I hope, it is not necessary to say that you should not rely only on the results of the analysis by the service.
- The second step is a manual check. Open posts, and see how targeted comments are, check likes for quality and compliance with the audience, open a general list of subscribers, and selectively view it.
- Do not be lazy and write to advertisers who have already had advertising experience with this blogger, and ask about the result of advertising. If the result is bad, you will be answered with a high degree of probability; if it is good, then they may be silent.
In principle, these three steps are usually enough to understand who is in front of you: an account with a high-quality audience or a dummy.
In addition, when communicating with a blogger, always request complete statistics for the audience, and statistics for the last few posts.
Advertising format
At the stage of elaboration of an advertising campaign, you determine in which format you would like to conduct it.
The main options are:
Post – if you need to show the product face, or show a large amount of information to the reader. In the post it is convenient to tell the details about the product or service.
Stories is a unique advertising format where you can place an active link. If you need to advertise a site, an external project or get a quick application, advertising in the best option. In addition, recently the cost of the post rises, and advertising in the store is usually more effective.
But there is one “BUT”, which should not be forgotten – this is the number of stories a blogger has per day, be sure to pay attention to this point. If a blogger publishes 30 stories per day, most likely your ad will be seen by a small number of users, or simply will not notice when flipping through a common story-stream.
Now less popular advertising formats, but no less effective:
Competition – the most important thing in this version is to choose the right prize for your real followers. It is important that it is valuable enough (value can be achieved not only by the price of the product, it can be an original, unique thing), otherwise it will not attract the attention of users and participants.
Flashmob – suitable if you have an interesting event (the so-called infopovod). Birthday, professional holiday, discovery, new level achieved by the company, etc. Create a unique hashtag, and promote it. In addition, such flash mobs, in addition to attracting attention to the company, create for you a large amount of content that you can later use.
LIVE – suitable if you want to get your audience as involved as quickly as possible. Let me give you an example I’ve already mentioned: As you think, two advertising campaigns will attract more attention to the product, or live broadcast, with a blogger in your showroom who will be advised in real time with subscribers, what to choose, and tell how cool the product you. The difference is obvious and the level of audience involvement is very different.
Cooperation options
Abroad, bloggers enter into contracts with agencies and do not interact with advertisers at all. We don’t have that much yet, so we often interact directly with bloggers.
Depending on the specific blogger, you can use several options for work:
- Barter (you provide a blogger with a product / service, he advertises you);
- Partial barter (you provide the blogger with a product / service + partially pay for placement);
- Commerce (you pay the blogger the full cost of advertising plus most often provide the product);
Partnership
Depending on the scale of the blogger and the number of advertisers, the options for work may vary, I will say from experience that most bloggers with the highest quality audience work on a “commercial basis”.
How to write a blogger?
Often, bloggers may not respond, so it’s worth writing wherever possible:
If there is an account for advertising, we write there.
If there is no separate account for advertising, or there they do not respond, write to the main account.
You can also write an e-mail profile, or e-mail specified for advertising (if any)
It happens that it is more convenient to find a blogger in the messenger, if he does not respond anywhere else. There are chats in the telegraph where most of the major bloggers are sitting, you can try to find them there.
What to write?
We use special scripts to communicate with bloggers that we have developed for our employees. You can do the same. It is important to introduce yourself briefly and in essence, state the purpose of addressing the blogger, and request the information you need. Do not pour water and paint as you like a blogger account, believe that everyone writes the same thing, so reading flattering messages by a blogger is unlikely to bring him pleasure. I will say this: “Be guided by the situation …”
Abstracts and tasks for a blogger.
It is important at this stage not to let the advertising campaign take its course, since purely blogger improvisation often drains your budget, so you should thoroughly prepare.
Send the blogger all the necessary information, theses about the company, product / service. Throw off the necessary media material, examples of successful advertising posts, geotags, hashtags and publication schedule.
After the information is transmitted to the blogger, sometimes it is necessary to clarify the nuances, if the blogger does not ask anything at all, then there are two options – you have the perfect TK, or the blogger doesn’t care, the latter is not good. The indifference of a blogger to the advertised product is the worst that can be.
Check if the blogger has any questions, does he understand everything? Do not forget to say that the advertisement before publication should be coordinated with you and discuss in advance the possibility and number of edits.
On the day of the advertisement, write to the blogger and remind you of your advertisement, mentioning that he does not forget to give you a link to the post / story.
And the last thing I would like to mention in this article is the importance of advertising analysis.
Advertising analysis
Measure the figures before, during, and after the advertisement in order to evaluate the success of the advertising campaign.
Count the number of incoming subscribers, bids, sales, etc.
Evaluate and compare the result with the set plan, analyze the successful moments and failures.
If the blogger comes in, re-advertise over a period of time. What brings the result you need to “squeeze” until you stop bringing.
Save posts, storys in order to be able to continue to use the content with the participation of opinion leaders.
Request the results of advertising from a blogger after it ends. If it is storiz, then after 24 hours, ask for a screen view, if the post, ideally take statistics a week after publication.
Draw conclusions about the success of the project in order to further improve the quality of the advertising.
Important: If it was useful, write about it below in the comments, so that I understand to write this kind of article yet or not.
