Influencers have shifted from simple promoters to vital storytellers in the brand world. To make the most of these partnerships, it’s crucial to go beyond surface-level engagement.
In this article, we’ll dive into 10 practical steps to improve influencer engagement, ensuring your strategies not only align with your brand’s voice and values but also deliver impactful measurable results by building authentic long-term relationships.
Engagement is the interaction rate your users have with your content. This includes likes, shares, comments, and tends to vary by platform. The trick is to actively foster interactions that go beyond just a quick glance.
To improve influencer engagement, aim to create content that resonates deeply with your audience, encouraging them to participate and engage meaningfully. By doing so, you not only boost your engagement metrics but also build a stronger, more connected community around your brand.
Brand engagement goes beyond making initial contact with a potential customer, it's about building an emotional bond or cultivating a rewarding transactional relationship over the long term.
Influencers play a key role in boosting brand engagement by acting as authentic and relatable ambassadors who can connect with their followers on a personal level.
Being an Olympian and Lululemon ambassador for over 3 years, Colleen Quigley, is a perfect example of how influencers can enhance brand engagement by establishing an emotional connection through storytelling.
As a credible athlete, she builds trust and connects with her audience, aligning the brand with fitness, wellness, and an active community by authentically showcasing their products in her training and lifestyle.
This helps brands reach their target audience and campaign objectives by making its message feel more genuine.
While brand engagement is the overall interaction between a brand and its audience, influencer engagement specifically relates to the interactions an influencer can generate on behalf of a brand. It helps foster those relationships for you in order for your brand's engagement to continue growing.
The goal is to effectively bridge the gap between your brand and its target audience, transforming passive viewers into active customers by fostering strong partnerships with the right influencers.
To measure influencer engagement and make sure your collaboration will bring results to the table, it's essential to understand the metrics that reflect how actively their audience interacts with their content.
A good engagement rate can vary depending on the type of platform, account, industry, or the content itself. Generally speaking, an engagement rate on Instagram between 1% and 3% is considered average.
The higher the rate, the more likely it is that followers are genuinely engaged and interested.
A simple way to calculate this is by using the formula:
(Total Likes + Total Comments) / Total Followers x 100%
This gives you a quick look at how followers are reacting to an influencer’s posts. But if you don’t have time to do the math, you can always use a tool to help you out.
Check out the Top 8 Free Instagram Engagement Rate Calculators and also our detailed article on how to calculate engagement rate in instagram.
Selecting the right influencers is crucial to ensuring the success of your partnership. Since each influencer has a distinct personality and style, it’s important to collaborate with individuals whose content aligns with your brand’s values.
To understand who to partner with, start by defining your target audience. Know their age, location, interests, and values. This helps you find influencers whose followers align with your brand’s demographic.
Next, ensure the influencer’s content matches your brand’s tone and values. Authenticity is key, so choose influencers who you think establish a genuine connection with their audience and are transparent about partnerships.
You can use tools like Instagram's Fake Follower Checker to verify engagement rates, audience demographics, and authenticity. Avoid influencers with a history of unrelated or inauthentic promotions.
Remember that the goal is to foster long-term partnerships, so choose someone you would want to continue working with.
According to ION, brands that invest in ongoing collaborations with influencers ensure that 82% of consumers are more likely to buy due to repeated, trusted exposure, and the 54% who value authenticity over metrics, like follower count, will be more inclined to engage with consistent, relatable content over time.
Consumers are looking for relatability, and influencers provide that authenticity that brands can’t always match.
A celebrity example would include Nespresso trusting George Clooney as its global ambassador since 2006. A 2023 study done by Personality Media in Spain, shows 60% of consumers associate him directly with the brand.
Long-term partnerships like this build stronger brand recognition and trust over time. Consistency is key, given it creates an authentic connection between the celebrity and brand, making the message more credible, leading to higher consumer loyalty and engagement.
Unlike User-Generated Content, which depends on the spontaneity and authenticity of everyday users, Influencer-Generated Content typically stems from a strategic collaboration between a brand and an influencer.
Their extensive reach, along with their ability to create and curate content tailored to each platform, can significantly boost your engagement rate compared to traditional brand-created content.
In the following case study, a brand called The Honest Company partnered with 30 influencers who aligned with the brand's values to promote a bedtime bundle for moms.
The approach: The influencers, spanning from micro to macro, created 103 posts across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. The goal was to create content that visually and tonally felt as though Honest had created them in-house, emphasizing brand consistency.
The results: Engagement rates were up to six times higher than the campaign's initial benchmarks. Specifically, the in-feed posts achieved an impressive 4.32% engagement rate, and the overall engagement rate across all platforms was 4.25%, both of which are considered very high in influencer marketing.
When we say micro influencers we’re talking about a 10K-100K followers range.
A influencer marketing study found that micro-influencers see a 6% engagement rate on Instagram, while mega-influencers see engagement rates around 1.97%.
Jorge Gutierrez, a flight crew beauty influencer, qualifies as a micro influencer with over 53,000 followers at the time of this writing.
Although this number may vary through experts, the important thing you need to understand about micro influencers is that they are exceptionally valuable because of their passion, creativity and authenticity.
When talking about improving influencer engagement rates, micro influencers take the lead, as they’ve invested significant amounts of time building a trusted, engaged audience who already shares a strong interest in their niche, whether it's food, travel, art, or sports.
A Digiday report reveals that micro-influencers with fewer than 1,000 followers can achieve engagement rates as high as 8%. This rate decreases a 4% for accounts with 1,000 to 10,000 followers, and further drops to 2.4% for those with 10,000 to 100,000 followers
This targeted connection is something macro influencers can't always offer.
Allow your work ethic to serve as a motivator for a better performance. The goal here is to achieve better results by motivating your collaborator to work as effectively as possible.
Make sure your presence as a brand reassures the power within your collaboration, and stay up to date with any concerns / suggestions that might arise.
Some useful examples are:
Long-term: Build a relationship based on mutual respect and negotiate terms that work to benefit both parties.
If creativity is a muscle, then influencers train it daily. As long as the campaign’s guidelines are clear, try letting them push it to new limits and discover what they come up with.
Of course offering creative input or feedback is important, but avoid being overly restrictive, choose to trust your partner.
A great example of allowing creative freedom is Nike's collaboration with YouTube star Casey Neistat. In 2012, Nike hired Neistat to create a promotional video for their "Make It Count" campaign. Rather than sticking to a conventional ad format, Neistat used the budget to travel the world for 10 days, documenting his whole journey.
The result was a genuine and viral piece of content that resonated with audiences and perfectly captured the essence of Nike's campaign. By trusting Neistat’s creative instincts, Nike became associated to a unique and impactful message, showcasing the power of giving influencers the freedom to express a brand's values in their own style.
Social media marketing isn’t a one-size-fits-all game; different types of content serve different needs and grab attention in various ways. Mixing things up with text, video, audio, and interactive content can do wonders for your brand. Let’s dive into why using multiple content formats can be a game-changer:
In short, mixing up your content formats can make your marketing efforts more effective and engaging, helping you connect with a wider audience and strengthen your brand’s presence.
To be clear, using the same 30 hashtags for every post is no guaranteed success, but they can be useful when navigating social media’s internal search engine.
When partnering with influencers, hashtags and keywords are your best friends for boosting discoverability. They help categorize your brand’s content, making it easier to connect with users actively searching for related topics.
In these examples, the influencers effectively use a targeted set of hashtags related to their partnerships to enhance discoverability without overwhelming their Instagram reels.
At the end of the day, social media is a constantly evolving trial and error process. Measuring certain influencer marketing KPIs gives you the advantage of understanding what is and isn't working, so you can continue growing in the future!
Here are some KPIs you could track:
Keeping an eye on these will help you see how well your influencer campaigns are working and where you might need to tweak things!
Access these Top 10 Influencer Tracking Tools To Analyze and Monitor Performance
Influencers thrive on connecting with their followers in ways that brands often can’t replicate. Encourage them to foster a sense of community around your brand by organizing live sessions, Q&A segments, or meet-ups where fans can interact directly.
This strategy boosts engagement by giving audiences a voice and a chance to connect with both the influencer and your brand in a more intimate setting.
Creating a community-oriented approach helps amplify word-of-mouth, increases loyalty, and invites genuine feedback. When an influencer nurtures a community centered around your brand, it becomes a self-sustaining loop, encouraging organic engagement and building trust, two elements crucial for long-term brand growth.
Improving influencer engagement is all about smart choices and genuine connections. By picking the right influencers, nurturing long-term partnerships, and letting creativity shine, you can make your campaigns more impactful. Don’t forget to keep an eye on performance with the right tools to continually refine and enhance your strategy.
Implement these 10 steps to elevate your influencer marketing efforts and drive meaningful interactions with your audience today!
The ideal engagement rate can vary by industry and platform, but generally, an engagement rate between 1% and 3% is considered average for Instagram. Higher rates indicate better audience interaction.
Look for influencers whose content and values align with your brand. Use tools like Upfluencer to check for fake followers and verify that their audience demographics match your target market.
You can use tools like Google Analytics, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and UTM.io to track and analyze influencer engagement. For Instagram-specific metrics, check out the Top 8 Free Instagram Engagement Rate Calculators.
Micro-influencers, with 1,000 to 10,000 followers, offer higher engagement rates and more authentic connections with their niche audiences compared to macro or mega-influencers. Their targeted reach can result in more meaningful interactions.
Allow influencers the freedom to express their creativity within the campaign guidelines. Trust their expertise and provide constructive feedback rather than imposing strict content restrictions.
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