how-to-leverage-instagram-for-brand-sponsorship

How to Leverage Instagram For Brand
Sponsorship

If you have been on Instagram for a while with established presence, chances are high that there
are sponsors willing to pay you. Sponsorships are given to Instagram accounts with strong
popularity in some specific groups of users or those accounts run by celebrities or public figures.
The IG profiles with higher number of followers and likes are likely to get more sponsors.

It is a way to sponsor an ad for a brand to earn a lot of money through promoting their product
or service. It is a promotional tactic of letting people, especially targeted users, learn more about
the sponsored company.

As a result, the sponsored company pays the IG account holder a lump sum money for the service.
So, getting sponsors for your IG account is a great way to add extra bucks into your business.
Now, the question is how? With enormous user base on Instagram, to get sponsors who will pay
you to promote their business is not an easy task.

The present scenario:

Right now, more companies are starting to use social media sponsorship as a means of reaching
their target audience online, in place of increasingly overcrowded social media advertisements.
It is one of the proven best ways to grow your personal brand by paying people with established
presence on social media to get the word out about your business.

If you have the capability, it won’t be hard to become one of those sponsors as a way of growth-
hacking your business to limelight. Or on the other way, build your own IG authority to attract
sponsors for your business. Either way, It is a smart business move to reach out to your brand
online audience for business.

This post will focus on how to help yourself with getting sponsors who will pay you to become
their authoritative brand ambassador.

First stop, build your unique brand:

As the initial step, you need to create an IG account and then upload a minimum of 6 to 10 photos
that are consistent with your brand early on.

Before any plan of becoming an IG influencer, you need to create your own very IG unique brand.
When you are signing up, you have the chance to upload several pictures that are attuned to
your brand in the process so that your profile makes the first impression about niche it is
promoting.

Moving forward from this point, it is not recommended to just upload multiple images of
different backgrounds or effects that are not able to convey your message properly. You will
come to know more about this services and methods from Gramista.com.

Switch to Instagram business account:

It is a no brainer that marketing effectively on Instagram requires that
you move your account to a full-fledged business profile.

Instagram business accounts have extra features or functionalities that
enable your account to be properly used for business purpose, including
an integration with your business Facebook page. You can add your
business phone number, address or category, and even have a
placement of your product catalogue on Instagram.

Posting pictures with consistent theme and style for exposure:

There are so many monthly active users on Instagram that doing something unique or different
to create your own trademark on the platform is not that straightforward. But being yourself and
portraying your true value is all that you need to care about.

• Establishing your very own brand on IG is the first step before getting to collaborate with
any brand for sponsorship. In that case, you need to present yourself with some very
quality high resolution photos as potential sponsors or followers will not want to be
associated with an unappealing, grainy or blurry IG account.

• More so, more companies are becoming conscious about the quality of pictures on social
sharing as more of those are being shared on a daily basis. They are investing their money
in you to portray their products and services to your followers, so a blurry picture isn’t
the right way to do that. So, if your pictures are not of good quality, then you can count
on that as a big disadvantage to make sponsors want to give their deals to someone else,
there are always options for that on Instagram.

• For example, you can upload pictures of more or less the same thing and then try to
maintain that unique style throughout your Instagram posts. It will help you to clarify your
brand to your followers what image you are trying to create and what they can expect
from your posts.

• You can check some of the notable examples from the Instagram own blog themes. Some
of those are fitness, fashion, cats, travel and food. Sticking to the right and same theme
will help you convey yourself as an authority in your chosen field to your followers. And
that is how you increase the chances of getting yourself new sponsorships.

• Trying to maintain one promising visual style may also help you to interest your account
with some select brands. For some brands, designs are everything. In that case, you have
to work hard in creating a proper color palettes for your images. For example, most of
your pictures might have featured yellows, oranges and pinks. With this, it is not clever
to use an image with loads of shadows and dark browns. You might even want to keep
grays out of the picture for visibility. Here is an infographic that shows you what a unique
color means for brands.

Posting around 2 to 3 posts on a daily basis is a must:

It is always a good strategy to post on a regular basis on social media to help build your
consistency trust with your followers. It is also a great way to increase your visibility through IG
algorithms. It also promotes users to Instagram's “explore” page. So, it is highly recommended
to post at least 2 to 3 images per day, which also need to be separated by a few hours in between.

• Let’s use an example to help you understand this. If you are posting a photo at around 12
pm, it is always good to wait until 3 pm before posting another photo. After then, you can
now post your next picture at 6 or 7 pm.

• If you are not able to log on to IG every time to post due to other engagements, you can
just use some scheduling apps to queue up your posts around these optimal times, or
even to check out for future posts. One of such apps is Buffer.

• This is crucial in maintaining an active Instagram presence even though you are not
personally active on the platform. You can just schedule your daily posts around 11am,
2pm, and 5pm or the variation of that at 12pm, 3pm and 6pm. But that doesn’t mean you
shouldn’t log on to your account at least daily to response to comments and feedbacks.

No matter what the solution is, to get your hands on the sponsorship of bigger brands, you have
to maintain an active posture on your Instagram account. After gaining quite some followers,
sponsors are likely to come for you in a smooth and steady way.

Cultivate your Instagram following:

Instagram bot is very frowned upon the account unfollowing other users. You can follow a few
hundreds users on Instagram in five minutes without any problem, but once you start unfollowing
these users for not following back or for not being active, you will trigger Instagram spam bots
that will limit your number of unfollows in that single operation. You will have to wait for a few
hours or a day to continue with that operation.

There are many Instagram tools that help with determining what users to follow and how you
should unfollow them, Twitly is a great resource to uncover the users who have not followed you
back on Instagram.

The goal is to follow those users who have followed at least one influencer in your niche to ensure
you are able to build your Instagram on a targeted strategy.

Become verified:

There is this general belief that brand influencers are those users that have been verified for the
Instagram platform. Once you have built your Instagram followers to a level, say 1000, and you

have gained a decent amount of likes and engagement, you should push for the account to be
verified which will see a blue mark added before your name.

You can visit your profile settings to check if you are qualified for this feature after you have built
a number of Instagram followers.

Promote your account to potential sponsors:

Sometimes how you attract sponsors for your business on Instagram depends more on what you
do off the platform rather than what you do on it. If you want brand sponsorship deals, you’ve
got to show up where you can find them.

You can join several Facebook groups that focus on social media marketing and share some posts
about your business interest. If you are not able to get brand sponsors by this you will certainly
attract some interests closer to this, like someone wanting to start a new social media campaign
or managing their account on Instagram.

You could also create a gig on Fiverr stating specific brands you are promoting on Instagram. If
you checked on “buyers requests” on the freelance marketplace, you would find something
similar to this, like someone looking for Instagram influencers with a stated amount of followers,
depending on how you have tailored your gig to a specific category and description similar to this
interest.

Final thoughts:

Keep in mind that the number of sponsors you get on Instagram is also more likely to depend on
reactions you are getting on your posts. While the followers are important, it is also good to get
those reacting to your posts to send a positive signal to potential sponsors that you have an active
community worth exploring.

To this, you should carve out a unique niche for your business on Instagram, not necessarily that
the niche is already existing, but it should reflect your unique perspective, creativity, fun,
controversy and brand mettle.