Crafting Instagram influencer campaigns that convert
If your brand is looking to add Influencer Marketing to your marketing mix, you’ll likely be looking at Instagram, and with good reason. Instagram is one of the most popular social media networks, with over 2 billion monthly users.
From entertainment, information, or product inspiration to providing community and connection, we turn to Instagram for so much more than just ‘socialising,’ which makes it a powerful channel for marketers, particularly when it comes to reaching younger audiences. One of the most effective ways in which brands can reach consumers on Instagram is by working with Instagram Influencers.
In recent years, with the rise of AI, content creation has become more accessible than ever. This means the number of Instagram Influencers has risen exponentially – as have the opportunities for brands to collaborate with them.
But how can brands ensure their Instagram Influencer Campaigns are actually driving tangible impact?
In this article, we’re breaking down everything you need to know about Instagram Influencer Marketing in 2025.
What is Instagram Influencer Marketing?
Instagram Influencer Marketing is a modern digital marketing strategy that involves collaborating with Instagram content creators’ to introduce your brand/ product/ service, etc to their followers through their content.
It follows the same psychological tenets as Influencer marketing on any other platform. The trust and para-social relationships these content creators have built with their audiences gives them particular influential power over these audiences’ preferences and opinions. This allows brands to leverage their reach and following to create awareness, interest, desire, and drive action for their products or services.
Unlike YouTube, Instagram as a platform is far easier to create content for – creators do not need fancy equipment, or high-level editing skills in order to create engaging content. This in turn means there are more creators, more content niches, and more advertising opportunities for brands.
Instagram tends to be the most preferred platform for Influencer partnerships, even above TikTok and YouTube, particularly amongst lifestyle brands, and those targeting younger customers.
In fact, over 60% of Instagram users are aged 18-34, which makes this a powerful channel to reach this cohort.1
How Does Instagram Influencer Marketing Work?
There are several ways in which brands can work with Instagram Influencers. The most common forms of sponsored content on Instagram tend to be-
- Photo posts
- Reels
- Stories
The setup generally involves paying an influencer to introduce your brand to their audiences via the content on their accounts. This may be in the form of product placements, testimonials, tutorials and demos, and so on.
Influencers play an important role in brand discovery and purchase intentions. In fact ‘influencers’ are the preferred means of brand discovery for over 31% of consumers, and rising to 43% specifically amongst Gen Z. 2
Instagram Influencer Marketing Strategy
Like most other platforms, a successful Instagram Influencer Marketing Strategy starts with clearly defining the objectives and the target audience.
Outlining whether you’re working towards brand awareness or performance metrics is key to identifying the right set up and tactics.
Your objectives should also guide how much budget you allocate. If you’re expecting to work with a larger influencer and aiming to drive brand awareness at scale in a single campaign, it’s unrealistic without a significant 5 or 6 figure budget.
Similarly, scaling performance outcomes is not possible without investing enough to generate organic uplifts, and collect enough data and insights to draw reliable conclusions to inform a long-term strategy.
In general whether it’s brand awareness or performance, it’s difficult to drive impact at scale without sufficient investment – whether that’s in a single campaign or over a period of time.
If you’re looking to integrate Instagram influencer marketing into your mix as a long-term, scalable strategy, you also need to be mindful that you’re spending enough to create a decent sample size for data and insights collection.
Influencer Marketing across any platform is a long-term iterative process, and requires investment to actually yield results. In fact, a 2024 Nielsen report showed that over 50% of brands don’t invest enough in media to see the maximum ROI.3 Influencer Marketing on Instagram is no different – you have to invest if you’re expecting results at scale.
What deliverables work best for Instagram Influencer Marketing?
In general, traditional video posts (0.42%) followed by photo-posts (1.17%) tend to have the lowest engagement rate. Carousels have a slightly better engagement rate with around 1.7%, but Reels by far are the best post format for sponsored influencer content. On average, Reels are reported to have an engagement rate of 2.08%.4
In general, it’s best practice to negotiate a mix of content deliverables. This means that instead of a single reel or post, you should look at negotiating a package deal.
The ideal package of deliverables we tend to recommend for maximum brand and performance impact with Instagram Influencer campaigns includes-
- 1 x reel
- 3 x story frames with a tracking link
- Tracking link in bio
Finding the Right Instagram Influencers
Depending on your campaign objectives and available budget, you might need to adjust your parameters for your influencer search to select the right types of influencers.
For instance, if you’re aiming for brand awareness, you may want to include a few mega influencers into your mix. On the other hand, smaller and mid-sized influencers tend to work better for more performance oriented objectives.
An ideal mix will have a versatile mix of influencers of different sizes so you’re driving both, performance in the short term, and brand impact that translates into performance in the long term.
In general, on Instagram, influencers can be classified as follows –
- Micro-influencers 100K-500K average views
- Mid-sized influencers 500K-1M average views
- Mega Influencers 1M+ average views
A key thing to note here is that it’s always important to analyse and identify influencers based on the average views they tend to get on their reels, NOT their follower count. The number of followers can be a misleading figure, and doesn’t accurately represent how engaged an influencer’s following currently is.
Naturally, it’s also worth noting that your budgets have to be aligned with your goals. You can’t drive awareness at scale and hope to work with a mega influencer with the bare minimum budget.
When it comes to actually identifying specific influencers, you need to consider a few aspects:
- Your target audience location
- Your target audience age
- Your target audience gender
- Your target audience profile – interests, hobbies, habits, etc.
These will help you narrow down your demographic targeting. You ideally want to work with influencers who have a majority of audiences that overlap with your ideal audience profile. You want influencers who speak to the same target audience as your brand.
Whilst you may have outlined your audience’s interests, hobbies, and so on, most people new to influencer marketing typically tend to struggle with identifying which content verticals to start with – after all, there are many verticals and sub verticals and so many niche communities.
A good place to start with this is by analysing competitor data – particularly of brands that have been doing Influencer Marketing on Instagram for a while, or are big spenders on the platform. Typically, your agency partner should be able to help with this sort of competitor analysis.
That said, no two brands are exactly alike, so there will always be differences in what your ideal Instagram influencer partnership will look like. But as you start and scale, you’ll gather enough data and insights to tweak your strategy and optimise it to your own brand’s needs.
In general, it’s good practice to work with influencers across a minimum of 3 different content verticals, with around 10 influencers per vertical. This allows you to collect enough data to gauge the performance and potential of each vertical with more confidence.
Check out our detailed breakdown of how to find influencers here.
How to create an Instagram influencer brief
When it comes to the creative for an Instagram Influencer ad, it’s important to strike the right balance between staying true to the brand identity and maintaining authenticity in the content.
You may be tempted to provide strict guidelines and scripts for your influencer collaborations, but it’s important to allow the influencer some creative freedom.
They know their audiences best, and they know what works and resonates best with them.
Your Instagram influencer brief should provide enough information about your brand, product, and any key CTAs or offerings for the influencer to get a clear idea of your identity, USP, and what response they’re trying to elicit from their audiences.
Beyond that, you can include specific brand-safety rules- for example, depending on the rigidity you may want to specify the visuals cannot include alcohol in the shot, have any references to violence or use any expletives in the sponsored post. In fact, it helps to include some general Dos and Don’ts to streamline the draft review process down the line.
However, you should avoid writing out the entire concept for them beat-by-beat or providing a line-by-line script for them to read out as this comes across extremely ingenuine.
How to improve Instagram influencer campaign conversions
Optimise the ad creative
Some of the characteristics of top-performing Influencer Content on Instagram include:
- Personalised talking points
- Seamless integration with regular content
- Influencer’s face displayed on screen
- Clear and Strong Calls-to-Action (CTAs)
Add incentives
Beyond these, there are several tactics you can leverage to improve your Instagram influencer campaign performance further like –
- Discount & Coupon Codes
- Contests and Giveaways
- Custom products with Mega-influencers
Adding these to your collaborations provides an additional incentive for consumers and can help improve conversion rates and ROI on your instagram influencer campaigns.
Boost top-performing content
Finally, make the most out of top-performing content by putting paid spend behind it. We always recommend purchasing usage rights for Instagram Influencer content AFTER the content has gone live rather than including it in the initial contract.
Including usage rights clauses in initial contracts can create a surge in the price an influencer quotes you. This could mean you end up paying for content that you may not even ultimately use. So the best thing to do is always wait for all the content to go live, monitor its initial performance, and then only put paid spend behind the content that performed well to begin with.
What terms you negotiate for the usage rights will depend entirely on how you want to use the content – for instance, brands often negotiate lifetime usage rights for bigger influencers. But a typical frame is 30 days from the live date, especially if you have an always-on type of influencer program running.
Examples of Successful Instagram Influencer Campaigns
Molly Mae for Emma Mattress
This campaign we ran for Emma Mattress with reality TV star Molly Mae is a brilliant example of a seamless integration with a highly relevant, top Instagram Influencer.
Love Island is one of the most popular ITV programmes amongst the 16-34 age demographic in the UK, and Molly Mae has emerged as one of the recognisable stars of the series.
So when Emma came to us looking to make a splash in the younger UK market with some of the biggest Instagram Influencers, Molly Mae was a prime candidate.
Not only was she a great fit for the audience Emma Sleep were looking to target, her lifestyle and family centric content presented a great opportunity for an authentic integration. We were able to seamlessly integrate the brand into her content, leveraging a popular ‘unboxing’ format to show her unpacking a mattress as she moved and settled into her new home.
This campaign is a great example of an effective mega-influencer collaboration on Instagram.
Air Up Instagram Influencer Marketing
Our Instagram influencer campaigns for air up are a great example of an always-on influencer program.
Since 2023, we’ve been working with air up on monthly influencer activations across platforms including Instagram, primarily leveraging reels, supplemented with story posts.
A key observation in air up’s influencer campaigns is that no two integrations are the same – each influencer integrates the product into their content in a format that feels natural to their regular, unsponsored content.
air up’s Instagram influencer campaigns are also a great demonstration of a versatile influencer mix- including a variety of Mid-sized to larger influencers across a number of verticals to help reach their varied target audience.
Summing up: Winning with Influencer Marketing on Instagram
In a chronically online world, Instagram Influencers have become a key part of societal culture. Not only do they play an important role in shaping consumer trends and behaviour, but they can also play a key part in amplifying key messages and shaping wider public opinion about specific brands, which makes them a powerful marketing tool.
However, like with any other platform, successful Instagram Influencer Marketing comes down to a sound strategy grounded in data and creative insight.
If you’re looking to discuss what that might look like for your brand, our Instagram Influencer Experts would love to hear from you. Book a free consultation with our team today!
- Instagram Statistics Marketers Should Know in 2025 [Updated] | Sprout Social ↩︎
- 35 Influencer Marketing Statistics Shaping 2024 ↩︎
- Nielsen report finds underspending in 50% of media plans jeopardizing maximum ROI | Nielsen ↩︎
- Instagram Statistics Marketers Should Know in 2025 [Updated] | Sprout Social ↩︎