Marketing With Instagram “Celebs” (Is it Worth Your Time?)

I really wanted to touch on this topic for other startup businesses and designers who are contemplating this method of marketing. Please keep in mind, everyone’s outcome will be different. Therefore, I can only speak on how my experience went and what I will be doing differently in the future.
 

Getting In Contact

I would go to celebrity rappers Instagram profiles and scroll through their “Following” list. This was a great way to find the “IG famous” models quickly because let’s be honest, most celebrity rappers are following beautiful women! Once I found a model I liked, I would check for their booking email and contact them. Now this part is extremely important, please DO NOT just draft up an email like you’re talking through text etc. THIS IS YOUR BUSINESS/BRAND! Take the time out to type up a professional email with an introduction of who you are, short body message of what you’re offering and an outro of how you can be reached. Notice I said what YOU’RE offering! This person does not know you and they do not need to help you, so you need to make your form of value clear. How I made my offering clear, was including 3-4 photos in the body of the email with items I made. This way, they saw a sample of my collection and didn’t need to spend time finding my Instagram profile or searching for my website. You will find out very quickly that people are lazy and think they’re God’s gift to all of us on the planet. So anything you can do to make them not “work” harder is a huge plus!
 

Outcome

I found this method of emailing resulted in a pretty high response rate for both reality and IG celebs. The downside was the time it took to find them and resending the same email weekly. These women receive thousands of emails from small business owners and designers. So there’s a chance that your message won’t be seen at all. Hence, why I would wait a week to receive a response and resend it again weekly for an entire month. If I didn’t receive a reply after 4 weeks ( 4 messages total), I would move onto finding the next model. Personally, I felt that 4 emails were plenty and I didn’t want to come off as telemarketer, even though that’s basically what I was doing. I’ve also been told NO many of times and didn’t get discouraged, I just moved on.
 

Sealing the deal

Once they say yes and agree to doing business with you, they’ll more than likely send you their P.O. Box information. I would notify them of when I was sending the package and an estimated day of arrival. Once again, I made sure to keep every email interaction with them professional from beginning to end.
 

The Waiting Game

I can’t tell you how many times I got excited to see that the packages had been delivered. Now it was living on Instagram to see if they’ve posted a bomb photo wearing my design. During this time is when I learned my biggest lesson on “influencer marketing.”

1.       They may never wear your design.
2.       They may wear it and look horrible.
3.       They may wear it and not tag you or say where they got it from.
4.       They may wear it, look amazing and tag you.
 
Without set guidelines in place, you will never know what the final result will be. I learned this lesson the hard way however, I’m glad I did when I did! If you do not tell them what you want/expect (nicely, of course) then you’re stuck with what they decide.
 

They Wore My Design!

Another HUGE lesson learned with this one and that is, lots of followers DO NOT equal sales! I would be so excited when one influencer tagged me in their photo and their followers liked/commented on it. The issue was, my expectations were all wrong! I had this thought in my mind that once my item was worn and tagged, I’d get nonstop orders rolling in. Congratulations, you played yourself *DJ Khaled voice* this was SO WRONG!!! I quickly learned that although they had 500K followers, most of them were men, robots or women who I weren’t my target market.
 

Lesson Learned, Now What?

I will consider doing influencer marketing again with my next items however, I will have strict guidelines moving forward. These are a few questions I will ask myself next time I choose to go down this road.

When picking an influencer:

• Is this person within your target market?
• Are their followers within your target market?
• What kind of people are commenting on their photos?
• Does the influencer interact with their followers?
• Does their brand match yours?
• Do they market everything by everybody?
• Do they have a set of schedule of when branding/ad posts will be published?

This is just a short list of what I would ask myself next time before sending any products to an influencer/Instagram model/Reality celeb and whatever else you want to call them! Have you ever marketed your products with an influencer? What did you learn from it? Would you do it again? Please let me know in the comments as I would love to hear your experience!!

Until next time ASSASSINS… Stay Disciplined Y’all!

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