According to 2023 statistics, about 9 million Russians go to Instagram every day. Despite the blocking of the social network, advertising from bloggers remains a popular tool to promote products and brands.

Let’s analyze the pros and cons of advertising integrations with bloggers on Instagram. We’ll tell you how to find the right Influencers and properly organize the cooperation.

Pros and cons of advertising from bloggers on Instagram

Like any method of promotion, advertising with bloggers has advantages and disadvantages. To see if the tool is right for your brand, evaluate the pros and cons.

Pros of blogger integrations

• Access to the target audience – you can choose influencers with an audience that matches your age, interests or geolocation. For example, manufacturers of sports equipment collaborate with fitness bloggers, and clothing brands collaborate with stylists.

Selecting bloggers can be time-consuming. You need to contact each one individually and agree on publishing terms.

• Increased brand awareness – Advertising with bloggers builds brand image and works to remember the brand. Even if a person does not make a purchase immediately, in the future he is more likely to choose a familiar product.
• Audience trust – loyal subscribers perceive integration more as advice from a friend than as direct advertising. This is especially true for microinfluencers – bloggers with between 1,000 and 10,000 subscribers. Advertising in such accounts can be more effective than integrations with “stars.”
• Easy campaign launch – you don’t need to understand the intricacies of targeting or advertising cabinet settings in order to collaborate with bloggers. Choose the right Influencers and agree on publishing terms.
• Non-standard format – a blogger can create advertising creatives in his own author’s style. Unconventional pitching will help you stand out from your competitors. The audience will better perceive and remember such content.

Disadvantages of integrations with bloggers

• Difficult to predict the effectiveness of the campaign – it is impossible to calculate the conversion rate of views of the advertising post into a purchase.
• High cost of integrations – advertising with “stars” is expensive, so you need to correlate the potential profit from the campaign with the costs in advance.
• Poor quality audience – advertising on pages with cheated subscribers will not bring sales. Therefore, it is necessary to check the quality of the bloggers’ audience. How to do this, we will tell in the next section.

What you should consider when advertising with bloggers

If you plan to advertise with bloggers, we recommend to take into account some important moments. They will help you to protect your interests and get the maximum result from the advertising campaign.

Formalization of cooperation

Fix the main conditions in the contract. The presence of an official document is important to the customer and the executor.

• terms and number of publications;
• payment procedure;
• mechanism for approval of the text and layout of the advertising post or script of the video clip;
• responsibility for failure to perform obligations;
• other important conditions for the parties.

A written contract will help to avoid misunderstandings between partners. It will also help to protect your interests in court should the need arise.

Audience of the blogger

Before you advertise with a blogger, make sure that his audience suits you.

How to evaluate a blogger’s audience:

• Quality – live subscribers, natural activity on the page, high engagement. You can assess the quality of the audience yourself or with the help of special services.Pay attention to the number of subscribers, as well as the number of likes and comments under the posts. If the audience is not active in publications, it means the subscribers are tweaked. Your advertising will not be seen by potential customers. Social network analytics services will help you check your account for bots and find out the exact indicators of engagement.
• Geography is important if you are selling your products or services offline to local consumers. For example, it would be better to advertise your restaurant to a blogger from your city. And if you are promoting an online course or an online store, the geography of your subscribers is not important.
• Characteristics – sex, age, and preferences of your audience. Assess how much your product is in demand among the subscribers of Influencer. It makes no sense to advertise bicycles in the culinary blog, and the youth audience is unlikely to be interested in expensive real estate.

Terms of Reference

To make sure your blogger integration meets your expectations, draft a detailed terms of reference.

What to agree in the terms of reference:

• Content of the promotional post – Approve the layout and text of the post or script of the commercial. Determine what kind of call to action should be in the publication: click a link, order a product on the marketplace, subscribe to your page.
• Time and number of publications – it can be difficult to agree on an exact date and time with popular bloggers. In this case, determine at least a rough time frame.
• Format – integration can be done in the format of a mention, recommendation, unboxing or review.

Also fix in the terms of reference that the blogger should send you a link to the published advertising post.

Conclusion

Advertising with bloggers on Instagram opens up access to an audience of Influencers and increases brand awareness. This method of promotion is often more effective than regular advertising. Subscribers trust the blogger and are loyal to integrations. But there are also disadvantages: the high price of publications from “stars” and the inability to accurately predict the results of the campaign.

To make advertising with bloggers work effectively, check the quality of the audience, draw up a terms of reference, and fix the terms of cooperation in the contract.