Are you seeking strategies to market your online store on Instagram? If so, you might be unsure about the value of using Instagram Story shoutouts.
The definition of an Instagram story shoutout and ten practical examples for ecommerce firms are covered in this article. Are you prepared to begin?
What is an Instagram shoutout?
A public boost or endorsement from one Instagram account to another is what an Instagram shoutout means.
It’s a unique approach for businesses to spread the word about what they have to offer and expand their target market. Brands can gain by employing a shoutout post on Instagram to increase engagement and attract new audiences, from paid influencer shoutouts to free user-generated content.
Shoutouts are frequently a strategy that falls under influencer marketing, a significant trend that has more than doubled in the previous two years and doesn’t appear to be slowing down any time soon.
Here’s how they operate: A different Instagram account uses your brand, product, or service as a promotional tool on their history while also tagging and mentioning yours.
The Instagram account delivering the shoutout frequently has a large following, which means they can reach a large audience and persuade their followers to buy your products and follow your account. Due to this, these accounts are frequently referred to as “influencers.”
Types of Instagram shoutouts
You’ve come across a few different names for this strategy if you’ve been looking out how to obtain a shoutout on Instagram. What do the terms “Instagram shoutout,” “Shoutout for a Shoutout,” “Like for a Shoutout,” and “IG Shoutout” all mean?
Let’s examine the various Instagram shoutout post categories in more detail and discover what makes each unique.
By compensation method:
- Paid shoutouts: A paid shoutout is a traditional influencer marketing strategy in which you pay a user to promote your business. Cash payments and product or service access exchanges are both acceptable forms of payment.
- (Free) product shoutout: Comparable to paid shoutouts, the influencer receives your product for free, at a discount, or even with a coupon.
- Thanks for the shoutout: This form of a shoutout, also known as S4S, is essentially a straightforward trade: you both agree to provide a shoutout to the other account on your sites. A win-win scenario exists!
- The best kind of shoutout is one that comes from word-of-mouth recommendations. Also known as a “voluntary shoutout,” this occurs when a customer is so pleased with your good or service that they decide to post about it on Instagram and share it with their followers.
- Affiliate marketing shoutout: This shoutout implies a contract between the influencer and the brand. The influencer will post a shoutout for the brand and will add their affiliate link to the shoutout, earning back a percentage of sales or a discount.
By objective:
- More followers: One of the quickest and most efficient ways to grow your Instagram following is with a shoutout.
- Increased sales: Influencers can post shoutouts with a call to action (CTA) that entices their followers to go to your store or website and purchase your goods or use your service.
- To publicize a particular campaign or launch: Shoutouts draw in additional followers, which draws in more likes and comments. A new product or event can get much attention by using this involvement.
By format:
- Post in the feed: On Instagram, in-feed posts are the most often used content for influencer marketing. A single image, a carousel, a video, or a reel can be included. Instagram sponsored posts have increased because they are simple to create, approve, and publish, making it simple to scale them up.
- Stories: The second-most popular medium for shoutouts is Instagram Stories. Over 500 million people use Instagram daily, and Stories were first popularized on Snapchat.
What can a shoutout on Instagram do for your company?
More than any other medium in use, social media has produced some of the biggest content producers and promotional talent in recent years. It has allowed regular individuals to develop their brands through engaging content.
With over 50 million independent content producers, curators, and community builders powering one of the industries with the fastest expansion rate today, we live in a new, thriving, creative economy.
Marketers are taking note of these new influencers because they are more relatable and trustworthy than conventional celebs. Increased potential for marketers to monetize and market to identified and engaged consumer behaviors on mobile apps create audiences.
The resources needed to make top-notch content are now at the fingertips of creators, and Instagram shoutouts have established themselves as a proven marketing strategy to reach a loyal audience. The benefits of including Instagram shoutouts in your marketing plan for your business include the following:
- Increase brand awareness.
The most common objective of influencer marketing efforts is to increase brand, product, or service awareness, and shoutouts are an excellent way to do so. Brand awareness is typically assessed using impressions, reach, and engagement measures.
- Speak to new audiences.
If you collaborate with the right influencers—more on that later in the article—shoutouts are a fantastic method to reach their loyal audience. With your target audience, influencers should be willing to offer information about their audience (age, gender, region, interests, etc.).
- Obtain better clients.
According to 51% of marketers, influencer marketing helps firms attract better customers. Your conversion and retention rates will increase if you develop partnerships with influencers who are in tune with your brand and build influencer campaigns that reflect the ideals of their following.
- Produce sales.
You may increase actual sales using shoutouts. Utilizing bespoke links, landing pages, redemption codes, and ProductLead Influencer & ROI metrics, you may monitor these. Make sure your measurements are precise, and choose influencers who will benefit your company.
- Increase brand loyalty.
49% of consumers rely on suggestions from influencers. This figure emphasizes the growing significance of social media influencers for brands looking to engage their consumers. Influencers can offer resounding affirmation and encourage word-of-mouth promotion of your brand or product among their followers.
- Drive the generation of leads.
Names and emails, another well-liked direct response statistic for influencer marketing campaigns, can be gathered through newsletter subscriptions, account installations, or entry into giveaways and used in subsequent efforts.
The science and art of an excellent Instagram shoutout
While there isn’t a single best approach to earning an Instagram shoutout, you can take steps to improve your chances of getting a favorable response from an influencer and fantastic outcomes from the shoutout itself.
Here is a 4-step process for maximizing the impact of an influencer’s Instagram shoutout.
- Look for influencers who publish content similar to your page.
Use hashtags unique to your sector to search for influencers on Instagram directly. To improve your chances of receiving a favorable response, choose sites with a similar number of followers to your own if you’re searching for free shoutouts in exchange for shoutouts.
Use ProductLead to manually select your following collaborators based on their prior work if you want to research influencers who perform for your business. Once you’ve established the KPIs that matter most to your brand, compare the data in a single, focused dashboard to make the best decision.
- Select only the right people.
Receiving a shoutout from unrelated pages that aren’t even in your business won’t help you. Instead, consider using influencer tools like BuzzStream or BuzzSumo to look for influencers in your niche. Make sure your possible partners are compatible with your brand and campaign idea before deciding.
Look closely through their profile, posts, and stories to determine their following, their profile’s nature, feel, and substance, the specific number of likes and comments received on each post, and the different sorts of engagement occurring on each post.
If you already have an influencer database to pick from, you can utilize ProductLead to analyze influencer campaign performance and increase business ROI. Measuring ROI, in the opinion of 65% of marketers, is the top pain factor in influencer marketing, according to The State of Influencer Marketing 2021 Report.
This problem is resolved by ProductLead, which enables you to identify where, when, and with whom you’ve had the best outcomes to organize your subsequent influencer efforts accordingly.
Want to take it a step further? Shoppability is a popular trend in influencer marketing, as evidenced by the fact that 86% of marketers already utilize shoppable links to enable customers to convert from inspiration to purchase immediately. The ProductLead Conversion Tracking via Analytics feature lets you see conversions generated by the social media content embedded in shoppable galleries directly on your website.
- Establish connections before making a pitch
Follow these methods to establish a connection with someone or a business after determining that they are an excellent candidate to increase your likelihood of receiving a worthwhile Instagram shoutout:
- Keep up with their blogs, social media pages, and Instagram accounts.
- Regularly interact with their postings by commenting and liking them. Only post comments that genuinely contribute.
In essence, you’re attempting to bring up pertinent debate points or pose insightful questions that demonstrate you care about their work and are paying attention on Instagram.
- Begin a conversation by sending a considerate message or email.
Now that you’ve chosen the ideal influencer for the position prepare a compelling pitch and decide which communication channel to use to approach them. If they have an email address in their profile information, it can either be an Instagram Direct message or an email.
Be open and honest about what you want and how you’d like it to go. Using ProductLead, you can quickly generate briefs for influencers that contain crucial information like the kind of content you want each influencer to produce, the theme, duration, hashtags, and the payment method.
You can select one of four alternatives for the latter, either alone or in combination:
- Paid – you can choose a currency and an amount, as well as include a description of the payment;
- Vouchers – include a report mentioning the voucher’s value;
- Product Sampling: a description of the goods and benefits the influencer will receive;
- Custom – a description of your offering that doesn’t fall under one of the other categories, such as a complimentary ticket to an event.
Conclusion
You now have all the information you need to begin using Instagram shoutouts. You may quickly increase your Instagram following with this strategy for free.
It could take some time to get things rolling, but once you figure out what kind of outreach to conduct and which accounts to contact, things start to become exciting, and your performance should improve.
Additionally, keep in mind that you can use several additional strategies to acquire traction on Instagram besides shoutouts.
Private Agent for Dropshipping Success