K atie c ouric

How to Approach Instagram for a Local Market
Ken Cheng of Jengo explains that Instagram is a great tool for local
businesses. One reason is that, unlike some of the other platforms that rely
on broad-scope content (which has nothing to do with a person’s life
outside the digital world), the use of Instagram stems from experiences that

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originate off-line. Instagram users want to go places for the opportunity to
take and share photos on the platform. Thus, the release of a product can
become an experience to document—it can bring people to a restaurant or a
clothing store so they have the opportunity to share the story of interacting
with a local business.
Once Cheng’s team realized the way the platform worked, the challenge
was driving traffic to their clients’ accounts. When they began, they had a
limited budget, which made it hard to build traffic in a short period. As a
result, they decided to leverage other influencers’ traffic. The next
challenge was figuring out which influencers to target. They were
promoting restaurants and although you can use the typical hashtag search
to find people in the restaurant and food space, it’s difficult to search for
influencers in a specific category. However, now there are websites such as
FameBit, Social Native, and Grapevine that you can use to help you with
this process.
For example, they wanted to find influencers featuring Asian noodles in
New York. But it’s hard to tell if an influencer is local. You can go through
their photos and find their geotags, but if you don’t have a list of influencers
to start with, Instagram isn’t very supportive in reaching that goal.
To identify if your influencer’s followers are local, you can either
manually look through their followers or search for a program that helps
you. When choosing a good influencer for your local brand, make sure that
person lives in your area and will post about your specific topic; 40 to 60
percent of an influencer’s regular posts and 15 to 35 percent of viral posts
should be geared toward and received by your specific geo-targeted
audience. If the influencer lives in your area but most of their followers
don’t, it won’t help your objective.
The next step depends on how much money you have to spend, but
Cheng shares that he doesn’t typically pay influencers. To get influencers in
the most cost-efficient manner, his company uses free food in exchange for
an influencer’s visit. Also, they never directly ask influencers to post photos
about them. They always just say, “We saw your photos and they’re
amazing!” Talk about their photos and invite them to dinner in your
restaurant or to an event at your local business. Provide them with value
instead of just trying to sell them something.

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His team also discovered that people with more than a hundred
thousand followers usually ignored them if they weren’t compensated
economically. For no pay, typically someone in the ten to twenty thousand
follower range was more likely to show interest. Besides, the larger their
influence, the more global the traffic. A more microinfluencer with a ten-
thousand-person following could actually be a better fit for your local
business. Also, people with fewer followers actually need the content and
appreciate it more. After they built relationships with smaller influencers,
they started to reach out to ones in the forty to fifty thousand person range,
then the sixty to seventy thousand range, and so on and so forth.
Don’t forget to think from the influencers’ point of view and offer them
value. Give them something they already need, want, or are using. To be
effective in this regard, refer back to some of the strategies we offered for
building partnerships in 
chapter six
.