How to better understand your audience: using influencer marketing for market research

Social media has changed the way we communicate with each other and with brands. Before social media, our interactions were limited largely to people we knew in-person, or people nearby in terms of location. Today, you can open Instagram or TikTok and interact with someone you’ve never met in person, who lives halfway across the world.

Social media has not only changed the way consumers communicate, it has also opened up many new opportunities for brands.

Social media has shortened the distance between brands and customers

From shopping on Instagram, to viral brand videos and the possibility to interact directly with your customers through DMs, social media has brought brands and customers a lot closer together. Thanks to the online social landscape, a local business can easily gain awareness for their brand and attract customers without having to spend tons of money on advertising. 

As social media evolved, consumers have become more selective about the messages they want to see online. There’s so much content out there, and algorithms have become so good at showing us the content we’re interested in, that we have little patience for non-personalised content.

This can be a real challenge for brands. Your potential customers are not always local anymore. Before, you could speak to them in-store and get a better understanding about their needs through short surveys and market research. Today, you have to go through email, online reviews and customer service complaints. The pressure is on, because if you don’t give your customers exactly what they’re looking for, they can find another brand that will, all through the click of a button.

Get to know your audience through Influencer Marketing

Luckily social media offers a great way of getting customer feedback: through influencer marketing.

Over the last 10 year, IMA has worked with countless brands to develop and execute their influencer marketing strategies, and we’ve been witness to the growth and change of the industry. 

As influencer marketing has grown in popularity, and as more brands have shifted their marketing budgets onto social media, influencers have watched and learned.

Influencers today understand the value of their loyal followings and content creation skills. They’re selective in choosing which brands they want to partner with. They have an enormous amount of knowledge about what their followers are interested in. They apply this knowledge to every brand collaboration, to ensure you get the best possible results for your campaign. Many brands have caught on, and have worked with influencers to create exclusive co-creations.

But influencer marketing can do even more than that. Next to using influencers to promote your brand and services, why don’t you use their platform as an opportunity for market research and product development? You might not have considered this, but Instagram has developed the perfect tool for market research: Instagram Stories.

Use Instagram polls, sliders, and question stickers with influencers to help brands answer specific market or product questions.

You probably already use Instagram Story Stickers, such as Polls or Questions, in the Stories you post on your brand’s own social media channels, or even in your ads. However, the audience you reach with this content is likely already interested in your brand, and would even be likely to answer your survey questions through your newsletter or website. 

Using influencers for market research gives you access to a specific audience of potential customers, and can give you valuable insights into their product needs. Influencers can share branded Stories where they ask followers to answer a specific question, or where they choose between two product designs or colors, giving you valuable insights into which products you need to order more stock for, how to launch a new product version, and what your target audience is truly thinking. 

Market research through influencers gives brands the opportunity to develop more meaningful, strategic partnerships, that resonate with their audience and drive impactful results.

IMA is the perfect partner to help you set up a market research campaign through influencers. Take a look at our past experience and