Businesses or brands are paying Instagram influencers for posting adverts on their profile. Influencers are also generating decent revenue out of their followers but the entire process is happening outside the Instagram platform. Some of the companies who help businesses in doing this are — Ifluenz, Scrunch and Pulpkey.

Suggest a feature that can make the entire experience smoother for both brands and influencers.

Approach

I start off by identifying all stakeholders/user personas, who they are, and what pain points they have during their journey using the Instagram app for their interaction. After brainstorming some use cases and conducting customer interviews related to the pain points, I will select the ones that will help achieve the goal of a better User Experience better with consideration of other factors such as value to Instagram, cost, and complexity of implementation.

User Segments

• Influencers of all sorts from micro (10k followers) to macro (over 1M followers) who use Instagram platform to promote brands
• Brands with a major millennial audience who have realized the transition from billboards to people for optimal exposure for their audience and are willing to pour thousands of dollars for the right influencer for a promo.

User Journey

• Brands: brands have a longer journey as compared with influencers; they will need to spend the time to find a 3rd-party platform, signup, and spend hours sifting through results and send offers to influencers:

• Influencers: on the other hand, influencers have a much shorter journey when it comes to promo collaborations; despite this, they have their own pain points during their journey:

Use Cases

• Brands:
  • Brands want to spend least amount of time scouring through influencer profiles to find matches
  • Bradns want to know what the engagement rate of an influencer is
  • Brands want to have access to schedule of influencers to minimize wasted time and effort upfront
  • Brands want to get a price range on how much an influencer is worth for their promo
  • Brands want to know what percentage of influencers are “real” and not bots
  • Brands like to know about influencer rating and their past performance level
  • Brands want to be able to post promo gigs and have influencers apply to them inside the app

• Influencers:
  • Influencers want to know more about brand values without having to leave Instagram platform to determine fit
  • Influencers want to see a schedule with all their promos listed with reminders
  • Influencers want to have in-app communication channel with brands without having to leave the platform
  • Influencers want to be able to see a list of available promos and submit proposals for them

Solution Prioritization (Impact vs. Effort)

Of all these use cases, I would prioritize the ones that have the highest impact on the main metric, which is User Experience. The use cases that would be tied into overall UX of the Brand-Influencer business interactions clearly suggest an opportunity for Instagram to create a marketplace for both parties. While potential improvement to UX, there is a business opportunity for Instagram to cut the middleman and take a percentage of each transaction. However, building a full-blown marketplace is of huge complexity and resource-focus. In order to test the hypothesis, I suggest doing research on the most important use cases to both influencers and brands and run a MVP.

After analyzing user research and market stats, it turns out that both brands and influencers rather stay on Instagram platform for their interactions. Also, brands care most about engagement rate of influencers to see fit for their promos while influencers tend to care most about brand values and “fit” with what they’re offering.

• According to use cases diagram above, below are the top 3 features to consider for MVP:
  • Influencer Stats Profile including:
    • Rating
    • Past Engagements
    • “Real” followers count
    • Schedule
    • Post Engagement Rate
  • Advanced Influencer Search Engine
  • Brand Profile
    • Rating
    • Values/fit

Metrics

Wireframes

Brands

Influencers: